Alpine start? Nope. V3 project.

I’m trying to be disciplined in my climbing and get an alpine start every morning.  I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately, though.  I go to bed at around 1930 hrs every night and wake up at 0217 hrs or so (almost exactly that time, though) and can’t go back to sleep!  By the time I should be getting ready to get my alpine start at the climbing gym and leave at 0515 hrs, I’m fried and tired, cross-eyed trying to stay awake!  I think my medication is affecting this process heavily.  This pattern started when I started this new medication.  I don’t know how to avoid it, though.  I tried staying up later last night.  I didn’t go to bed until almost 2100 hrs.  That’s almost two hours past when I usually go to bed, and it didn’t make any difference.  I gave up on the alpine start this morning because I have an appointment to to go mid-morning and didn’t want to oversleep or be too tired to pay attention to what goes on with that, so I went back to bed at 0400 hrs and slept until 0630 hrs.  I definitely didn’t get my alpine start!!!

So, that’s just the way things are going to be, I guess.  Some mornings I’ll be able to do it and some mornings won’t work out exactly as planned.  I’ll have to experiment with some naps during the day or something, maybe.  I’m not functional for anything except climbing between the hours of 0420 hrs and 0900 hrs, anyway, due to the medication and when everything kicks in.  It’s interesting.  I use climbing to get myself right-side-up in the morning, it seems!  I’m not right-side-up this morning.  I would’ve gone climbing when I woke up at 0630-ish, but I felt really sick.  I didn’t take my meds on time this morning.  I have to be careful about that.  My body lets me know in a hurry if I don’t keep a fairly good routine with my medications, which is interesting because some of these medications are supposed to have fairly long half-lives.  My body knows when it’s supposed to have the next dose, though.  Boy, does it ever!  My mom brought me some fresh yellow raspberries from her garden this morning, and those calmed my stomach, so I feel better now.  It’s 0802 hrs right now.  For the moment, you know…

My next project at the climbing gym is going to be a purple V3 (no, I’ve never sent a V3) that is a tall-person crack problem on the main bouldering wall.  It’s going to be a project.  I really haven’t had many projects.  I’ve had problems that I’ve known I can eventually redpoint and worked on, but not an actual project, where the outcome is unknown and the grade is above anything I’ve sent before.  V3 isn’t something I ever even try, normally, because I send the occasional V2, and that’s the most difficult I’ve managed so far.  This V3, though, looks doable if I just figure out where to foot jam and how to shift my body weight to keep my balance up to the top of the wall with some arm techniques that are new to me.  I’ve never crack-climbed, officially.  I used to practice crack climbing in the naturals of the old bouldering gym walls, but that’s the extent of it.  This problem is going to involve some potential arm jams because of the width of the “crack” and my non-tall-ness.  I believe I can get the send, though.  I really do.  We’re going to find out, because I’m going to try it!!!  And I’m going to keep trying it until I either get the redpoint, or they take it down!!!