Margalef 2013

I've just come back from another visit to Margalef (Catalunya).  It was a climbing trip, although you'd never have known that by the quality of my "climbing."  I've not been climbing regularly for several years, but in preparation for the trip I had started going bouldering regularly and felt like I was getting a little stronger.  Unfortunately, it turned out not to be nearly enough to work on my old project, and not having done routes for a long time made me struggle with the prospect of falling off easier routes (for my runner friends:  easier routes tend not to be overhanging, which makes them scarier to fall off because there's potential for ankle bashing on the way down.  Both my ankles are permanently bad already, for different reasons.).  Dave helped me with some falling practice on a just-more-than-vertical route, which was useful but still not enough to convince me I wanted to fall off anything more vertical.  I've only got 2 months to train for Arrowhead and I guess it's important enough to me that I didn't even like the remote possibility of any ankle injury downtime.

That all sounds a little depressing, at least on my part, but actually we had a good time.  Even if I wasn't making much progress on my project, it was still fun trying the moves again and working out new ways of doing them.  I got to see my friends Carles and Elena, who are sadly moving to Australia in the near future.  There was nice sunny weather, Spanish practice, and plenty of good wine.  And Dave, who was dealing with his own ankle rehab situation and was only 4 weeks post-surgery, made an impressive progress from not really being able to walk to the crag to doing multiple hard routes in a day.

Then there was the running.  I got to do my favorite run ever for a second time, plus a few shorter runs and one "adventure run" under some time pressure from impending darkness.  The scenery is pretty good on the Montsant trails...

The fruits of the mountain provided