Summer Sweatfest....the overnight madness...

So last Thursday, True North hosted our annual stop of the Summer Sweatfest Series. These comps are a friendly format, scramble session events that are open to all to compete and are not sanctioned by the CEC. These are local comps for the GTA and are all held on Thursday night with the exception of the finale, which will be a two day event at Climber's Rock in Burlington. 

For our event, my team and I decided we were going to combine the event with our regular schedule of stripping the entire boulder and refreshing it with new blocs. The other, notable achievement of this comp was that there was almost no interruption to our regular bouldering business. Members were still welcome on Wednesday night, the day before the comp, and there were still many boulder problems for them to climb on. And although this was a brilliant scheduling move, I know I know I'm so modest, it also involved a LOT of work. Most of the Route Setters I work with were instructing a very large group during the day, a few helped with washing holds, but we all started work at 9:45 on Wed morning, worked through most of the day till close, then, finally began stripping the bouldering wall at around 11pm. Once the wall was stripped, we started setting with the goal of either getting all the problems up that night (we had decided on 30 blocs for the comp) or falling asleep amongst the truly epic pile of clean holds. 

The guys and girl, doing what they do best...probably around 1:30am...?

As it has been every comp, and most of the time in our regular commercial setting, I was truly amazed by my teams creativity and determination to put up aesthetic, inventive and challenging blocs. Everything from bloc #1 to #31 (yea we ended up with an extra by accident, what can I say, we were a little over zealous) was something new and something different. Everything from tensiony compression, balancy slopers, thugged out pullin, out-of-the-box starts to dynos and yes, even a world cup style slab problem using just volumes.

Fellow Evolv team member Mark Smith getting warmed up for business

In prep for the comp, one of my route setters Jonny Briggs, who I've worked with for over 4 yrs now, built some very sick features to help do up our wall all pretty like. Most of the feature that we made were small, maybe about 1 1/2 ft by 1 1/2 ft but we tried to stay away from the typical triangle design, opting (and learning to be honest, the truth of this is that the triangles are easy, and we were using tools that we didn't have access to before in previous construction projects) for instead pentagons, square pyramids and a really rad super man logo. 

Ah Climb It....This feature was painted this way to accompany all the new Climb It holds we got to use for this comp.

All in all, I was really impressed with, despite the hard ours, my Route Setters put up amazing problems that were creative, inventive, sequence dependent, aesthetic and most importantly they separated the field. Big props to Shaun, Jonny, Lina, Andreas and Max for all the hard work. I hope everyone who came to the comp like it, and I'm sorry there weren't more picture, as I said, I'm still learning how to use my camera and to be honest, I took about 200 pics at the comp, but only a few turned out. Peace all!

Unknown Competitor on the delicate and funky slab bloc

My friend Keith Mackay making the best go bloc #30 saw. Although it didn't get sent, it wasn't for lack of effort by Keith...man this boy can scream when he's giving it!