Rather a while since my last blog…… Mainly because I’ve been doing so much. I think in the last six weeks I’ve nearly made up for the lack of activity in the six months before that. I have to keep reminding myself how rapid my recovery has been and not set myself unreasonable standards! Despite this I’ve been training hard and I’m really starting to feel good after doing so. I can feel my strength coming back and I’m really motivated to get out there again and raise a whole load of money for the MSS.

I actually entered a bouldering competition at the Climbing Academy in Bristol. What started as something fun engaged my competitive streak and I had to go back for the second round. I’m currently placed 14th out of 92 and with another two rounds to go I’m determined to finish in the top ten and I’m really going to push for top five. Travelling back and forth from Bristol has also been amazing. I’ve had more luck hitch hiking lately than ever before. I’ve met some incredible people to whom I’m extremely grateful and made some great new friends.  
I’m just about to head to K2. The bouldering wall and new routes there are exactly what I need at the moment and I’m nearly fit enough to start my “two days on, one day off” routine. Tom’s been really pushing me up some harder routes lately but he’s now talking about a trip to the Peak. I’ve never liked grit much and in the cold I become unpleasantly aware of the metal holding me together. But I’ve decided that I need to start scoring E points again, so I’ve bought some gloves and decided to man up.  
In other news my hair STILL hasn’t been cut (those responsible know who they are), lack of cigarettes has left me jittery, irritable and my lungs feeling big and empty and I’ve actually written a “TO DO” list…

I’m really aching after two sessions in two days. This bothers me slightly as I used to quite like climbing six days out of seven. But baby steps….. I’m finding I have to stop long before I want to and really control my urges to climb something really hard. 
 So Wednesday saw me at Craggy with Tom and Lisa and for the first time ever showed the world a tanned Scotsman. I also earned myself some smug time by arriving a good twenty minutes before the Scots. We had each set out at the same time with me hitching and them driving. Craggy has remained the same with over-zealous staff, dirty holds and grading that makes one feel hopelessly inadequate, like a panda in a survival contest. And they still haven’t changed their ropes. 
 Yet strangely I still enjoyed myself. Having realised that I was never going to live up to Craggy’s unreasonable standards I resigned myself to having fun. Then was struck by the realisation that this is what climbing always should be. Fun! For reasons unknown to me this is forgotten with alarming frequency. The reason for climbing in the first place and the reason we carry on despite the risks and injuries is that we enjoy it. So although I still have lofty ambitions about certain bits of rock I have resolved not to get bogged down in the sticky mire of grades or the advantages of tying a bowline clockwise and just enjoy being off the horizontal. 
 Tom is climbing irritatingly well at the moment and apart from a couple of whiny complaints about his “tendonitis”, was a laugh to climb with. He seems to register that I exist now that I can climb again. Lisa managed to beat me up the lead wall, an experience I don’t think she’ll ever let me forget.  
 A number of people (most lacking Y chromosomes) have asked to come climbing with me.  To which I always reply that they would always be welcome to come climbing with me. I become suspicious when they ask the same question, get the same answer but never seem to get anywhere near a harness. But my faith in (wo)mankind has been restored. Briony not only came climbing but actually hitched to K2 with me. Strangely I seem to get picked up quicker when I’m with someone blonde and pretty. 
 Briony did however, neglect to tell me about her fear of heights until we were basically at the wall. This didn’t really sink in right away as I have absolutely no comprehension of vertigo. But she gets awarded serious points for effort as she persisted several times despite shaking knees. I’m also impressed by the amount of natural technique she displayed up until about 4m off the floor. Although next time I’m just going to blindfold her rather than let her join the ranks of that most evil practise: bouldering.  I had a good laugh on some of K2’s new walls caught up with some old friends and I discovered that the carpal tunnel release on my left hand means I don’t get pumped. 
 In other news my hair is still two foot in length and the debate for its demise rages, acrophobia is an innate fear unrelated to experience and falling energy drink prices have made me slightly blurry around the edges.

