It happened!

Well, I'm sitting here feeling pretty happy with myself. Today, out of the blue, I climbed the hardest route I've ever done on real rock, and achieved my long term goal of climbing a 7a! WHAT!

Now that number probably doesn't mean anything to most people, but to me it is a massive number. Relatively early on in my climbing career I got close indoors, but through a variety of reasons it never quite happened, and slowly over the years that number started to gain more weight and became extremely elusive. Especially over the last two years which have seen a lot of time off due to injury, I thought I'd never even climb regularly outside let alone that number. In my mind it started to become THE grade. I tried not to look at it that way, and still maintain climbing is not about grades, but secretly I knew that that was my goal. That was where I wanted to be.

Somehow, over the last year, I have managed to find a reliable group of friends who are as psyched to get out as I am, and it has snuck up on my and taken me by complete surprise. It took two attempts, the first I got totally pumped putting the draws in and had to have a rest. Tom, who I was climbing with, almost did the route but then had to have a rest at the top. It was now a race to get the send! By this time we were the only two climbing at the crag and a small group had formed to watch, it was go time! I've got to say I totally smashed it, I didn't just grunt my way up, all the techniques came out of the bag! You should have seen the smile on my face on the way down. So chuffed!

A great reminder to me that just because something feels totally out of reach, you can never be sure, things change, and if you keep going good things can happen :)