Nalle Hukkataival, who has never suggested 8C+ for a Boulder he has done, comes on Facebook with the amazing news that he has done the FA of Burden of Dreams 9A. "Yesterday I had another session on the Lappnor project. The routine that goes into it after all this time isn’t all that exciting; the same warm up, driving an hour on the same road, brushing the all too familiar holds, re-warming up, systematically trying the same sequences in the same order. Some days you feel strong and confident and get totally shut down. Other days you’re not feeling a 100 percent and it could be the best session you’ve had. All logic seems to have gone out the window a long time ago. Many sessions I wish I could forget. Can’t do a move I’ve done countless of times before. Last highpoint was a year ago. Weeks and months turned into years of uncertainty and self-doubt. Trying to keep that little spark of hope in the back of your mind alive. Walking up to the boulder with all the positivity I can muster, I still can’t ignore what the boulder has become to represent; failure of varying degrees. Sitting under the boulder I can feel the weight of it. Pulling on always feels like a déjà vu, like the thousands of times before. It always starts the same way and ends the same way. Except this time. This time was different. Snap to reality, I’m hanging on the lip of the boulder, disoriented, heart racing. Contain the panic. I’m on top of the boulder trying to grasp how I got there. Lots of feelings coinciding; surprise, relief, happiness, confusion. As reality hits that quickly turns into ecstatic happiness with a dash of disbelief. Waking up today I can’t help but look at the world with different eyes. Having achieved the first ascent of Burden of Dreams marks a new level in my climbing. With a handful of existing 8C+ boulders in the world, proposing 9A is the logical step. Huge thanks to my friend Marko Siivinen for showing me the line! What a journey it’s been! Stay tuned for a film of the whole story with the boulder. It will be something extraordinary!

Gimme Kraft presents their second training bible after they first success - a book that sold out several times. The book, written by physiotherapist Simon Friedrich, contains some 240 pages and in practice it is about showing and describing non-climbing exercises. The overall message is "Climb Better, Feel Better" and "Climbing Training Meets Good Health also through MOBILITY - STABILITY - STRENGTH." It feels as if the whole book wanted to grab and shake all the gym rats focusing on finger power and inspire them with some odd training we seldom have seen before in climbing. The book is very user-friendly and you can more or less open it randomly and get very inspired. It is actually quite extreme and you just wonder what effect such training would have had on all climbers saying they never do any complementary training because this is what it is all about. Hannes Huch give some more insight: "Our first Gimme Kraft! book, written by Dicki Korb and Patrick Matros, was and still is a huge and unexpected success with nearly 25000 copies sold in less than 3 years. We received a lot of positive feedback from all over the world. The people especially seem to enjoy the easy-to-understand and inspiring design. It's more the Mac than the Microsoft among the training books :) But we also heard that people were missing entry level exercises, which gym-climbers can easily add to their bouldering to stay healthy. So we switched to our Café Kraft physiotherapist Simon Friedrich, who's repairing all the climbers who want too much in too short time. We invented a very easy to handle training plan so that even a newbie can create his own additional program to his climbing training. There's a lot of emphasis on mobilisation and stabilisation, things a lot of climbers lack of! Nevertheless working with the book is intended to be fun and enjoyable and to keep your motivation high. Gimme Kraft! The Café Kraft brand is growing again: In 2017 we will open another big franchise location ... but we can't tell the city yet. And we will release another book which will be about mental training. Main author will be none other than the rockgod himself: Jerry Moffatt!"

The sixth and second last stage of the Lead World Cup took place in Xiamen, China this weekend. The world champion, Janja Garnbret, took her fourth victory and so she has secured the overall title. Among the male, Stefano Ghisolfi won for the first time since his first victory in 2014. The overall leader, Domen Skofic, also from Slovenia, was just #9 meaning that also Jakob Schubert and Romain Desgranges are on the run for the 2016 title. 1. Stefano Ghisolfi ITA - Janja Garnbret SLO 2. Dmitrii Fakiryanov RUS - Anak Verhoeven BEL 3. Jakob Schubert AUT - Jain Kim KOR 4. Gauthier Supper FRA - Akiyo Noguchi JPN 5. Romain Desgranges FRA - Mina Markovic SLO

