So it turns out that we didn’t get to go climbing on Wednesday or Thursday. The weather was too bad plus we just didn’t feel up to it. I know, I know. You would have went anyway. My reason is simply that we were putting in 12 to 14 hour days everyday since we had gotten to Vail and we were all pretty whipped. Instead of going climbing or for that matter doing anything at all we just stayed in the condo all day long. The only place I went all day was to get some washing detergent from the front office. It felt awesome to just sit around all day and hang out. I got a lot of reading done and watched a lot of TV.
We helped forerun for the World Cup Crew on Thursday evening to help them tweak their problems. The problems were great and even though I couldn’t climb many of them it was awesome to see others do them and watch the setters work through their problems.
The World Cup started on Friday and was crazy. I think there was 82 competitors. Woods, Puccio, Johnson, Killian, Bautista, Robinson, and Rands are just some of the competitors that you may have heard of. The Americans crushed at the competition. We ended up with 5 American climbers in the finals. There was 6 male and 6 female competitors in the finals. For the females we had Puccio and Johnson. Puccio did all 4 of the final’s problems which gave her 1st place at the end of the day. It was awesome to watch her climb in true Puccio style, raw power. On the men’s side there was Woods, Robinson, and Owen. Woods did all 4 problems but had 2 falls in the process which gave him 2nd at the end of the day. The German, Jonas, flashed all 4 finals problems. It was pretty awesome.
After the finals at the World Cup the citizen’s crew had to stay and set up our 32 boulder problems that we had set the week before. This turned out to be harder than I imagined. We took them down the week before and tagged them different than I was used to. This made it harder for me to work out how they went back on the wall. Keep in mind that each of us had 8 problems to put back up. There was 7 different zones and about and average of 4 to 5 problems in each zone. Pretty confusing when I looked at the blank wall and tried to imagine where my problems went. Lucky I had taken a picture of all the problems before we took them down. This turned out to be a tremendous help for me. It took us until 2:30am to get them all back on the wall.
We showed up back at the wall at 6:30am to put plaques on the wall for the different problems. The competition started at 8:00am for the youth competitors. It was great to watch all these little guys throw down on the problems that we had set for them. I even had Elizabeth, Emily, and Rob from Stone Moves participating in the competition. There was also Cody from the Rok Haus. Throughout the day there were 3 sessions that lasted 2.5 hours each. The awards ceremony was at 5:00pm but we didn’t stick around for that because we were pretty tired. We took down the holds and tape that we could reach from the ground and went back to the condo.
Kynan bought us dinner and Johnny and Mike L. cooked it for us. There were hamburgers with blue cheese in them, salad, bread, and a lot of much needed beer. Those burgers that Johnny made were probably the best burgers that I have ever had in my life. I am definitely going to try and make them when I get home.
Monday and Tuesday were take down day for the wall. This went really fast with about 9 people but was a lot of freakin work. It was amazing to watch the wall that Professional climbers had been climbing on the day before come down in about 3 hours. It was kind of sad to see. It won’t be until next year when we will see that wall again.
In all it was a great experience. The crew that I worked with was awesome and I can’t wait to work with them again. I think we all got along great and didn’t have any problems working together. It was sad to say goodbye today but I am looking forward to seeing my family. My wife called me today and told me that my little girl, Maggie, woke up from her nap crying uncontrollably asking for Daddy to hold her. She wouldn’t stop crying so Jess had to call me and let Maggie talk to me. It was so heartbreaking that I almost started crying myself.
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