Storming The Castle

On a trip where a lot of much harder climbs were sent, this problem still sticks out as the best. A reminder that it isn't about the number. It's about what happens between the ground and the top.

Andrew Consroe on Storming The Castle. Stone Fort, TN

The Three Stages of Cultivation

The first is the primitive stage. It is a stage of original ignorance in which a person knows nothing about the art of combat. In a fight, he simply blocks and strikes instinctively without a concern for what is right and wrong. Of course, he may not be so-called scientific, but, nevertheless, being himself, his attacks or defenses are fluid. 

The second stage—the stage of sophistication, or mechanical stage—begins when a person starts his training. He is taught the different ways of blocking, striking, kicking, standing, breathing, and thinking—unquestionably, he has gained the scientific knowledge of combat, but unfortunately his original self and sense of freedom are lost, and his action no longer flows by itself. His mind tends to freeze at different movements for calculations and analysis, and even worse, he might be called “intellectually bound” and maintain himself outside of the actual reality. 

The third stage—the stage of artlessness, or spontaneous stage—occurs when, after years of serious and hard practice, the student realizes that after all, gung fu is nothing special. And instead of trying to impose on his mind, he adjusts himself to his opponent like water pressing on an earthen wall. It flows through the slightest crack. There is nothing to try to do but try to be purposeless and formless, like water. All of his classical techniques and standard styles are minimized, if not wiped out, and nothingness prevails. He is no longer confined.

-Bruce Lee

Coordination

I trained yesterday with my friend Andrew and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could actually try hard. Over the past year, I have had 2 significant finger injuries that have forced me to always hold back in order to protect my tendons. Now it seems the patience is starting to pay off. My fingers feel great!

For the past few weeks I have been experimenting with different types of movement in my training. It started because I didn't feel like I could grab small or bad holds with my injured fingers. So I had to find other ways to make moves hard, without neccesarily making the holds themselves hard. What ensued was pretty rediculous initially, but as I kept refining things I started discovering these weird complex moves that were based more on coordination than strength. For example, imagine a move that requires you to make a long crossing deadpoint over your body from one very tension-y position to another totally different tension-y position. What this does is force you to coordinate very specific movements at very specific times. If you are off on any part of the movement, you fall, and the move feels impossible. After a number of tries however, constantly tweaking and 'feeling' the move, you start to nail it, and the impossible move is now suprisingly easy. More than anything this is really an example of how amazing the body's capacity for muscle memory is. My goal in working on these types of moves is to exercise my ability to develop muscle memory for new moves and sequences as fast as possible. As soon as I stick one of these moves once or twice, I find a new move, or sequence of moves, and start over again.

Now that I feel I can try hard on bad holds again, I am ready to start incorperating worse holds into this equation to further decrease the margin for error on these types of coordination moves. I am excited to see how this affects my ability to quickly unlock and send hard boulders outside.