flynn067

Post surgery day 2. Anaesthetic drip disconnected, time for the training to start again. I’ve been getting really motivated for training lately. Which is just as well, because I’m about to have a 6 week solid block of it during the spring. The reason? Ankle surgery.  Yes, more ankle surgery. Readers of this blog will know that I’ve had surgery on both ankles in the past two years. In both cases this was for damage to the edge of the cartilage surface of my ankle joints. By far the worst injury was happened in this accident when I was lowered off the end of a rope. The microfracture surgery I had did work to an extent, but the nature of doing tons of walking on mountains has meant the lesion, although small, has not remained stable and has got a little worse. Knowing what I know now, I also suspect that some of the advice I was given for the post operative period was, well, sub standard and could well have contributed to it not working as well as it could have. So I’ve tried to put ...

Sunday boarding from Dave MacLeod on Vimeo . Having come out of the other side of my massive book project and starting to climb regularly again, I have been thinking a lot about the nature of my need to climb and what I take from the activity. I’m aware that for some readers these comments may sound ridiculous, but they are my feelings and so you can take them or leave them - they simply are what they are. My deprivation from climbing over the past months and years during this project has been relative. I have still climbed more metres of rock and ice than many people have the chance to and I am grateful for that. I’m also aware that the book project has had still greater disruption for my family. This post is not a moan. I understand that everyone has choices to make in their life which have a big mix of positive and negative consequences and then live with them. Nonetheless, whether it seems self-indulgent or not, the relative lack of climbing over the period had a huge effect on ...

Starting up Feeding Frenzy VI,7 on Ben Nevis last week February is always all go in Lochaber. First of all, we have been sending out a lot of copies of Make or Break . Thanks to everyone who’s ordered it and I hope it is starting to help you with your climbing and injury rehab decisions already. We’ve had a few recurring questions about it: ‘Is it better [for us] to order it directly from our site, or Amazon?’  Yes it’s better to get it direct from us than the mighty Amazon. We are shipping them all over the world, every day. Plus, you get a signed copy this way! ‘Are we releasing an ebook/kindle version?’ No plans to at the moment, although we might do it sometime. Thanks for everyone’s great feedback on the book so far. It means a lot. In between dealing with book related things, I’ve been in my wall training a lot and rebuilding fitness. I love my wall! It’s so great to finally be in there regularly, just pulling on holds and enjoying it. I’ve also been out on the ice which has...

For the past 4 years or so, I have been working on a book about climbing injuries. It spells out in detail how to treat them once you have them, based on the evidence from high quality scientific research and practice. More importantly, it discusses all the things we do in our climbing routine that cause our future injuries and prolong those we have already caused. I have titled the book ‘Make or Break’ . This is because becoming an expert in understanding the causes and treatments of climbing injuries will be make or break for your climbing career. As Wolfgang Gullich said, “getting strong is easy, getting strong without getting injured is hard”. In my first book, 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes , I suggested that many aspects of training for climbing are not rocket science. Keep showing up, pulling on small holds, pushing the limits of your motivation and learning from others and you will get stronger fingers and get better at climbing. It will be injuries that will get i...

Readers of this blog will of course know that I have been working on a book on climbing injuries for some years. It has turned out to be a much bigger book than I originally envisaged. It has been a huge project, but in a few weeks I will reach the finish line. The book is currently with the printers and some time in the next few weeks, many boxes of copies will arrive at my house. The final stages were a rather exhausting process, but I’m excited to release it and potentially help healthy climbers stay healthy and injured climbers to get back to the fray. I’ll write a more detailed post about the content of the book when the stock arrives in early February. If you want to make sure you get a copy as soon as you can, we’ve put it up for pre-order in the shop here , and it’ll be in the post to you as soon as it arrives. I’ve also added the table of contents below so you have an idea of the breadth of the areas covered. My aim was to write the manual on how to stay healthy as a climbing ...