Rehab is about as fun as the junkies make it out to be. But the thrills of physio are all part of the recovery process I suppose.  My thumb now works after the tendon transfer which is a huge relief, although my brain still has some trouble distinguishing it from my index finger. Another relief is that, against all probability, my scaphoid is healing well with no avascular necrosis (death from lack of blood). So I’ve blown the dust off my harness and been climbing a couple of times on some painfully easy stuff. It’s made me realise how unfit I’ve got from moping around for four months. But training is progressing slowly but surely. I’m starting to feel my strength return and apart from the odd attack of burning pins and needles things are moving forward.  
 I was really sad not to be able to accompany Tim on the John O Groat’s to Land’s End cycle, which was a great success. Although it was probably just as well because I’m not a very good cyclist and I certainly do not envy Tim and Hooper’s lycra induced tan lines.  Check out the photos and such at onemilecloser.com.  
 In other news I had an awesome amount of fun at Hannah and Eve’s party, which I was able to justify in terms of training by the amount of time I spent in the sea the day after. I’d forgotten how much I love swimming and it’s definitely good exercise. I did discover however, that if I’m not paying attention I swim in a big anti clockwise circle…. Also watched the birdman contest which made me remember how much I want to get a wingsuit. A lot of people have agreed that taking a parachute climbing is a good idea, but I think they may have misunderstood the principles of BASE jumping.  
 Archie tells me he’s been bouldering on the side of the Captain which made me laugh (and only slightly jealous) but also made me aware of my lack of climbing partner. It’s not a problem at the moment where I’m only capable of climbing once or twice a week but thinking ahead it’s rather worrying. Volunteers welcome.  I’m trying to make the most of this nice weather but I can’t help but feel that it’s wasted by not climbing.  
 Oh, and I’m still thinking about cutting off my hair. Voice your opinions.

So after what will hopefully be my final operation I’m back in plaster again….. I had an enjoyable few weeks with a removable splint on my left arm which gave me so much more freedom and allowed me to have showers without being wrapped in plastic. But my hand wasn’t working due to my severed EPL (really important thumb tendon) and the operation I have just had, was to correct this. Unfortunately repairing a tendon isn’t as simple as just stapling the ends together. So my surgeons disconnected one of my index finger tendons and reattached it to my thumb. There are two tendons that extend the index finger so I should have relatively normal function after I’ve relearned which digit I’m moving!  
Before this op I was starting to remember what it felt like to be healthy. I was running lots and even went climbing a couple of times (don’t tell my doctors). It made me realise that although I’ve lost basically all my strength I still have some technique to fall back on. So returning to form may not be as difficult and as painful as I had initially imagined. But I’m definitely not expecting it to be easy. It’s just incredibly frustrating to have begun to focus on recovery only to go back into plaster.  
The John O’Groats to Lands memorial cycle is coming up soon and I had initially planned to break my leg muscles (I’m not much of a cyclist) but now I’ve been sliced open again I don’t think I’ll be able to stay on the bike. So hopefully I’ll be along as some kind of support team. I was thinking about riding a motorbike with a camera, Tour de France style, but as I can’t change gear…..  
In other news I’m seriously considering getting my hair cut. For those of you that don’t know I’m rather attached to my flowing locks and so this may be another way for me to raise money for MS research while I can’t climb. Interestingly this comes at a time when the number of people diagnosed with the condition has risen to over a hundred thousand in the UK alone.    

