Spenser – Page 9 – The RV Project

Carlo Traversi’s Birthday Challenge- Insane

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Climbing, Exclude From Site, FilmNo Comments

Folks, I’ve done some bouldering, and I’ve pushed my limits. I’ve even done a few harder problems, up to V11. I’ve also done literally hundreds of boulder problems in a day. I’ve been at it long enough to genuinely surprise myself from time to time. What I have no freaking chance of ever doing is doing a fraction of the hard climbing that Carlo Traversi does for his 26th Birthday Challenge. Attempting 26 boulder problems V5 or harder in Colorado meant doing an awful lot of harder climbs, since the bouldering skews in favor of the higher grades there. This is partly why his ticklist (below) is so totally absurd. Plus, I think Carlo just enjoys climbing hard climbs and making it appear effortless. Of course, it’s not all good…anyone who’s bouldered knows how important it is to have skin in order to complete a problem. And guess what happens to your skin after a dozen hard climbs? Will he complete his challenge? Press play to find out… 1. The Kind V5 2. Mr. Wimpy V7 3. The Kind Traverse V11 4. Crack Line V7 5. Whispers Of Wisdom V10 6. Storm Shadow Stand V10 7. Unnamed V6 (Cube Boulder) 8. Unnamed V5 (Cube Boulder) 9. Unnamed V6 (Cube Boulder) 10. Real Large V9 11. Hi Fi V11 12. Arete V8 13. Tommy’s (Other) Arete V8 14. The Donut Thief V9 15. Veritas Assis V11 16. Stripes V8 17. Menwax V7 18. Bulgin’ Out V8 19. Child Of God V10 20. Suzuki Boulder V5…

September 9, 2014

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30-Day Birthday Challenge Wrap Up

By SpenserBirthday Challenges5 Comments

So…done? SO done. How done? So done that I couldn’t muster the energy to write this until, what are we now, damn near two weeks out from my finish date. The last thing I updated anyone about was our trip to Salt Lake City to film and support Steve Edwards’ 54th BDC. He has since begun chemotherapy, and you can follow along on his wild ride by clicking here. So that was Monday, when we got back. Monday night, kinda late, like 1AM. We were tired. Day 24 (Tuesday)- 30 Pitches Led on Gear The next day had rain in the forecast, so we woke up relatively leisurely to head into town and grab sustenance. Consistent showers had our spirits down, but hashbrowns and pancakes brought them back up. While we waited for the world to dry, we planned the rest of the remaining BDC week by reserving a bike for the bike park, arranging to stay with Scot and Michelle at Alta Lake, and staring at the Chief in hopes of divining three easy ways up the face. If you are looking for a new, high performance mountain bike, then you should seriously consider looking into what is known as the PK Rippers for sale. This company is well known throughout the mountain biking community for being on the cutting edge of mountain bike technology. Their products not only come highly regarded for being functional, but they also are designed with mountain bikers in mind. Their mountain bikes for sale come in…

September 2, 2014

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Alex Honnold’s Birthday Challenge: A Year’s Supply of Climbing

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Climbing7 Comments

I can’t contain myself, this is just one of the coolest things ever and I have to get it off my chest. After talking about my 360 boulder problem day, Alex Honnold decided to do a Birthday Challenge. To reword that slightly: one of my biggest inspirations was inspired by me. It’s weird, because he’s also a friend and he treats people like equals (in other words, is a normal human being…normal-ish, anyway). If I complain about people being ahead of me on a route at 8am, he dryly observes that the sun comes up at 5 (fair point). If he makes fun of my challenges for sounding heinous, I have tons of ammo to fire back with. And as I reported the trials and triumphs of my various hard days, he began toying with the idea of doing 290 pitches on his birthday, August 17th. It sounded really hard: 10 hours of climbing means roughly a pitch every 2 minutes. After a little bit of discussion, which included talk of the logistical difficulties (travel between routes, passing other climbers) and what would hurt most (feet and legs, followed by hands), he seemed to dismiss the idea. A few days later, Stacey mentioned that he’d gone through the guidebook and counted pitches on the Apron routes. We knew it was on. He’d been bitten by the challenge bug. Sunday 5AM We meet in the Apron parking lot. The sun is not yet showing itself, but some morning stratus clouds lend a dull blue-grey…

August 22, 2014

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Day 23 (Still)

