Tim Würthner ticks La Grosse Tarlouze (8C)

Tim Würthner, with seven 8B+’ under his belt, has repeated Michael Piccolruaz’ La grosse Tarlouze (8C) in Magic Wood. The 22-year-old is also a competition climber who this spring was #5 in a Euro Cup.

Can you tell us more about doing your first 8C?
First of all La grosse tarlouze consists of three sections: you do the whole The Never Ending Story (8B+) which consists of two parts (they are considered two boulders themself and are 8A+ and 8A). For me, the first part (8A+ of about 13 moves) never felt that difficult when I had worked my beta well. It just gets you a bit exhausted for the second, more max power intens part. Coming through this without being to tired is the key to do the full line. At the last section you first traverse on a rail to the left, those moves aren’t too difficult. Then you enter a small rest on a slopy jug before the last crux, which mainly consists of a dropdown move to two slopers.

It’s the longest I ever projected a boulder. Previously I never had the patience to work on something over a longer time but rather wanted to do stuff really quickly, probably within just one trip of a few days. However, I always felt like I wanted to see how far I would progress on a boulder if I tried it for a longer time. Initially I aimed to work and do the boulder this spring/summer, but in the end I had quite many competitions until the Worldcup in Innsbruck in july. At that point I was quite exhausted (physically and mentally) from the season and took some rest. However I also had two important comps coming up in september and thought preparing for those and sending the project would be too much, so I went just for working on it at first. In august I had some rather rough sessions on it because it was to warm.

However, I surprised myself with all of a sudden making it to the last crux at the first proper sending try, as soon as I was there in cooler temps in september. In this moment I realized with some work on it I could already have the capability for it this season and commited to it. I drove to magic wood a few more times to give send goes and at the end of september I finally had the level to climb it. All in all, from first trying never ending story about five years ago, I spend 19 sessions on it, 13 of those from march till september of this year.