The new purpose of the blog

The first chapter of this blog tracked my winding road trip across the country, starting about a year ago, and ending around November. Since that little outing, I've settled back into life here in SLC with a new job, a new gym, and some new clothes. During this whole settling period, I've had some time to reflect on the next big plan.

But first, a little back story.

Andy, who lives in Jackson Hole, showed up in the valley this fall after not really climbing all summer, and crushed heads. He was leading solid 5.11, which is nothing to sneeze at in Yosemite. Especially if you're doing it consistently, from wide stuff to fingers.

I asked him wtf and how he trained for that. He told me he'd been working out at a gym in Jackson called Mountain Athlete, (click on that to check out their website, it's pretty sweet.) And they had him doing stuff like this:


Looks hard core. But you can't argue with results. So when I got home to Salt Lake, I looked up a local gym that was supposed to be of the same flavor. I found Gym Jones via the internet, and dropped them an email to see if I could start training.

None other than legendary alpinist Mark Twight answered my email with a series of piercing questions about my training goals and motivation. I replied that my ultimate goal, as of right now, was to climb The Nose in 24 hours with my buddy Andy this summer. (This one's been hanging over ours heads for a while now.) I was curious if he thought the workouts at Gym Jones were specific enough for my climbing goals. Here's his response:

"Plenty of climbers have done the Nose in 12 hours on a
diet of climbing and general fitness only. A solid foundation of
general fitness is achievable at Gym Jones.

If you require a more specific program to achieve a more difficult
objective it is another story entirely."

Whoa, a more difficult objective? Fair enough Mark, screw The Nose in a push. (Or 12 hours.) We'll go climb The Nose, and then we'll climb Half Dome too, all in 24 hours. How do you like me now?

I updated Andy on our new goal, and he responded by going back to the gym to do this some more:
So while he was getting strong in Jackson, I started going to Gym Jones.

It's been a trip over there - the emphasis is all on building a solid foundation of core strength, and building everything up from there. I thought I had core strength, but the first time I tried to do a big deadlift, I understood. And ring dips, geez.

But at the end of the day, it's about honest hard work. The feeling I get from Gym Jones workouts can most closely be compared to offwidth climbing, or hauling on a big wall. You just work till you think you might puke, and when you think there's no way you could do another move, or rep, you do. And then you do another. Take another look at Andy's photo. When was the last time you worked that hard?

I think this training is going to work.