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Trip Journal7 Comments

It is with a very strong passion that I hate the TSA. You may not agree with me. Maybe you think that being made to take off your shoes, dump out your water, and stand in a microwave somehow makes us collectively safer. Maybe you think that safety is the most important thing in life. I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion, and mine is that the TSA is only good for making complete idiots feel safer. Moreover, only complete idiots think that safety is more important than things like fun and adventure. Goodness. I haven’t even started and I’ve digressed. I’m typing this from a small chair about 6 miles higher than where you’re reading this from. The chair is hurtling north through the rarified air toward Canada. We’ve just departed from Salt Lake City, where we had flown on Friday to support an original birthday challenger. This guy: Steve Edwards, AKA Manny Varjak, Emmanuel Overdrive, and a load more pseudonyms based on various films. So, I’m still on Birthday Challenge Day 23 because, well, we changed our plans. You see, we had to fly out to Salt Lake to support this particular challenge. I should back up just a bit so you know why. Starting when I turned 24, Steve and I have had a bit of a rapport over email regarding birthday challenges and climbing and coffee and other things essential to living a decent life. He lives in SLC. We went to the winter OR…

August 12, 2014

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Day 22- Writing on a Rest Day

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Climbing, Trip Journal14 Comments

Since the last post, I’ve done a few things. Day 14- Win and Lose I fully expected 30 free throws to be the hardest (least likely) element. Not so much when I first thought of it, but upon subsequent thinkings, it only seemed to get harder and harder. Will Wolcott kindly pointed out that, if shooting at an 80% rate, I stand a way-less-than-1% chance of succeeding at 30 consecutive free throws. I countered that each shot was not an independent event, statistically speaking. There is such a thing as being “on fire” and “in a groove” and whatnot. F the haters. I’m gonna make baskets. I spent an hour looking for an indoor basketball hoop in this icy land of hockey, and found one at the Totem Hall, a community center for the First Nation folk of Squamish. I shot free throws in an empty gym for the next 2.5 hours. At first I improved. I went from streaks of 8-10 to streaks of 12-15, hitting 18 in a row a couple of times. Then it all went to shit. My eyes stopped working properly and my focus waned. Best to call it a practice round. Besides, I had another challenge to attempt. So that was the lose part. The win part is way better. When Jeremy and I did our “test” run up the Grand Wall a few weeks back, it took us 5:40 because we were stuck behind slower parties. We figured that if we hustled and…

August 6, 2014

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BDC Update- The Suffering Begins

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Climbing2 Comments

Seems like I manage an update every 4 days. Sounds fair, I suppose. I mean, 4’s a pretty cool number. 2+2 is 4, 2×2 is 4, 2^2 is 4. It’s a nice neat number. Birthday Challenges have been in the air lately. There was Pat Campbell’s leiderhosen-clad challenge. And then on Saturday July 26th, Lizzy Asher (who was born in a completely different month) celebrated her birthday by going for 28 V-points’ worth of Squamish highballs. They were all climbs she hadn’t done before, and were on her list as climbs to do before leaving Canada for thesis writing in California. On her list were Ride the Lightning (V8), Teenage Lobotomy (V7), Funeral Arrangements (V6) and Black Slabbath (V7). She managed to “bop” her way through each one, though I’ll leave it at that and suggest instead that you wait for the EpicTV episode we’ve got coming. Oh yeah, BTW, we filmed it. If you need attorney for reckless driving claims, you can get them from here! We also filmed last year when a few people tried the same lines. Click the link to watch it. But what of the Spenser Challenge? Ah yes, here we go… Day 9- Reeling from 360 V-Points So yeah, I slept in. Got up just in time for Toonie ($2) swim at the rec center. Because it’s summer and it was raining and it costs $2 for a jacuzzi, a diving board, and a shower, lots and lots of climbers filled the pool area, campusing around on the wooden play thingy…

July 29, 2014

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BDC Update: Day…8?

By SpenserBirthday Challenges5 Comments

It’s July 23rd and it’s raining. Such is the folly of long-term schedules for weather-dependent outdoor activities in a temperate rainforest. In other words, the schedule that I’d carefully laid out has unraveled (lying on the floor, it’s come undone). Assuming a finite number of clear climbing days, I need to be strategic about them and fit the other elements of my challenge around them. It feels like sitting at basecamp waiting for a storm to clear. That was meant to be a matephor, but I suppose it’s damn near literal in this case. Day 5- I didn’t do shit. It rained. I stared at a screen for most of the day. Vikki volunteered to help trail-build in the North Walls, and that night we saw some films at the Squamish Mountain Festival. Day 6- Juggling Anyway, to pick up from the last post, I haven’t yet done the 3 minute breath hold. I haven’t tried it yet. But on the next morning, Day 5, I got up, walked outside, peed, and grabbed my balls. I tossed my balls in the air and they didn’t hit the ground once in 30 minutes. You see, I managed to juggle for half an hour straight, first try. It was weird…my eyes hurt, as expected, and my sides hurt too because of the micro-adjustments to posture I was making. As my mind might wander, so did the balls, and I was forced to stay focused and present in the moment. If I were a spirit guide, I…

