Its been a while .. a long while and it showed.

The wall. Some love it , some see it as a poor relation to the real world, some like me just see it a part of the whole spectrum of vaguely mountain related sports from Skiing to iceclimbing.

With a lot of uncertainly in my life and a recent positive change in his it was a great opportunity for myself and Davy Wright to get away from it all and focus instead on not falling off. Always a panacea to your real life worries.

We headed to the EICA (Edinburgh International Climbing Arena), at Ratho n.r Edinburgh after a mad dash from work.

Busy as always we waited for free roped then hit the easier walls for a much needed warm up before heading to longer leads for Davy, longer but failed top ropes for me and then some tough physical overhangs to finish us off. Davy making easy work of routes certainly motivated me to push hard but finally the pump and weakness of my grip (told you its been a while) got the better of me!

While we climbed we watched the route setters preparing for this weekends World Internationals (sadly i missed out on tickets)  including ( sans shirt – as is his trademark) climber Robbie Phillips.

An easy going guy his good humoured and relaxed demeanour often belie just how good a climber Robbie is but you only need to watch him and you know he is something special.

Although in this pic he seems very taken with a big pink volume (sic). 😉

A great night, a great catch-up and a great reminder that climbing is truly something at forces you to step away from the everyday and focus on the here and now!

For more information on EICA and the World internationals visit the site here or check out their twitter feed @EICAratho

Climb when you’re ready!

Davy Wright is a Glasgow based mountaineer, climber and regular gear blogger – his reviews (always honest and always useful) can be found on MyOutdoors.co.uk  and you may also know him as the guy in front in my Monch SE Ridge video from my previous posts, also available here.