Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Local News? Not so much

Since Jamie Emerson is in South Africa, I will add my slightly jaded perspective on the local bouldering scene which can be summed up in this sentence: Evans and the Park are now like Rifle. Exhibit A is Nalle Hukketaival's rampage where he repeated Jade(V15) quickly, established a beautiful and tall V13 called Sunseeker (check out Carlo's video) and dispatched the old-school testpiece Nuthin but Sunshine (V13) in 30 minutes. Now the rest of us are making the drive "over the hill" and doing the approach to throw in a few burns on the "proj" before heading back to town. The filling in the gaps era is here, the veterans, lifers and addicts spending weeks and months on a problem or a grade are all going to be here. Colorado is no longer where it is happening. Go to South Africa or Switzerland or who knows where else but not here.

As you can tell from other posts I am trying to stay off climbing altogether as my left elbow is stubbornly refusing to let up. This is a difficult condition to work with as sometimes it feels as though the slightest movement in the wrong direction can aggravate it. This has prompted looking at a number of training books, as I have mentioned already, and I am reading in preparation for a survey of the most recent, in particularly Eric Horst's Training for Climbing and Hague and Hunter's The Self Coached Climber. Both contain useful advice but both ultimately are missing the point in my opinion but more on this topic later. So I am doing a lot of running and painting and generally trying to keep hopeful.

7 comments:

Narc said...

Bummer about the elbow. I've been struggling with mine for a couple of years now. I took something like 6 months off and now I'm constantly evaluating how it feels and modifying what I'm doing while climbing.

Peter Beal said...

It seems to be going around:

http://www.urbanclimbermag.com/themag/411/injured_reserve

Anonymous said...

As someone who had pretty fast and solid results with acupuncture, have you considered this route? I'm not a hippy and pretty skeptical in general, but I was having zero luck with a bad wrist tendon. My options seemed to be pain killers or surgery, so I decided to give acupuncture a shot, and it really helped get the injury healing. I still needed a bit of rest and a slow rehab, but acupuncture turned things around. My 2cents.

Peter Beal said...

I am looking at all reasonable options and will be blogging about them as I go. Thanks for the recommendation!

Tom Markiewicz said...

What type of problem are you experiencing with your elbow? If it's tendinitis, I've had fantastic success with a program I've been following.

Anonymous said...

Peter, My wife is a physical therapist and turned me on to this device - http://www.optp.com/BOING_414B.aspx when my elbow was flairing up. You use it to strengthen your supinator/pronator muscles (a common underdeveloped muscle in climbers which leads to elbow tendonitis). You can also do this exercise with a one sided dumbell, but it was not nearly as effective for me.

Thad

chuffer said...

I've previously given you my 2 cents ...

stay off the plastic for awhile
+ glucosamine/MSM, etc.
+ reverse wrist curls on the steering wheel EVERY time you get in the car

I had horrible medial epicondylitis in both elbows for almost a year. A couple months after I started this program I solved this problem.