A week after Bern came Imst, the second worldcup of the fall. The format for qualifiers was flash which was really nice, less pressure and less mistakes. To make the semis you had to top both qualifiers, which werent too hard, maybe 7c+, so 28 people topped both. On the first qualifier I was the second person to climb and was a bit nervous starting up the route. As I reached a nice jug at the 4th clip, my worst nightmare came true and my left contact lens fell out of my eye.... Since my vision is really really bad without these, I had to climb the rest of the route in a half-blind manner. Thank god I already knew the beta and was still able to top it, but it was definitely a bizarre experience. After coming down I found the contact, put it back in, and also topped the second route.
Semis - Ive already mentioned it before, but let me stress this again - for some unkown reason, I cannot climb well in a world cup semis. Too much stress, not enough warmup, bad beta, etc etc, always something goes wrong.. and ONLY in world cup semis.. nowhere else. This comp was no different. Already I was climbing like shit in the bottom of the route, but when I reached a big volume in the roof I realized I forgot to clip from the obvious jug before and had to do a strange extendo-clip back down to continue. Then I toehooked the volume, and as I reached for the next hold my toe slipped a bit and I didnt reach far enough, and fell... such basic mistakes. I ended up 26th which is quite annoying, I know I could do much better if I didnt mess up, but that never happens.
The rest of the Shit Gang also performed well. Jakob forgot to use a key foothold in the finals and did a completely unnecessary dyno and fell. Jerome climbed well in the semis but on the second qualifier, nearly timed out 10 moves from the end and in a punt-like fashion sprinted the last (crux) moves, nearly fell, and clipped the anchor with three seconds remaining. Whoopdie doo!
Anyways on the way back to Belgium, me and Jerome stopped to climb in a really nice sandstone crag in norther France called Kronthal. A small cave with a bunch of hard routes, and realy nice climbing. The routes are quite short and often a bouldery start to an easier finish. We both tried an 8c+ called Le Labyrinthe de Pan which is super fun, an 8A boulder into an 8b route. I linked almost all the crux section second try and am syked to return after the Worldcup in Belgium to try and finish it up.
So this upcoming weekend I will compete in Belgium. My goal is no more then to break the WC Semis curse and FINALLY not climb like a total wanker. But maybe thats too much to expect, who knows, I guess I'll find out in a few days. Wish me luck!
