In the past year the following has happened:
I got married to my beautiful wife and climbing partner
Caroline
We changed career
Packed in two full time positions teaching in Spain
Returned to Ireland
Started a business
Turned 30!
Bought a van
Caroline gave birth to our beautiful baby girl – Matilda
Wow!
At the minute I’m busy being a dad, husband and project
manager; overseeing the construction of Irelands largest climbing centre –
Awesome Walls Dublin. The excitement I feel for this is HUGE as it’s the one
thing I’ve always wanted to achieve and now it’s finally happening. The down
side is that as a result of wanting to give 100% to the three roles mentioned
above I’m finding it hard to fit in climbing myself – sanity comes from knowing
it’s a phase and that it will pass. I know from experience that I come back
stronger and more psyched than ever after periods of forced inactivity. That said,
we’ve been on two trips out west to the Burren and by my second trad lead there
I was back to leading E5 again and it felt easy enough. I feel like I’m lining
up dominoes and that once things are finalised everything should click into
place to allow for more training, a return to fitness and more time spent doing
what I love – being outdoors on rock or running. Enough of the waffle!
Time for some goals:
I’m 86.7kg – jaysus! My fighting weight of 79kg seems a
long way away. There is an easy first target, break under 80kg before
Christmas.
I’ve been doing a bit of bouldering and would like to do the
following boulders: Computer World and Leftism.
At this stage I just want to squeeze in some E5 and E6
onsights – some time spent headpointing something harder would be nice but I’d
only be looking at really safe hard trad meaning they’ll be physical and I need
to shape up for that kind of thing.
I want to start racing again – if I can even get back to 4
or 5 easy runs a week and keep it sustained I’d be happy for now.
