Where to start?!  The past month and a bit has been a very crazy one.

First stop was the Women’s Climbing Symposium, at the Depot in Manchester.  The event this year had over 400 women in attendance – very impressive!  I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to do a question and answer session with my nutritionist Rebecca Dent.  I was pretty nervous, as I’ve not really done much public speaking before but I think it went well!  Looking forward to doing some more!  I also got to take 5 time Olympian Jo Pavey climbing!!!!  It was well cool, and she was such a lovely person.  Hopefully I convinced her to start taking her children down the their local wall.  In conjunction with the event I also got to go crack climbing for the first time with Sophie Whyte.  Unfortunately/fortunately, (I’m not sure!) the whole experience got filmed and will soon be available to watch on Epic TV.  It was fun, but man my hands were so bruised!!

A few days after this I got to spend just over a week in Font with my good friends Leah and Liam.  I worked out I hadn’t been on a trip there for 3 years, so it was really exciting to go and see where I was at.  I’ve always found the Font subtleties very difficult to grasp, so it was nice to feel like I could get somewhere on boulders I’d previously not been able to pull off the floor on! The weather was slightly colder than I had anticipated, ( okay maybe I was slightly under prepared)but  I managed to stay warm at night in my tent with the help of 2 sleeping bags, thermals, a hot water bottle and a blanket! Amidst the breaks in the rain and joyrides around the supermarket on golf buggies (would highly recommend this) we did manage to get a fair amount of climbing in, it was a good trip for setting sights on some projects to go back for.  Oh and of course we managed to fit in some trips to the patisserie!  Im certainly not leaving it another 3 years before I head back!!

Since getting back from the Forest I’ve been doing some setting, which has been really fun and I think is helping to develop my problem reading skills a lot.  I also headed to the first round of Blokfest which was held at the Mile End wall in London.  It was the busiest competition I have ever been to, you literally were queuing for every boulder during the qualification round!  I managed to top all the qualification boulders, with a couple of mistakes so was into finals in 2nd behind Leah.

I was mega excited to see the final boulders, I had learned that the Blokfest team like to put on a good show so the boulders were set to be good!  We were not disapointed.  The first boulder looked like it had a tricky start to get into a groove, and then a grovel to the top.  I knew that one person had topped it, but everyone else had come back to iso grabbing their hip flexors, so I was a little concerned about whether  I would be flexible enough.  The start of the boulder was a lot easier than I had anticipated, with the volumes being crazy sticky is was easy enough to get into the groove.  Then the grovelling began.  I wasn’t 100% sure how to transfer my weight over so I would be in control for the last move.  Somehow though I figured out a sequence which involved a lot of palming.  The next thing I remember is being at the top!  The other two boulders were pretty steady and I managed to finish them both.  I was the only person to top all three, which meant I’d won!  It was pretty unexpected and a good start to the winter!

Ive just booked to go sport climbing in Tenerife next month, so I think I’ll be making a concerted effort to tie in a few times before going away!  Psyched!

Here’s some photos from my latest adventures….