July 24, 2014

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BDC Update Day 4

By SpenserBirthday Challenges2 Comments

Captain’s Log, July 18th. The challenge is under way. I have begun hiking the mountain, an overwhelming series of tasks now in front of me. We’re gonna need a bigger boat… That’s why I gonna recommend my favorite online shop, you will find any kind of boats, take a look on shoppok – walleye. Day 1- Run the 3rd peak in 36 minutes or less Day 1 was, well, wow. Made it to the 3rd peak in ridiculously record time. Started at 9:05am on the dot and got to the peak at 9:41am. Okay, so if I’m totally honest, I think my total time was about 36 minutes plus 20 seconds or so, but I’ll tell you this: I hiked/ran my ass off. The strategy was simple: prepare the morning of as best as I could; hike/run at the fastest possible pace that I could sustain for 36 minutes; run like fuck from 2nd to 3rd peak and bulldoze the roots and rocks like they were just belts on a treadmill. I hit the 1st signpost at just over 8 minutes, 2nd at 18 minutes, and got to the base of the 2nd peak’s mini-Death Slabs in 25 minutes. According to Vikki I had 7 minutes left when she saw me dashing across the flats near the 2nd…apparently the slabs took a long time (I recall feeling like I was walking through molasses), but I sprinted like a demon until the 3rd peak. I passed Vikki, who was dutifully manning the tripod, as…

July 18, 2014

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The Final Countdown to My Birthday Challenge

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Climbing, Training7 Comments

I’m not normally the kind of guy to spray the world about my birthday. I’ve never been one for huge laser tag parties or making all my friends invite their friends to a big group takeover of some moderately expensive restaurant. Birthdays are weird…the only time I’ve felt compelled or entitled to a big gathering of any sort was when I turned it into a charity event. Interestingly, that one was also a birthday challenge. This time, I’m spraying for a few reasons. I’m stoked. I’m kinda marketing for our EpicTV series, and my challenge will be part of it. I have trouble following through with audacious personal goals unless other people know about them. I have a lot less trouble with audacious goals if others expect me to at least try really hard. One more thing: if I can, in some way, inspire others to do something similarly audacious (physical or otherwise), that’s all for the better. I really, really hope this isn’t spilling over into obnoxious narcissism (my parents are psychologists, so I’m very self-conscious about this sort of thing). But I digress… Last night I hiked a tripod up to the 3rd peak and stashed it, so that Vikki will only have a camera bag to carry with her to film my first element on Tuesday. It was my second time up there in two days and my legs are feeling it today, but I’ve got three days to rest and a killer set of recovery tools in the…

July 14, 2014

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My BDC- Long Term Beatdown

By SpenserBirthday Challenges, Bolt Clipping, Bouldering2 Comments

“Just so you know, Georgie, I’ll be sprinting this one as fast as I can, since I’m training and all that.” “No worries, you can go ahead of me.” And so I sprinted up the first set of stairs on the trail that eventually gains 700 meters of elevation, bound for the 3rd Peak. About 150 stairs later, I was cooked. My legs felt like molten slag, and the air I was sucking didn’t seem to contain any oxygen, despite being at sea level. What began as running quickly turned into plodding. “I think you’re hosing yourself by not warming up” No shit. And so Georgie and I huffed our way up to the pinnacle of the 2nd Peak, arriving exactly 36 minutes after we began the hike. There is a trail, you see, that goes directly to the 3rd Peak, but it is vicious. Roots and rocks. The type of terrain that eats inferior ankles for breakfast. There is no moving quickly over that kind of trail. I think that, physically, the single hardest part of my birthday challenge will be this run, 36 minutes or less to the 3rd Peak. So why did we go to the 2nd? To see if the trail was faster, if longer. And it was. Despite lingering on the top of the 2nd Peak for a few minutes and dawdling over to the 3rd, we made it to the 3rd Peak in 51 minutes. That’s 1 minute faster than when I did the 3rd peak trail…

July 7, 2014

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