woensdag 24 februari 2016

Ramblings from an old man

My God, am I a bad blogger! Months went by without sharing a single post. And all of the sudden 2015 is over and it's almost March 2016. Many goals for 2015 aren't realized, although it's easy to blame that on me landing on the intensive care and taking over half a year to recover to old fitness levels. A collection of uncorrelated, impossible to combine snippets of written story is scattered across a series of draft posts and by now there is no point in finishing them all and publish a tedious cluster of posts about the past months... Instead it seems more appropriate to wrap up the gap briefly (I've posted two 'new' video's from 2015 to the videos page). save you - my beloved reader - ploughing through my ramblings, and end on generally positive note rather than dwelling on the things I didn't do.

I'll go awry straight away: I tend to trivialise the physical impact of the illness I suffered this summer and expect to be climbing on the top of my game consistently again. Even without the illness that would be unreasonable, so unsurprisingly I've been disappoint myself regularly. I climbed ok, but not great. Honestly, I should be thankful to return to this shape and not having sustained some serious permanent damage. But my immune system suffered noticably (probably due to the fact that all of my blood plasma has been replaced...) and I'm tired and ill much more frequently than I used to be. Obviously that isn't complementing my training very well. I'm just returning from a four week break from training (longer even than after the intensive care!) and I hope I'll be able catch some momentum again now. It's frustrating to really want to go for it, but not have my body cooperate. Maybe I'm just getting old...

On a brighter note: lacking my sharp edge regularly is learning me to enjoy easier climbing without feeling the pressure to outperform myself all the time. I get better at picking climbs because I want to climb the line, not the grade, making every day out a more enjoyable experience. I try to broaden my palette again, the need for which was pointed out by a comp I participated in following the advice of climbing coach Jan Martin. I performed badly and discovered some weaknesses I have developped. Although I didn't feel too good during the comp and got ill the day after and I may blame part of the sub par performance on that, those weaknesses are unrelated to fitness. So I'm changing my training routines a bit and shifting my outdoor focus towards volume and fun for 2016. Lets see what the year brings!