Pulling Plastic

The last few days were some moving days. First I did my third V10, ‘Black Mamba’. It’s a small boulder problem with only two moves. It’s a totally different style compared to the typical Hueco style. Two moves on flat slopers, a real Font problem. To see something different in Texas I joined the camp hosts, Natalie and Jan to a climbing competition in the Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The camp host, Corbit, has his own brand of climbing holds. ‘Dirty Birds’ is the name! He made some new holds for that competition, with great success.

From Hueco it was a 5 hour drive to Lubbock trough the dessert. Quite boring and flat. We past a lot of oil pumps, it's funny to see that in real life. We past little poor villages with a lot of old small houses.
Once we were in Lubbock we rented a room in a hotel, I slept great in a real bed again. In the evening we went to see the Real Rock Tour movie 2010 in the university. This was for me a really inspiring movie, because I know I’ll go to a lot of the places I saw in this movie. I’m looking forward to do some trad climbing!

Next day the competition started at 1pm. Bouldering and route climbing were the general disciplines. You can compare the competition with The Vertical Event in Louvain la Neuve. Every route or boulder had a judge and every climber had a scorecard. The 5 routes or boulders with the highest points you could do counted on your scorecard. If you flash them, you have even higher points. I flashed the 4 hardest routes and one boulder and I won the competition. Jan and Natalie became both 3th. So the Belgians win!
It was really funny to climb in an American gym. It’s not like in Europe where you follow one color to the top. They just have all colors spread out over the wall and make up routes by sticking tape on the wall. So it was confusing for us Belgians to follow colored tape instead of the color of the holds.
It was not that hard to win the competition, there were not so much strong route climbers. And by doing routes you got more points. But it felt so great to do some routes again, even on plastic.

In the evening there was an after party in a house of one of the staff. Most of the people who were at the party were staff from the competition. I had the feeling I was in a movie on a house party of students in a small neighborhood. I had a great time and met some nice people.

Today we climbed again in the gym before going back home to the Hueco Rock Ranch.
I saw this little vacation as some rest days for my skin and getting pumped on some routes again.

In 5 days I have my Van and I’ll leave to the next spot! Where that will be, you’ll see!

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