Periodized Training 7 (Overcoming Staleness)

Four months into a maintenance phase and it becomes awfully hard to get motivated to do a workout.  The programme itself is a success.  All the gains I made in the off-season and preseason have been maintained thus far.  I’m climbing a bit better as my on-the-rock time has been great this summer, but I’m not climbing any harder than at the start of the season.  This is exactly how everything was designed: get better when the weather sucked, climb hard early in the season, maintain that level of performance throughout the summer and into fall.  Put up tonnes of new problems in the process.

This mental staleness may not have occurred if our weather had been more typical this summer.  If we'd had the typical month-long rains and associated clouds of biting insects, I'd have squeezed in a mini off-season when the outdoor climbing conditions deteriorated.  Breaking up the long season into two shorter in-season maintenance phases with a more intensive/extensive work in the middle would have been a bit more stimulating.  Not that I am complaining of the stellar weather this year.  Conditions were amazing, and I did my best to take advantage by climbing often.

But training was getting boring.  Though the specific movements as well as the exercise stimulus to each muscle group changed every month, the overall maintenance programme is pretty much the same for it’s entire duration.  Physically, I still enjoyed doing the workouts, but mentally I wasn’t there.  I found myself slacking off.  No longer looking forward to a training session, I skipped it, then decided maybe the whole week off would do me good. I got Shawn to take me through his rings/campus/hang workout, then he joined me for one of my sessions on Kermit.  I went back to the in-season workouts for another hard week (since I wasn’t going to climb at all the following weekend I ramped up the volume-load hoping to get mentally and physically pumped), but still was left wanting.

That non-climbing weekend involved a fair bit of driving (and a search for solid sandstone -stay tuned for more about that!).  Maybe the humming engine resulted in sympathetic resonance of my brain waves.  More likely it was just that being seated for 5 straight hours made me want to move.  In either case, I wanted to workout.  Not what I’d been doing, not a typical in-season workout, in fact, not a typical workout at all.  I really began to crave a type of metabolic workout that I’d done in the past and used quite often with my team sport athletes.  Everybody loved to hate these, and the adaptations were positive.  The protocol was first reported in the literature about a year ago.  The hormonal response is marked, yet the overall duration of a training session is brief.  Perhaps my body was in need of these hormonal spikes, as my current levels were not fluctuating significantly with the maintenance programme.  The brevity makes skipping them nearly impossible. I thought it would be a good idea to do these for a bit to get back on track motivation-wise.

The pun wasn’t intended, but these are track-based workouts.  Though one could make a weak case for them having some sport-climbing metabolic specificity, from a neuromuscular point of view they are not going to be beneficial.  More likely, those adaptations will actually hinder climbing ability.  I probably should not do these.  What if I modified them by employing exercises (movements and resistance) that have more specificity to climbing?

Other metabolic resistance training circuit protocols I’ve used in the past have had phenomenal results, but are incredibly taxing.  They have no place in-season, though, as they require deliberate rest and recovery strategies between training bouts to prevent overtraining.  Climbing concurrently would be out of the question.

I’d like to train this way, but I want to boulder harder and better, and not miss out on a good outdoor day because I’m tired or sore.  I want my cake.  I want to eat it, too!

Is there any way I could make it work? I mulled it over on the drive home and came up with a few possible solutions.  I reread the pioneering article, and went back in my training log to review what I’d done and what resulted.  I looked up other references, and reviewed the charts of some of my teams.  I got out the calculator to workout volume-loads, and estimate recovery needs.  Eventually, I found the theoretical evidence and enough practical experience to support one solution in particular.

It’s still too early to tell, but so far (just a couple weeks in) I’m psyched to train and to climb.  Physically, I’ve felt pretty good throughout the work/training weeks, and great by each weekend.  A couple days ago, for example, I worked a new project and stuck two really hard moves that I could barely reach/touch last month.  I also was able to repeatedly and easily stick the (crux?) big pinch on Two Zig Zags, a move just beyond my range previously.  The next move (one I’ve done before) eluded me though as the pinch was still dripping wet from the previous days torrents.  All this was after a few hours spent scrubbing and establishing 3 new problems in the Slab Area, and playing around on a couple potential hard lines up Big Slab.

