Posts Tagged ‘Monk Bouldergym’

Last weekend I drove with Climbcheck founder Joey from Eindhoven to Amsterdam to visit the opening of Monk Bouldergym.

On the backseats Timo and Noortje tagged along. On our way it was windy and snowing. Fortunately we arrived without any trafficjams.

My first impression of the bouldergym was very nice. Free bouldering among lots of enthusiastic people. The boulders were quite diverse and the holds were awesome and raw!

I was psyched to boulder at Amsterdam. I had a good time among the climbers. The bouldergym looks finished and the bar area was great. The soccertable upstairs is a nice add on. You delivered great work Monk. See you next time!

Yesterday was my first competition of the year. It was RE-SET round number 6 held at Monk Bouldergym.

This local competition was new to me. The rules are simple. There were 12 problems between 4 and 8a and a time limit between 8 and 11 PM. Try to climb all of them and you were the winner of the day.

I knew about this serie before but I never bothered to join before. My goal was to see if I was fit enough.

Routesetters Bruno & Michiel

Anyway I was among training buddies and friends. I climbed with Vera who managed to flash the same set of boulders.

After an hour I had finished them all. There was one nice blue problem on wall number 4 which took me a few attempts and it wasn’t even the hardest problem.

I think I like such subtle boulders in particular. Overall I find the boulders were quite friendly.

Photo by Bram Berkien

In the end I wasn’t the only one who sent all the problems. Tim Reuser, Timo Tak and Ties Linders (coincidentally all names starting with a T) managed to send them too. Female winner was Vera Zijlstra. We received a Lapis brush for our effort. Awesome right?

More or less I think I’m getting fit again. Thank you Monk and training buddies. See you around soon again!

Yesterday I had my usual teamtraining at Monk Bouldergym only this time it was shifted to the morning.

Vera, Wouter, Eva and me were having a nice boulder training. I was super motivated and wanted to train 120%. Sunday I went to Stonage in Brussel which was really nice. Tuesday I trained at Monk, Wednesday at Neoliet Eindhoven and Thursday this training. It was my 3rd climbing day in a row.

It all went well until the last few minutes of the boulder training. We started with some warm up boulder problem followed by a few boulder problems between 6a and 7b, short campus session in between and another 2 rounds of boulder problem solving.

I was doing okay until I fell out of a boulder problem. It was a really interesting boulder problem which I’ll probably never repeat again. I had to cross over with my right arm and at the same time leaning on my left heel.

It was so interesting that Wouter shot some photos which I could use for my blog and at that same time I didn’t want to give up. I was basically sitting on my left heal and bent my knee too far away from me that it had to give up on me.

As I was lying on the mat, I tried to move my toes. I could move my left foot, stretch my leg but my knee hurted a lot. I decided to stop the training and immediately made an appointment with our tied doctor.

Throughout the day my knee started to hurt more. I was able to walk in the afternoon but throughout the day I can’t walk proper anymore. I’m still able to bend my knee really careful but I can’t make certain moves anymore at the moment. For instance walking up the stairs is difficult though. According my doctor my left knee is injured: lateral band is partly torn! That’s all I can say for now.

As for now, I’ll need a to run a MRI scan at the hospital as soon as possible (urgent!) to see what exactly is torn, what I’m capable of, what I’m not capable of, how long it will take to recover and when I can start climbing again.

I’m afraid I have to cancel the national championship boulder for come Saturday at Rotterdam I’ll keep you up to date.

The 4th edition of the National Youth Boulder Championship was held today at Monk Bouldergym.

After a short briefing, I could check out my boulder problem. No I wasn’t attending, but I was part of the judge. I was granted boulder number 11 which started in a roof. It represents a 6c and was quite tricky.

Anyway, the concept of climbing this competition has changed into a maximum of 5 attempts for each boulder. The kids had 15 boulders to climb and it went very smooth. I think this concept works really well. The finals went great. This time I won’t post a lot of photos. I’m sure hundred photos of this event will be published on the internet soon. Check out the results here.

I had a great time today and I want to share my compliments to Monk Bouldergym for organising this championship so well!

This week I was really looking forward to the annual Dust 2012 event!

I recovered quite well from the 100% boulders event from last week. It was a good training session. This week I didn’t climb 5 times a week but just two times. This morning I woke up and ate some grapes and a sandwich before it was time to peddle my way to Monk Bouldergym.

I arrived just on time and said hello to Teun Keusters, Ulf Lennertz, Daan Groskamp and Vera Zijlstra. It was fun to hang around. Not much later Vera unlocked the CTO area where I changed my clothes and got ready to rumble.

Today I figured it was fun to solve boulder problems with Vera. Most of the time she could catch up with me pretty well. We used my topo guide and climbed like maniacs.

Luckily I managed to flash some hard problems, saving me some skin for the rest of the boulders. Actually I was quite proud of myself whenever that happened haha. Every small success should be celebrated.

I didn’t have any tactics today. I knew it was quite hard to go for the best 8 problems so I set my mind to climb as much as possible. It was my only goal for today. Climb until I’m out of time!

Vera quit a bit earlier but I kept going on. I didn’t have much skin problems. More or less my feet started to hurt from wearing the awesome Boreal Kintaro so long.

Anyway, later I ran into photographer Tom Doms. He wanted to take a few shots and you’ll see the photos in this story as I’m writing it. I was finishing up the easy set problems in my last hour. Sometimes I was just staring at the wall, because it was so ‘Dusty’.

In my last hour I still had to finish about 31 problems. About 10 problems were easy problems and the rest were 7a or harder. Vera was filling in my problems and supported me, thanks for that!

In my last problem I felt a bit tired. It was a black problem on the competition wall. I had to put a lot of effort in this one. I almost fell out of the problem however I didn’t want to give up and try it again. I just needed to put my left foot next to my left hand and stand up. Yeah I managed to do it and sent it! Awesome!

According to my topo guide, I climbed 76 problems out of 90. Tired but satisfied about my performance!

I remember I climbed 80 problems last year, so I was hoping it was enough in my category. I handed in my score form and went to do some groceries. 30 minutes later I received a text message from Vera that the price ceremony had already began! I was warming up some soup and haven’t started yet. Oh well, I got to hurry and peddled back to Monk Bouldergym.

Pheeew, I was just in time for the price ceremony. They started to hand out prizes for several categories. I was waiting for the category: Male most climbed boulders. And finally Joris Klinkenbijl started with number 3: Tim Reuser. I knew he climbed 74. 2nd was Elko Schellingerhout, he climbed 75 problems. Nr 1: Truong Ngo. Hey that’s me! Yeah! I climbed 76 problems, woooow that was a close call. I received 7 bags of Moon chalk. Thank you Dust 2012. You can find the rest of the results here.

More photos of Tom will be soon available on his Facebookpage.

It’s time to get some rest. I had oodles of fun climbing the problems. I’ll climb the rest in my spare time. So see you around at Monk!

Yeah, this competition started this morning! A competition till 18 years old! I’m talking about Youth Open 2011 at Monk Bouldergym.

The youth of today, 175 kids (!!), are performing right now at Monk! Unfortunately you can’t sign up anymore, it’s full, however you can enjoy the ambiance though!

Will you be around? I’m going to drink some Milk & Fruit juice to warm up my voice. I’ll be announcing some news and eventually hand out prices to the best boulder kids of the country.

See you around at Monk!

Impression photos:

Check out Facebook for more photos!