This weekend was our 5th BWSC specific trip to Paklenica this year, where the only focus is to train for the competition, and it was far from ideal conditions yet again. We arrived late Friday night, and as usual jumped straight out of the car for an easy night jog from the apartment to the National park parking and back (around 5 km).

Saturday started sunny, but quickly became a battle with rain. The rain first caught us in warm up, so we hided in a nearby overhang with sport-climbing routes. Jurica took the window of opportunity for some normal climbing, and sent his project from last summer – Los compadres de puta madre (8a/a+) while it was still dry.

The rain stopped, and after only 45 minutes our route was completely dry. We quickly geared up and went to training. Saturday was the last planned “work” day in the route – all the rest of days in the route were planned to be “speed” days.

Racking up

Work day means you go through the route and practice the moves, sections or pitches multiple times. In a typical work day, you would do every pitch 2-4 times, switching between improving your sequence with new hand-feet combinations, memorizing and repeating old moves, and occasionally testing your single pitch speed with a timed push.

In a speed day, the task is a lot simpler, but also harder. You rack up, press start on the stopwatch, make a run for it and press stop when the second climber touches the 5th anchor. We noticed that it takes us more time to rack up than to get on top of route!

The plan was to finalize and polish all the small details we had left in the route on Saturday, before making speed attempts on Sunday. We were making great progress, when on 3rd anchor it started to rain for real. In less than a minute, we were completely wet – Jurica was even having a small waterfall drop exactly on him while he was belaying me, as I was slowly climbing a normally very easy pitch 4 through the rain, with the goal to reach the rappel line.

Sunday was thankfully sunny, so we finished our work left in pitches 4 and 5 in the morning, and did one speed go in the evening. We decided not to reveal our time from this weekend, but don’t worry – we are fast!

Some image details:

Racking up

Time, weight, heartbeats – this year we mesure everything!

We were drying all the gear and my secret route notes, where I noted all improvements I wanted to do this weekend

Hey, don’t sneak-peak!

Jurica is an excellent cook – and probaby more aware about good sport nutrition than some pro athletes

Jurica did not fall drunk in the river – he is healing an inflamed elbow in the cold water!