New Life

How, I wonder do people who do Triathlon, Iron Man and Adventure racing manage it?  It's a perpetual juggling act to try to maintain some kind of credible and acceptable (to me) levels of ability in three different activities.  To cycle, to climb and to walk.  None of them is ever at the level I think I am capable of, and if a week or two goes by and one gets neglected I feel like I've gone back a step.  Except I kind of know it's not true, fitness and body memory don't fade that quickly.  

It's been a fair few weeks of more cycling, less other stuff, particularly with the arrival of the road bike.  Because who wouldn't want to be out on their new toy?  The fact is, though, that walking up Dove Crag on Monday has left the entire fronts of both thighs still painful three days on, and the IT band knots are mighty fearsome despite the dedicated self inflicted pain of the foam roller.  And I am slightly regretful that somehow walking or in to use a far more enjoyable phrase, hill fitness, seems to have vaguely declined.  Ah, gratuitous picture taken on phone coming right up:

And then there's climbing.  Leading or seconding outdoors are to me more a leisure activity than they are exercise.  After all, I guess climbing outdoors is the ultimate aim, and all the other activity associated with climbing is simply to get fit to enable that activity.  But somehow with the outside giving less feeling of exercise and physical effort, and more feeling of fear and adrenaline it doesn't feel like I'm getting the workout I kind of admit to needing to keep endorphin sanity levels in a happy place.  So last night, particularly in view of the deluge which hit Manchester, I climbed indoors again.  And as ever, thought oh dear, I've not done enough of this recently.  Except that wasn't true.  Quick warm up on a couple of 5s and soon I was onto the 6bs and then leading on the overhangs.  Lovely mish mash of plans which was originally to meet my friend Markella to climb.  We did climb together for a couple of routes but then somehow we were absorbed elsewhere, her with Andy & Sarah and me with my lodger.  The funny thing is, the lodger does a lot of climbing, leads outdoors at a "better" level than I do, but indoors he feels stretched by my climbing, so much so that he sees me do a route and believes he's going to have to do the same route or feel ... feel what, I wonder?  Certainly he feels pushed to have to do it, and makes comments about me making it look easy, and admires my technique and core strength. All quite amusing because it was him that somehow shamed me into leading last night and yet it was me that somehow pushed him to do the same grades, purely by getting up there and doing it.  And I demonstrated to him that I am incapable of doing a pull up. Oddly in demonstrating that I did managed to show that I am actually a lot closer to a pull up than ever before, and the muscles on my arms were oddly defined as I did, so much so I stared at them.

And courtesy of Nina Simone:

"Fish in the sea, you know how I feel
River runnin' free you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree you know how I feel
Its a new dawn, its a new day, its a new life for me
And I'm feelin good"