Motivation, Exploration, and New Projects

I’ve found that training motivation is largely cyclical.  Sometimes you feel like anything is possible; that your body is an endlessly-adaptable machine, capable of conquering every project you throw its way.  The counterpoint to those times are when you feel overwhelmed, as if everything has reached a plateau – your climbing progress, career, women, etc.  It is finally looking like I’m cresting after an uphill battle, and coming up to a well-earned downhill ride.

Aided by the arrival of consecutive sunny, 50-degree days, I seem to have gotten past my mid-winter funk.  Also, a drunk climbing injury I sustained a year ago has nearly healed – a bruised bone in my left great toe (healing is made easier when you know it’s a bone injury, thanks to $3000 worth of MRI scans).  This has enabled me to run fast again, in addition to numerous other activities.

Lastly, a trip to New York for some bouldering has taken any semblance of an ego I ever had, and dumped all over it.  I need to get much, much stronger to do the problems I worked, especially Catharsis (V9/10) [YouTube it].  That problem gave me a boner.  And that was just the beginning of things.  I’ve been incessantly campusing and hanging from my fingerboard in my asbestos-laden basement, finally with a clear goal in my mind.

And remember: if you’re not one-finger campusing, you’re not training.