climbing Zen

WarmUp

At one of the last weeks of the year 2008 two friends and i decided to visit the Lindenfels boulder area near Heppenheim. After driving some time through the Odenwald wilderness we arrived in Lindenfels and immediatly spotted the boulder blocs from the towns main street. So we jumped out of the car and 5 minutes later we were warming up on a bloc named “Eckfelsen”.

Abrazzo fb6a

As the whole area is exposed to the west and the weather was sunny we were in the sunshine all time which made this cold winter day more than sweet. After the warmup we checked out a problem called “Abrazzo” at the “Deckelstein” bloc which was quiet hard for the grade fb 6a and took us quiet some time .

Bogenriss Lindenfels

We then headed to the “Kippstein” bloc where we did the easy but very nice crack-problem “Bogenriss”. As i looked at my clock i recognized that we only had very few time left so we decided to try the sloper-problem called “Ueberlauefer” at the same bloc as the last one of the day. After some tryouts i sent the problem as my first fb6c outside the gym (*jippie*).

Ueberlauefer

Cause i was very impressed by the nice setting and lots of cool boulder problems (especially some highballs i want to try) lindenfels is definatly on my visit list 2009.

Today i finally managed to install my brand new hang-board over a door-frame in our flat. This is something i dreamed of for quite some time now because it ables me to do the boring climbing training at home whenever i want and saves me quiet some time at the climbing-gym to do other stuff like doing more routes or boulders.

Although I’m using a Lapis Lazzuri hang-board i started to train the exercises for the Metolius Simulator as i think they can also be done on the lapis. The training sums up many smaller exercises to a 10 minute sequence where you do one to two exercises a minute and use the remaining seconds to rest. The exercise goes like the following:

1. Minute: Hang 10 seconds on slopers and do three pull ups on the jugs.

2. Minute: Hang 15 seconds with an bent-arm on medium edges and do 2 pull-ups on three finger-pockets.

3. Minute: Do an 10 seconds offset hang, which means that one arm is lower than the other, on different edges.

4. Minute: Hang 15 seconds with your feet up known as L-hang on the jugs.

5. Minute: Do 3 offset pull-ups on jugs and 2 finger-pockets and reverse holds before doing another 3 offset pull-ups.

6. Minute: Hang 30 seconds on medium edges.

7. Minute: Do 10 pull-ups on 3 finger-pockets and hang 20 seconds on large edges.

8. Minute: L-Hang 15 seconds on 3 finger-pockets.

9. Minute: Hang 5 seconds on 2 finger-pockets.

10. Minute: Hang 20 seconds on small edges with an bent arm and do pull-ups to failure.

At the Moment I’m only getting to point 7 until being to weak to do the rest of the exercise. Maybe i give an update to this article later describing my findings and hopefully improvements with these exercises.

More information about them can be found in the exercise-handbook itself which can be found here.

Maybe I’m able to do “Paul Robinson’s” workout some time

Today 8a.nu wrote about the second ascent of “Open Air” by “Adam Ondra”. This Route first done by “Alexander Huber” back in 1996 is graded 9a+ and is therefore one of the hardest routes on this planet. Its incredible that Alexander did this in 1996 almost 10 years before “La Rambla Extension” was climbed, which is together with “Realization”,( climbed in 2001 ) considered the benchmark route for the grade. I wonder why this achievement isn`t mentioned much in climbing history yet. Even if it seems old news , Adams repeat is the first ever after “12″ years, and with many top climbers having tried this route, it speaks for Alexanders skills for it self. This is definitely my first awesome of the day.

Now to “Adam Ondra” the young Czech who now has nearly climbed all routes harder than 9a i know. I can’t say what an deep inspiration he is to me at the moment. He goes to a climbing route, so hard only a hand full climbers on the world are able to do it and gets to the top in almost no time. When others are working weeks, months or years he just gets there and sends it. Totally fucking unbelievable awesome. He’s definitely defining a new standard in climbing at the moment.

Now enough fanboytalk for the day

Today i received my copy of the long awaited boulder guide “Odenwald en bloc”, written by “Sascha Jung” and “Jo Fischer” and published by Panico.
I first read about the new guide almost a year ago when the 4Th edition of the
climbing guide “Kletterfuehrer Odenwald” came out, which was a stripped down
climbing guide without any boulder problems and a reference to a separate guide to be released in the early summer 2008. After some delay, which the Panico guys told be has been
due to “Axel Öland”, the graphics guy behind the guide, writing his diploma thesis,
it now finally got released.

Overall information:
On the first look the guide makes a very good impression. Although it is not that big, about 144 pages, it lists hundreds of boulders from 7 different areas namely:

- Riesenstein
- Lautertal
- Felsenmeer
- Lindenfels
- Lützelbach
- Fischbach
- Frankenstein

The guide starts with a list of the hardest boulder-problems and some nice pictures
and then straightly goes to the first area. If you are a happy owner of the guide “Pfalz en bloc” you may miss a bit of a history lesson about the development of bouldering in the Odenwald here, but it seems that the Odenwald people simply didn’t document their actions as well as the Pfalz people did. Maybe this is also about not knowing the leagalness of climbing on some blocs but that’s only a guess. Also the guide is not history less overall and contains a few sentences of history at the beginning description of each area.

Content:
At the beginning of each area-section you get the obligatory map and description of how to reach the area by car or sometimes even by public transport. Then you get a description
on the type of rock and how it is climbable on different weather as well as the mentioned small history section. Then there’s a small list of recommended problems of the area and the description of how to get to certain sectors. Here i give another small minus because one could have written the sector or bloc number right to the recommended problems.
After these introductory pages every bloc is listed by a number and picture and the different lines are marked on the pictures. As i haven’t been to any area listed here except “Riesenstein” i cannot comment on the information, Topo or grades here yet. It all looks very high quality but one doesn’t know before he was there himself.
If i will gather new information about the content i will make an update to this article later.

Design:
I’m very impressed by the design of the guide and think “Axel Öland” did a very good job here. Every area is layout ed in a different color so if you are reading fast through sections or you are searching something you immediately recognize the area with its associated color. Also the pictures in the book are very nice photographed and fit into that color scheme as well. When i took the first look into the guide i was a bit irritated about the Topo’s because they were part of the background of each page, but one gets used to this very fast. Doing so is not a new but a nice idea as you have the Topo on every page and don’t need to thumb through the book all the time. I can only give one small minus to the design because i think the pictures could have been a bit bigger but that’s only a minor thing and maybe is only my personal taste.

Conclusion:
This Guide is absolutely worth its price and should be in the bookshelf of everybody
who likes bouldering and lives in the area between or near Darmstadt-Heidelberg. The
design of the guide is very good and motivates you to go to the listed areas while you are reading it.
I’m glad i now have some alternatives to the Pfalz boulder-areas and at this point want to thank “Sascha Jung”, “Jo Fischer”, “Axel Öland”, “Panico” and the many people involved who made this guide possible.

References:

http://panico.de/de/panico_buecher/boulderfuehrer/bf_odenwald.php

http://www.rokblog.de/2008/11/05/odenwald-boulderfuehrer/

http://news.climbing.de/neu-im-shop-kletterfuehrer-lenninger-alb-und-odenwald/