Just got back from the fracture clinic yet again. I'm starting to become a familiar face, which is a bit odd. Obviously it's nice to know people but I find myself hoping I won't have to see them again... At least today it was only a brief visit to remove my right cast. So I had a thoroughly enjoyable shower and scrubbed off six weeks worth of dead skin. The atrophy in my forearm is quite horrific given that I've always been endeared with crimpy holds. It's also incredibly sensitive without the plastic exoskeleton I've got used to: everything has gone back to being hard work without the support of the cast. But at least I can work at getting my strength back in my right arm now. This is made all the more essential by the total lack of progress in my left hand.
I know healing bones takes time: I'm up to 10 I think (196 to go) but my left hand doesn't seem to be doing much other than hurt. I haven't been this long without climbing since I started. I've been running lots but it's painfully dull compared to being up a wall. I've been trying to focus on other things but climbing is such a huge portion of my life that I find myself just killing time. I've been thinking of things I normally do when I'm not climbing. These normally consist of activities like kiteboarding, playing guitar or video games. All easy and painless when you have one hand that hasn't been used in 6 weeks and another that doesn't work at all...
So, brace yourselves (I mean it), I've been trying to get a job. My plan is to make some money while I'm still broken to put me in good stead for Yosemite next year and give me something to do while I'm healing. Of course I've had my head in the clouds and had forgotten about the economic state of this country. Luckily I have a pet rock I think I can make bleed.
Now where did I put my powerball?

It makes me laugh to read Tim's blog about "injury". Not because I'm cruel but because I'm beginning to lose the will to live. I haven't gone this long without climbing since I started and with the weather so nice it's more than a little frustrating. Hit the floor at 25mph then tell me about injury. I spent another thrilling day at the fracture clinic yesterday. I had my K wires removed, which is possibly the single strangest sensation possible to experience. It didn't hurt (although I'm told it normally does) but I believe Tim would describe it as feeling rather "geeurgh". There aren't any nerves in bones, only round the outside, but you can still feel it coming out. Imagine a cork coming out of the bottle, but with a radius instead of a bottle and a long steel pin instead of a cork. Twist, creak, pop!
I also had to have a CT scan of my left wrist as it looked a bit dodgy on the x-rays. Luckily it seems to have been a false alarm and strangely the shrapnel that formerly made up my triquetrum is reassembling itself quite nicely. There's still a big gap in my scaphoid but this is normal as it's a slow healing bone. So I've got my right in plaster for another week and my left for at least another month and the need for another operation hasn't been entirely ruled out.
Having had rather too much time of my wrists I've been doing a lot of reading recently and I realised it could be worse. For example Joe Simpson who crawled for 6 miles down a mountain with a shattered leg over three days after being cut loose by his partner and left for dead in a crevasse. Or Aron Ralston who was forced to amputate his own right arm after having it crushed by a boulder and lying trapped in a canyon for five days. Both these men still climb.
In other news I had a call from Delhi that cheered me up immensely. Nadeem has been having an awesome time from the sound of things and he even got my thought message to bring back a piece of Everest for me. I think I'm going to have to stick to some slightly less vertical slopes for the moment and so mountains are starting to appeal more and more. It's looking like I may well not be fit enough to get round Europe so I plan to use the time to make some money and put myself in a good position for next year and my road to the Nose.

Yesterday, I bought a new pair of running shoes (Brooks Adrenaline GTS), to try to remedy the problem of the ankle. A short walk to Sainsbury's (after this morning's 8 mile run) showed me that the ankle is actually getting worse. So I have the aged old problem (with regard to the triathlon on the 14th of this month), because I can either rest my ankle, but not be at peak performance in 2 weeks time, or I can carry on training at the risk of not being able to compete at all. For now, I think I'm going to carry on doing the run, but slower and less often and go swimming more often.

Today started off, much like every other day this week, with a depressingly long session of revision, trying to get my head around "Pure Maths" (which I'm pretty sure doesn't make many people smile). Unfortunately, the exam this afternoon went a little worse than expected; I rearranged the equation of a circle to get it in term of "y," but forgot to square root the right hand side (school boy error)! Still, when the sun is shining, it is difficult feel that bad. So I put on my running shoes and headed off towards Chorlton on my usual route.
When you are cycling and you hear the sound of your gears crunching, it does make you cringe, but when you are running and you hear the same sound, you really know something is wrong! Having run nearly 100m, I stopped to realise that the sound actually was coming from my ankle. Every step I took on the way back, it was making an equally grim sound.
I'm now sitting here, writing the blog, and I the plan is to go and buy the shoes I was going get about a week ago. I hope the guys in the shop will know what to do.

