Review 2017

2017 was a hard year for me. Working as a Psychologist in the hospital and training for the profession of psychological psychotherapist prevented me from climbing outside as much as I usually like to. Because of that I decided to move to Frankenjura this year. Im looking forward to be able to climb outside every day I want, also after work-days. Bevore starting this new chapter I want to present a review of  2017.

About my training in 2017 
What I really found interesting about my training this season was, that I experienced, that training more is not always better. Since my trainers Lena Herrmann and Ralf Kowalski from the north german climbing Team that I belong to told me to focus more on quality than quantity, I did more project Boulders and a smaller extend of bouldering in general. That was fun, because I had a few cool projects, which I had to try over a few sessions. My Finger, Arm and shoulder Training has been shortened as well so that I do very hard exercises with a complete recovery time of 3 Minutes between repetitions. I found out that it’s much easier for me to do a lot of exercises with short brakes than really waiting so long that I recover between the exercises, but it is totally worth it. I also avoided doing a lot on one day, like bouldering 2 Hours and then doing exercises until my arms where shaking, which is what I liked to do in the past. I found this to be very effective for me personally, I would recommend to any athlete to vary their training and see which effect it has on their performance. A second thing that really helped me was working on my back. Since a few month I had severe Problems with my biceps tendon which became worse and worse until I found out, that the problem started at my lower back, which wasn’t stabilized good enough, which affected my upper back and then my shoulder and finally my biceps tendon. Since I started a proper back training with focus on good posture (what in my opinion is rarely seen in the climbing gyms) I got so much stronger than before. I was able to do some Campus-board moves, which I wasn’t able to do previously, that was another example that training is really about quality and keeping your body healthy. You can train your arms as much as you like but since they are fixed on your back, you can never use all your arm strength with a back problem. So reflect on your training, listen to your body, stay healthy and enjoy.

Bouldering Competition Season 2017

In June of this year the last stage of my official competitive Bouldering Season took place in Berlin at the national Championship. This season was the first to use a new competition mode, in previous years there were three national boulder cups each year and there was an overall winner. The counties were allowed to choose which athletes they wanted to send to the national boulder cups. The new mode includes just one national competition, what makes this one event even more important, since you just have one day to perform. Especially for bouldering I see that as a problem since bouldering competition results are very well known to vary extremely depending from day performance and how the boulders fit to the athletes strengths’. The new mode also includes, that counties can´t handpick their team but the athletes have to qualify at the regional and the over-regional championship. In my case the regional was the northern championship in Braunschweig at which I could retain my title. The over-regional was the newly invented north-eastern championship which took place in Hannover. That one I also won, which made me the first north-eastern champion. :) At the german championships in Berlin I did not have a good time since I almost did not sleep before the
competition on Sunday, so I really tried but I could not get into the “killermode” which usually pushes me at competitions. Usually I am fully energized, on adrenaline and exited to climb but that day I really did not feel all that. I ended with the 11th place, which I would still consider ok for a bad day. I´m happy to finish this season as new and old northern champion and the first north-eastern champion.