training – The RV Project

How About a Climbing Update?

By SpenserClimbing, MusingsNo Comments

Ain’t no climbing! F’reals. The gyms are closed, Owens River Gorge is closed, the Happies and Sads are closed, and the Buttermilks are about to be. As I’ve said before, I’m on Team It-Don’t-Matter, since I’m also still on Team Rehab. I would never wish for good people to be prevented from climbing, but I am definitely benefiting from the absence of envy. I may not be doing Soulslinger this season, but neither will anyone else, haha! Talking to my parents, who are in quarantine in the Bay Area, it sounds like the public there is quite panicked, and very wary of each other. My mom tells me that people aren’t smiling at each other in the grocery store anymore; her observation is that those who choose to appear friendly these days are almost exclusively ethnic minorities. I can’t really comment on that aspect; around Bishop, people seem to be pretty friendly while keeping their distance. In the first 2 weeks of March, barely anything had changed at all in terms of folks’ behavior. The last 2 weeks we saw checkout queues with zones taped on the floor 6’ from one another, and Main Street has hardly any pedestrians at all. So, here in RV Project world, we are climbing on the trailer-woodie waaay more often than we ever thought we would. The weather this week is warm and sunny, and when there’s no wind, we can lower the wall without losing all of our important documents. In fact, when…

April 4, 2020

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Training Gains – A Female Climber Perspective

By VikkiClimbing, Gym Climbing, Staying Healthy, Training, Trip JournalNo Comments

We’ve been back in the Bay Area for about a week now and are on an edit Jumbo Love + gym training regime for the month. We are both feeling really weak right now since we barely climbed the past few weeks of filming, but are determined to get back in shape before we head to Wyoming in July. Current status: extremely sore, but hopeful because I know the training schedule I set for myself is solid. Here’s a piece I wrote for Mojagear.com (original here) last month on the training program we use as our guide – The Rock Climber’s Training Manual. Recently on The RV Project blog, I wrote about our perceived reality of living on the road (we are going to be climbing all the time = getting hella strong and crushing) versus actual reality (weather, work and travel commitments make it next to impossible to continue to improve at climbing without a plan). We’ve spent the past 3 years pretending like we had all the time in the world, that our lives were as carefree as our Instagram portrays. Finally, we’ve accepted our reality – coming to terms with the fact that we’re busy, really busy. And, furthermore, we want to be busy. Just climbing hasn’t gotten us appreciably stronger, we’ve both plateaued. The only way we thought we could break through is to regain some structure. We needed a plan, we needed goals, or we were going to continue to disappoint ourselves. As Spenser described, after a lot of research,…

June 5, 2015

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Planning the Training Plan

By SpenserClimbingNo Comments

This is a piece I wrote for Mojagear.com (original here). Check them out if you need some gear, or just something to read to get you psyched to use the gear you already have. Last time, I mentioned that we are training for some fairly big goals. I’m going to gun for my first 5.14, Jumbo Pumping Hate at Clark Mountain, CA. Vikki is trying to take down the boulder problem that is largely responsible for how you and I see bouldering now: Midnight Lightning. She’s also trying to send Nat’s Traverse, a classic urban bouldering testpiece in Berkeley, CA. (The links for the latter two will take you to videos of the problems.) Before I start talking about the sets and reps and exercises, it’s worth a few words to explain why we’re training, and why we’re training the way we are. The Past I’ve been climbing for a little over 10 years now, starting when I was 19. Unlike the Ondras, the Megos’, the Sharmas, or the Raboutous, I didn’t have the good fortune to start climbing at a young age. While I’ve been lucky enough to avoid major soft-tissue trauma (I’m mostly talking about finger pulleys here), I don’t have the same natural tendon strength and flexibility as someone who grew up on the sport. Vikki’s the same, only worse…she only started climbing at age 23! When I started climbing in college, I fell in love with it and spent my time obsessing about how I could get…

February 13, 2015

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Setting Goals

By SpenserClimbing, Trip Journal3 Comments

Wow, where to start? I sat down to write a blog post about what we’ve been up to lately, but there’s hardly any way to begin it because everything I want to address is linked forward and backward and sideways and it’s all exciting but still up in the air. Right now I’m sitting in the office of our friend Lindsey’s house, for whom we’re watching over things and collecting mail in Berkeley. We’re not far from Berkeley Ironworks, which is great because Vikki and I are working our way through the Rock Prodigy training program. This ain’t no kinda new year resolution, neither…see, we’ve got goals. We even spent several days in the gym in Chattanooga to get in our ARCing and hangboarding. Those goals I mentioned come with what I would call a good chance of failure. Vikki’s goal is to climb Midnight Lightning and Nat’s Traverse (both very solid at V8). I’m going to skip 5.13b-d and try to send Jumbo Pumping Hate (5.14a) at Clark Mountain. Yeah! Sports-climbing! http://vimeo.com/117974391 That’s nothing compared to the goal of a certain someone with whom we’ll be traveling to Clark. The spark that kicked off our training was Ethan wanting to train for Jumbo Love, a route he’s tried in the past with some success. We jumped at the opportunity to film one of the hardest and most impressive routes in America, and I got excited about the prospect of trying its younger brother. The three of us share a tendency to flit from one thing to another, so the theory…

