Injuries, Cycles and Productivity

My intention was to focus on rock climbing this fall. However, the week after climbing Dragontail I randomly threw in a hard 13 mile run. I had only been bouldering and running a little bit all summer and, especially after a long day the week before, this was probably too much. That night Caitlin and I went to a concert and I noticed my foot was swollen and hurting. The next day I tried to climb at Smith despite my throbbing foot. I ended up limping to the base of a wall and climbing a few pitches before hobbling back to the car.

I monitored the injury the next week and realized that it was probably a stress fracture in my fifth metatarsal. I tried to baby it in supportive footwear and limited my exercise to biking and steep climbing. It seemed to be doing okay for a couple of weeks but then I jammed it in a hand crack and, no surprise here, it swelled up and hurt. So I put it in a walking boot and tried to figure out what to do with myself. Luckily I had a few projects.

My car has good clearance and four-wheel drive so I checked out some cliffs that I had not been to before but could drive to. One day I managed to knock my water bottle off a 200 footer into a tangle of bushes. I rapped down the cliff to look for it, which took a while and kind of also felt like climbing while simultaneously making me wish I could actually climb all of the awesome cracks two inches from my face. I never did find that bottle either.

I also installed a hangboard at my house (about time) and began to do some stuff on that. It was hard to find motivation at first but after a while of hobbling around and sitting on my butt all day it started looking pretty appealing. I definitely gained some finger strength and increased my pullup volume. Today I cranked out 102 pullups in between doing homework and eating snacks.

Finally, I created an extensive spreadsheet of climbing areas and ranked them by drive time from Bend. I created a separate page on this site to house it called... climbing areas by drive time page so check it out!

I think my foot is finally ready to start use again after 6+ weeks in a walking boot. Hopefully I will be able to get out and start doing fun stuff soon!