Birthday Challenged

I’m out of excuses. Shit, it took my first cup of coffee in weeks to motivate this post. Full disclosure - it was a “Rio Cappuccino” at The Last Stand in Eugene. Coconut milk, lime zest, vanilla bean, cardamom and perfect espresso shots. What’s that all about? Well, every so often, coffee and I have to take a break so my guts and adrenals get a break. But a birthday is the perfect excuse to fall off the wagon, back into love... whatever you wanna call it. While I normally am not a fan of “fun” drinks, this baby was legit.

But I digress. It has been one hell of a year. I threw around a few different ideas for the 31st Challenge. I even started training for a 13 (31 backwards) mile trail run, only to discover that my my ankle/foot/hip aren’t ready for that much repetitive motion. While a Bday Challenge should be hard and painful, it probably shouldn’t result in long term damage. A long run was beginning to feel like a candidate for the latter. And the truth is, I’m psyched on climbing hard sport routes.

So the challenge for this year is simple. Redpoint a 5.13 before my next birthday. And since I’m in the midst of an endurance block of training, I’ll also do 1300 moves a week for the first 3 weeks of March.

This block of training will hopefully culminate in a peak during spring break at the end of March. Sounds like I might be able to wrangle some climbing partners at Smith, Red Rocks, and Ibex. 5.13s probably won’t be going down this trip, but I’m psyched to get out on the road and start exploring what my limits are.

A little birthday serendipity led to a great climbing day at Smith this weekend. With sunshine in the forecast, a new buddy from the climbing gym shot me a last minute invite to day trip on Saturday. Perfect. I’ve only climbed at Smith one other day so I was stoked to have someone lead the way from classic to classic. I even ended the day with a HUGE fall off the top of Vomit Launch. After 30 minutes on the wall trying to pull off an onsight, my massively pumped arms couldn’t manage the last move on massive holds. There is little better than the fight of a good onsight. Funny enough, that whipper might have been close to 31 ft. Happy birthday to me.