January 29, 2015

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Hair on Fire

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Gym Climbing, TrainingNo Comments

I’m not ready to turn 30. The saying goes that time flies when you’re having fun. Strangely, I find that time flies when I’m standing still. Take the past two months for example. The RV Project moved its headquarters into my parents’ house, where we soaked up the comforts of a house and a doting mother and father who love to cook delicious food. A 2 month hiatus from the road seemed like a great chance to catch up with the videos we’re making, do some needed maintenance on the trailer, see our non-nomadic friends, and for me to prepare for my upcoming Birthday Challenge. The problem is, it feels like I’m just starting to train, and we’ve already left. It’s now less than a month from my birthday, and I am already dreading many of the elements I’ve set for myself. I’m not in poor shape, but the list of challenges is long. Time is fast dwindling, moreso as I’ll want to taper for a week or so before the challenge. I spent most of my time in the gym lifting weights and gaining endurance. I followed the format of Phase 1 of John Long’s Workout From Hell. I’d done the entire cycle once before, and remember feeling much pain and suffering during the 30-rep phase, but I also recall that my body felt as solid as a tree, as though bullets would bounce off my chest. I figured this would be a good way to train for my 300,000-pound lifting day,…

June 19, 2014

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Are Piercings Worth the Price?

By SpenserClimbing, Staying Healthy, The Exterior, The Interior, Training, Trip Journal8 Comments

As Spenser said in the last post, we have arrived to sandstone heaven. I could not be happier. Colorado has beautiful stone and a multitude of great climbs, but Joe’s Valley is just easy. Especially after a summer consisting of driving an hour and a half, hiking another hour a half, climbing, hiking over talus for a half hour, climbing, and repeating. Free camping, boulders everywhere, and a town with everything you need just a short ride away. It’s been effortless getting used to life at Joe’s. But I’m getting carried away. The point of this post is to talk about piercings! Let’s go back to where my curiosity with this began. Towards the end of our first climbing day at Left Fork, we met Mina Leslie-Wujastyk and David Mason. Mina and I started talking about physical therapy and the recurrent shoulder/neck injury she used to struggle with. Mina’s shoulder would act up, especially during training, much like my injury (similar neck pain with numbness down the arm). She went to a chiropractor in Britain that was more on the alternative side of things and he told her that her piercings could be hindering her recovery. Piercings? Really? Her chiropractor explained that because of the repetitive stress on her body from traveling, climbing hard, training, and so on, her immune system was already working overtime. To add the piercings on top of all that was possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back, in a way. Since her immune system…

November 1, 2012

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No Pain, No Gain…No, Really.

By SpenserClimbing, Staying Healthy, The Exterior, Training, Trip Journal8 Comments

Again, I’ve made the mistake of ignoring the nagging feeling in the back of my mind, that feeling that something is just not right with my body. The first time was when I ended up getting diagnosed with Celiac Disease. Not sure why I didn’t learn my lesson the first time… I was in physical therapy before leaving on this road trip for recurring shoulder pain. I made some minimal changes, but overall I didn’t trust my physical therapist. I thought she was full of it. Ok, just partially full of it. She assigned a few back exercises and stretches and sternly told me that I needed to climb less frequently for a while. Whenever I asked for an explanation, she gave me a half-ass response. Whenever I asked a follow-up question, she dismissed me. She was scatterbrained and always in a rush and I didn’t like that about her mode of therapy. So I only half listened to her. I was so busy with work and leaving my life in SF (renting out my apartment, packing up, etc.) that I barely had time to climb anyway – I was focused on getting out of the Bay Area and on the road. I changed up my daily habits a bit, things that were obvious to me, such as not holding the phone between my shoulder and head while typing and carrying an ergonomic backpack during my daily walks to/form the BART station. My shoulder pain went away without me doing…

October 1, 2012

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Time to Try Hard

By SpenserClimbing, Staying Healthy, The Exterior, Training, Trip Journal4 Comments

I’ve just fallen in love with the concept of training. I don’t enjoy training…yet. And yikes, if you know me, you know that’s a crazy sentence. Like Spenser mentioned in the last post, we’ve been in Colorado over two months. Since being in Colorado, Spenser and I have kicked up our training several notches. Through this, I’ve realized that my quit threshold is extremely low… What is a quit threshold, you ask? I see it as the moment you lose your “grrr,” when you stop trying hard. It’s completely psychological. You could do one, two, or even three more push-ups/crunches/squats, but you choose not to. You essentially give up. You know that the extra effort won’t kill you, so why do you stop? The negative impact is not solely felt in your training, this attitude will eventually permeate throughout all your actions. It could mean that you will not make that last move on the climb you’ve been projecting, or that you will lack the mental gumption to study hard for class that you need to excel in. So here we are. In Colorado, surrounded by ridiculously strong climbers. Living with Brad Jackson, a training master. He knows how to train smart, not just hard. So…exactly why are we not taking FULL advantage of this? When this realization finally hit me, I felt like quite a bonehead. The past 2 months have been the most active months in my entire life. Hiking to and from Rocky Mountain National Park, at high altitude, training hard…but…

September 5, 2012

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