Friday 24 July 2009

slack blogging! world championships

definatley been a bit slack on the blogging front, especially with everything that has been going on. First up was the world championships held slap bang in the middle of china and no where near any climbing, Xining in the qinghai region to be precise. Qualifiers where held on the tuesday, i felt pretty tired and my legs where really stiff, probably from the travelling, but managed to hall myself up three out of the five problems to qualify for the semis in 19th. With the semi-finals not till saturday i would hopefully manage to recover and do some stretching!........but thursday night saw me reproducing my dinner at a high rate of knots out of both ends! not a pleasant experience. Friday i managed a small plate of dry spagetti for lunch and not much more in the evening leaving me expecting to be last in saturdays semi-final. Saturday morning i felt really strong and light......... for two moves before all energy seemed to desert me! How ever it seemed that my new found pre-comp tatics worked quite well as i did three out of the four problems, coming very close to the fourth one and i'd qualified for the final in fifth place, maybe it was th jam that made me feel at home!
So to the final, i felt much less nervous than i had felt in Vienna, probably as i didn't expect anything.
I did all four problems but in less attempts than the two Russians leaving me in third place, although in hind-sight i should have flased them all and been world champion, but thats comps for you.
Here's some pics of me in the final,



So that was the world championships, a totally unexpected result, and Britains first medal at a world championship, awesome!

2 comments:

Nicholas said...

Awesome one Dave

rock climbing said...

Congrats on the 3rd place. Pretty crazy that you were able to climb so well w/ such low energy. I guess the psych from the comp was enough.