1. Domen Skofic 392 - Janja Garnbret 465 2. Romain Desgranges 337 - Anak Verhoeven 395 3. Jakob Schubert 337 - Jain Kim 350 4. Stefano Ghisolfi 301 - Magdalena Röck 308 5. Gauthier Supper 255 - Mina Markovic 251 The overall ranking above is based on five out of six events. If Anak wins the last event, she will get 495 points but Janja has 516 points counting all six so she has already secured the overall title. If either Romain Desgranges or Jakob Schubert wins in Kranj, Domen has to be #6 in front of his home crowd to secure the title. Overall, only 20 male and female have competed in all six events in 2016.

With more than 3 300 routes spread over some 70 sectors it can be quite hard to find your preferred routes to try. One great assistance can be the 8a Ticklist, where you can search for grades and the best routes, for example by onsight percentage etc. However, based on your personal wanted routes and daily conditions, you might be better off by a local Kalymnos insider that knows the topo and the Ticklist. Based on the idea of providing Inside Tick List Tips on Kalymnos, Wild Sport will start doing it next week in their main shop. Just show up there and they will help you to find the best sectors and routes for you.

Our new Web Developer, Tieme van Veen, has deployed some updates to our new responsive beta.8a.nu. New things: 1. Click Search and you will get a list nearby crags with distance to them and driving instructions. 2. Filter Crag Ticklist to find your best climbs (not mobile yet) 3. All news in a handy mobile format - beta.8a.nu/news" 4. Check your and friends' scorecards Next up is making it possible to add ascents to your scorecard. The plan is to have most ready within a few months but keep the old website so you can choose between them.

In order to promote onsight climbing, the webmaster has created an onsight ranking. Enjoy!

Adam Ondra has made fast progress on The Dawn Wall and this is his latest Instagram report. "@kjorgeson giving me the jugging up master class the other day and as well as beta for the pitches. The third day up on the Dawn Wall I fixed the lines almost to the top of pitch 16 (dyno pitch). I checked the moves on the crux pitches and it looked definitely hard. Beautiful, HARD, intimidating and motivating project. @tommycaldwell was a huge visionary to see this line in the middle of the blank wall." On the Black Diamond FB Adam gives some more insight to his strategy. "I would like to emphasize that I am not free climbing everything yet. The goal right now is only to go ground-up to the top, free-climbing and using a little bit of aid climbing, to fix the whole line with ropes and start working on the pitches properly to have them ready for the final free push later. So if the crux is around the protection, I just touch the holds to see how the sequence would be and continue. The first crux-pitch looked definitely super hard to free climb. Almost impossible. I will have to take a look at all these razorblades more closely."

EPIC TV shop has La Sportiva sales this week. Testarossa is offered at just Euro 109 with free shipping. This price is actually lower then what La Sportiva offers at their own Outlet.

Kalymnos is well-known for its soft grades but in reality in 2017 the new gym climbing generation will probably say the grades are hard. The reason for this is that almost half of the first steep routes have been downgraded, some lines are a bit polished and there has been a change in the climber profile and average strength. Some ten years ago, gyms were limited especially when it comes to Bouldering. Nowadays, new Boulder gyms are popping up everywhere and more and more climbers are performance oriented, following training programs. In Kalymnos, the unique and classical routes are long, 3-dimensional, with focus on resting and technique, which makes them almost the anti-style of Bouldering. After one attempt on the classical Aegialis 7c, (c) Jörg Zeidelhack, most need an hour's rest and can do a maximum of three attempts per day. This can be compared with the Bouldering lifestyle where you could do 30 attempts a day and instead of just ticking Aegialis, you could do at least five 7Bs. Amazingly, during the last month, Aegialis has been ticked only five times, which is just half of the average ascent number of the last ten years. At the same time, more lines of around the 7B grade are added to the 8a database. As the difficulty scale in climbing is supposed to reflect how hard the community has to struggle for doing different routes, it is time to stop saying that the typical routes are soft in Kalymnos and start to regard them as rather hard.