Category Archives: climbing

Climbing, rocks and mountains are my passion, my religion and my church

Nine life lessons from rock climbing

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In this short talk from TED, a veteran rock climber Matthew Childs shares nine pointers for rock climbing:

A few of those rules are quite well known and you can learn about them from other climbing gurus. For example:

Rules #2: Hesitation is bad

Yes, but patience is good what Lynn Hill explains in her Pro Tips: Patience

Rules #5: Know how to rest

Especially, when your imagination becomes an unnecessary source of anxiety – Johnny Dawes is a master sui generis!

Rules #7: Opposites are good

Plenty of related inspiration can be sourced from Johnny Dawes, again:

People are trying what they think they should try as opposed to what they enjoy.

Dave MacLeod also provokes some serious (re)thinking of any kind of goal-driven activity in his book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes.

Rules #8: Strength =/= success

This is generally truth, though. No strength, no potential for proper kinetic energy. Sometimes there is no other way than to pull hard, real hard.

Rules #9: Know how to let go

This one is directly related or affected by the very common anxiety, the fear of falling. There is no shortcut possible that would help to overcome the fear. You have to practice falls and master the cat righting reflex. Practice makes perfect.

…in climbing, in life.

Productive Saturday Climbing

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Today, Pantera and I we hit the Castle Climbing Centre early in the morning. It’s nice to have wide range of routes available when the centre is nearly empty as people are recovering after Friday buzz ;-). I am (exceptionally?) weak today. Probably, it’s because the last 2 weeks I conducted endurance oriented sessions only. First, I jumped upstairs to climb a few V1-V3 boulders on the overhang featured bouldering wall. I tried the new orange V5 boulder. It’s beautiful, but I couldn’t prevent my body swinging a bit after quite dynamic move to 4th hold. I’ve put the V5 on my short list, definitely. Next, we hit number of top-rope routes. Pantera was working on technical 5 and 5+ and I was trying to mix strength and stamina problems:

  • The Slabs: 6b (blue), 2 x 6c (pink/green)
  • Tall Walls: 5 (green), 6b+ (green/orange spots)
  • The Fang: 2 x 6b (orange/lilak spots), 2 x 6c (pink s.o.s., including loss of a few layers of my finger tips skin ;-))
  • The Stack: 6c (red), 7a (yellow, made 1/3 of the route, 3 moves only)

No rock rings, no campus. Finished bouldering a couple of V0-V3 on the Panels.

While my muscles were busy pushing enormous amount of ATP molecules through their fibres and cells, my brain was busy solving design issues of how to make C++ interface of GDAL library better. It is clear that neither dataset nor raster band can have semantic of plain value objects. Both, dataset and raster band, represent real world physical resources and they are more like reference objects. In spite of that reference semantic is dominant in the world of GDAL objects, I’d really like to make them CopyConstructible and Assignable. I know it can be achieved straight away:


std::tr1::shared_ptr<GDALDataset> ds(::GDALOpen("file.tif", GA_ReadOnly), ::GDALClose);

But, I just don’t want to make yet another Gigantic Rats Nest Of Pointers. I would be happy to keep all the ugliness out of user’s sight. I think it’s feasible. Perhaps I will even Pimpl my Ride GDAL.

I’ll probably need one or more climbing sessions to finish the design of better GDAL, so I can start slinging some code around. Next climbing on Monday in Swiss Cottage with Jo, Chiara and Pantera.

Endurance Hunny, Move!

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Yesterday night, I went to the temple of power where Pantera, my personal trainer recently, arranged 3 hours climbing session focused on endurance :-) So, I had to climb 18 routes with grades (Sport, French), mostly, above 6. Here is the list: 6a, 6b+, 6c, 5+, 5+, 7a (first time attempt, 50%, bloody features), 6c, 6c, 6a, 6c, 6b, 6b, 6a, 6b+, 6a, 6a, 5, 5.