Mina Leslie-Wujastyk has done The Pursuit Of Happiness 8B (A+) in Redhill outside Cape Town. (c) Jimmy Webb " I had two sessions in 2014 and then three more sessions this year, it was really satisfying to come back stronger (I did a lot of strength training over the winter). The next plan is to head to Rocklands for June, hopefully try some more hard boulders!" So what kind of strength training have you done? Lots of things but a big focus on max strength fingerboarding. Up to three times a week fingerboarding, lots of board climbing, also weighted pull ups and other conditioning exercises too. I did some anaerobic capacity work too but mainly relied on my fitness from route climbing and previous training. I had training plans from David Mason and Alex Barrows (they worked together with David mainly doing to strength/power stuff and Alex doing the fitness stuff).

A bolt placed on a lip above a roof where you continue climbing diagonal might be a death trap as several sideway and inward falls might break the sling. If it does not break but did wear down significantly, against the rock, you might be carrying a death trap quick draw in your rack. A Swedish climber was lucky, some days ago, when his 18 months sling broke after 5-7 such sideway and inwards falls. All bolts where the sling is at risk for such breaking should be removed.

Katrin Gründler (born Sedlmayer) has done her second 8c, Roof Warrior in Frankenjura and her story is quite interesting. (c) moritz perwitschky "I started climbing when I was 10 years old. In these years my focus was on alpine routes (“Fleichbank Ostwand, Wilder Kaiser” at the age of 13). Then I was fascinated by on sight climbing and competition-climbing (greatest success European Champion 2000 in Munich and Weltcup Winner in Lecco 2002). During the following years climbing got somewhat less important because I finished studying and had two children. Bit by bit climbing became again more and more important to me, and I was lucky to meet some strong young climbers who motivated me to try harder routes. So I was able to climb one 8c two years ago and now I scored again. To gain success I spent about 10 days on “Roof Warrior” (8c), Universum, Frankenjura. The climbing is very athletical and needs a lot of endurance. You are starting with a vertical wall, followed by an impressive roof. I really enjoyed this kind of climbing, because it´s my style." Due to clever and well adapted training and above all, great motivation I am still able, in spite of my age, to climb quite hard routes. Maybe I could have climbed harder routes at the age of twenty but unfortunately I never tried."

BETA - North Wales 2017 from Derw Fineron on Vimeo.

The first European Youth Cup in 2017 started out in Imst with 250 participants. The route setting team included Kilian Fischuber and many said it was the best route setting ever. Previous years, Austria and Slovenia have dominated but now the top positions were more evenly spread out. As previous years, out of the big countries UK and especially Germany have hard time getting their youth high up in the ranking. Several hundred more pictures from Kletterzentrum. The Norwegian head coach, Reino Horak, agrees that the route setting was excellent and also comments that it can be seen that the level of Youth B has gone up. Here are the winners and noteworthy is that Nika Potapova was the only one who topped out all three routes. All three boys and Nika are 8a members. 98: V Shevchenko RUS - H Doumont BEL 00: F Schenk ITA - N Arc FRA 02: A Gines ESP - N Potapova UKR Complete results