It's been over a month now since my fall and I'm really starting to feel the effects.. Those who have ever had to wear casts will know exactly what I'm on about when I talk about the ITCHING! Normally a paintbrush makes a very good scratcher, but my K wires itch all the way through my right arm (it feels as strange as it sounds) and the incisions in my left are still a bit sore for scratching. Although far worse than the itching is the atrophy in my forearms. Having spent the last five years building my flexors and extensors to the point where I can hang from two fingers, it's not nice to watch my arms reduce to twigs in a month...
On the upside I've been getting discount in shops and plenty of time for reading which is a luxury I'm normally too tired to enjoy. I've also been having fun coming up with new answers for the question I get asked thirty times a day: "How did you break both arms?!"
"Really kinky sex" goes down well. "Saving a baby from a car crash" was even better as the girl believed me, to the point where I was giving her the whole story but Tom gave it away when he couldn't contain his laughter. One guy didn't ask me how I broke my arms, instead he said:
"Are your arms broken?"
I looked at him in disbelief then looked at my casts, "These? No they're just for show...." This might seem facetious but it's very depressing having to respond thirty times a day "I fell off a rock".
Another upside to an injury is pushing the reset button on my fitness. I was chatting to Hans Florine (Tim said something about Lance Armstrong too but I thought he was an astronaut) about this and he agreed that it's possible to use an injury to your advantage. This is particular relevant to me as my build and style of fitness, most of all climbing, lends itself towards serious endurance. I thought this is what I needed for my ultimate goal of the Nose until Vaughan pointed out that it's no good being able to climb 7a for twelve hours if you can't climb 8a+ when you get to Changing Corners. So I need to work to get stronger and rely on my natural endurance.
This has provided me some relief since I bought myself some Salamon Wings and have been pegging it round Petersfield heath. Normally I run for distance and don't worry about time but now I've been going on much shorter and much faster runs. I like running against a clock and it's great fun to run really fast and know that you can push it really hard without having to plod for hours afterwards. I've managed to knock my 5km time down to just under 20 minutes which I think is fairly respectable as I've spent the last month sitting around regrowing my bones. I've also been trying to follow another piece of Vaughan's advice and run faster if I get stitch. This really hurts.
Obviously the thing I want to be doing most of all is climbing and that's really starting to take its toll on my mental wellbeing. Although I realised I'm going to enjoy having a whole new set of challenges and I can get psyched on some easy climbs!

Last minute cramming was the main feature of this morning, having woken up not understanding the Binomial, Poisson or Normal distributions, but by 2PM it was all slightly clearer in my mind.
James Hooper and I have decided that we will be doing the Mid Sussex triathlon in Burgess Hill on the June 14th, so I thought it was time to shed some puppy fat and go for a few lengths in the pool. Unfortunately, the pool was packed with little kids all trying to drown each other, which is very fun, but doesn't really help if you're try to train. One of the main principles of training is don't give up, so I went for an 8 mile run, which was distinctly easier than ever before (a sure sign that training paying off, despite the stubborn fat around my midriff)! I am going to have a big bowl of pasta now and then the plan is to go do some lengths in the pool, hopefully without hundreds of people about (don't worry though, it takes 30 minutes to get to the aquatic centre, which is plenty of time to digest an old wives' tale).

As I am writing this, the site is currently experiencing a bit of "down time" due to corrections that UK2 are making to the servers. However, this should be the last time we have any interruptions, because UK2 have very kindly given us a free upgrade (to have control of a lot of very geeky-website-computery settings).
Having whinged yesterday about how bored I was just revising probability (only to come to the conclusion that I am probably going to fail my exams), my flatmate Sarah knocked on my door and asked if I wanted some exercise (she meant running...). So she went on a bike while I ran along behind, doing my new found favourite 8-mile route down to Chorlton lake and back. Unfortunately though, around 6 miles in she selfishly decided to get a puncture, so we walked back together.
Despite not doing the full route, I can definitely feel myself getting fitter, which is only making me more motivated to train.