First Bouldering Competition

This past Saturday I competed in my first ABS Competition held at Vertical Endeavors in Warrenville. I have been working on bouldering for about a month. When I started bouldering more I was climbing a V3, I am now climbing V5's on a regular basis and working on most V6's. For bouldering I felt pretty good because I have a hard time with power moves and that's what a lot of bouldering is. During the competition I warmed up on the Intermediate problems and then tried the Advanced problems. The intermediate route ranged from V3 to V5 and Advance was V5 to V7. I completed one advance route and five intermediate routes. I felt really good with how I was climbing the routes there. Some of them were pretty stretchy were made it hard to complete the route. Even though it seemed like the day was going by slow it was earlier to figure out where I was standing by the way my body was feeling. There was one route is the corner of the gym wall that I really liked. The finishing move was a technical move because I had to turn my hip over while lunge to the finish. After I finished climbing we did a raffle prize to give time for the judges to add up and put score cards in the correct order. We waited about an hour to get results but in the end it was worth the wait. I took 5th place out of 15 people in my division. I am very happy with that because I am not big on bouldering. I am looking forward to the rest of the ABS Season because I feel I will do very well. This new training program that I am doing is a lot of fun and can be very hard on some days. Some days I will be doing long routes that are V6 or harder. Other days I may have to do short routes with a pyramid of pull ups. School I have three classes a day so I get out at 12:30 pm. I have a lot of time between school and the start of training to finish my homework so I do not have to worry to much about finishing things after training. My sponsorship with So ILL Climbing has helped a lot with my bouldering. So ILL gave me a pro deal on gear that i got myself a nice crashpad. I am also waiting on a helmet that is coming in from KASK Helmets. KASK Helmets is giving a product sponsorship. All pictures and videos for the competition and gear are/will be posted to Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Check them out a lot of really cool photos from the competition.