British Team Coaching - Carmel Moran

Hey Everyone!

Today I was coaching one of the younger Junior British Team members, Carmel Moran (Youth C). She was just up for the weekend from Sunderland with her dad. He booked her in for a personal coaching session and I was assigned to her due to my experience with competitions. The session was an hour and a half and we got through quite a bit in that time if I do say so myself. We started of with a nice warm up, she did a few easy traverses, and boulder problems, a bit of stretching and then onto the routes.

First route was a nice 6a+ (grey) up the left-hand side of the main wall. She lead this route nicely and relaxed well into the height of the ratho walls. Next we moved onto something a bit trickier but still quite a bit from her limit, the white 6b up the main wall corner. This is one of my own creations and as everyone knows whose tried it, you must plan your clips well and understand how to route read. Despite a few shout downs to ask where to clip and a particularly reachy clip, Carmel despatched this route with such elegance worthy of labeling her a climbing ballet dancer :P

After that, we moved onto the new comp wall where she cam agonizingly close to on-sighting the white 6c up the middle. Someone of her age to be able to come that close to on-sighting something so steep at that level is truly inspirational, it was a pretty awesome attempt and I am still psyched to get stuck into some hard routes myself after watching her performance!

After that, we headed onto the newly set boulders and tried some of the new problems Buz, Lisandro, Geeks and I have been setting over the past couple of days (Patrick also made a contribution). After dispatching a good few V3 - V4's and discussing different hold types and competition techniques in route reading, we went back and attempted a purple 6c. Falling at only one move (Because it was too big) she showed a lot of resistance and battled the entire way. Our final route was the green 6c+, one i think is no pushover. She gave one hell of an attempt and fell very close to the top missing out on only a few clips because of a difficult undercut sloper move.

A final boulder and a couple more despatched problems later and it was time up. She had a great time climbing at the world famous EICA: Ratho and no doubt awed by the brilliance of their climbing coaches : P and I hope to be seeing her lots at upcoming competitions.

Look out for this one everyone!!!

ROBZ OUT