I’ll post the training programme details, if appropriate, once I get a better gauge of the results.  In the mean time, here are some more pics for the online guide.

Nutmeg V0 and Pepper Spray V3 are two nice new additions to the Mace boulder.

Porcupine Caves, Cornerstones area

Colt 45, home to ***Two Zig Zags V8

Dunce Cap V0, Megacrystals Area

Labour Day

This past Sunday, after a great day of new-ish trad climbing at Cochrane Lane in Welsford, I went to the Munson Lake boulders to work a couple projects and to do some trail planning in preparation for a literal labour day of construction Shawn and I had committed to on holiday Monday.

The bouldering session was brief, as I developed a flapper quite early. So after scrubbing the last line on Small Slab, I took off for the river.  My goal was to see if a quicker/easier path could be established between a parking area and a swimming spot.  Previous exploratory visits indicated that though the Slab Area was closest to the river, at that point it’s flow it is too wide, shallow and vegetated for any pleasurable soaking.  Up stream, a trail was beginning to take shape between the Megacrystals boulders and a narrows/rapids.  Though most of the year it is too shallow to swim, the moving water is deep enough to sit submerged in the fast current to relax and bathe.  However, the long walk back uphill to the car (at Roadside Area) afterwards is less than ideal.  I was hoping to head from the Slab Area towards the river, and pick up a game trail through the mature forest that would lead most of the way upstream to the rapids.  This had the potential for a flatter, and shorter walk than the Megacrystals trail.

I hopped over a spongy section behind Inversée, and into an area of mature forest.  The thick canopy formed by the tall trees leave only enough light and moisture for a carpet of moss under them.  Visibility is really good, and the walking is easy. I headed North along a path of brown, well trampled moss.  At the first fork I went left.  It led to a tangled alder thicket.  I backtracked and went right.  This forks as well; one to a boggy section choked with poplar saplings, the other to a nearly impenetrable (for mammals our size) concentration of young spruce on the edge of the old clear cut.  I went back and forth this way, fighting through a rough section hoping for ease on the other side.  After an hour and only progressing half way up the river, I’d had enough.  Finishing the other trail, rather than starting a new one, is definitely the way to proceed.

For the return trip to my car at the Slabs, I decided to try following the edge of forest where it meets the clear cut, so that I wouldn’t overshoot my destination.  As I headed up hill, I passed a few small boulders imbedded in the slope that looked decent enough, but were not worth the schlep on their own.  I gathered up a bunch of dead wood and build a few piles up on the high points to facilitate their rediscovery at a later date.

As I neared the border of the clear cut, I turned South. Fifty metres of easy walking led to a thick wall of green running as far as I could see (which wasn’t as far as that phrase sounds) both East and West. I could see a few places where a moose had crashed through this, so picked one and went for it.  Fifteen steps later, and I was face to face with one of the biggest, baddest, mossiest boulders at Munson Lake.  This thing is 5-6m tall, steep, featured and adjacent to at least 3 similar erratics!

I hadn’t bothered to bring my camera, and I doubt I could have backed away far enough to get a clear shot of these things anyway, so you’ll have to take my word on this. They are amazing! Each is overhanging on at least one side, and most faces (even the overhangs) show obvious features that are atypical of granite erratics.  They'll require some scrubbing, but could host 12 or 15 stellar boulder problems.

***

Labour Day Monday, as planned, Shawn cut stumps at Cornerstones and Slab Area, reducing the pad puncturing potential, while I moved rocks around the base of Mace so a few new lines can be attempted.  There are now five or six problems in this area that are just in need of a final scrub and a first ascent.

We then headed towards the river (via Megacrystals trail), did some trail work, and cleared some dead trees from the area to make room for tents.  We used the logs to build bridges through the bog and got about half-way through before running out of gas.

After refueling, we squeezed in a good bouldering circuit at Cornerstones before heading home.