World Championship Recap

Hi! So the World Championships in Seoul have come to an end. I enjoyed the city, but I talk more about that in a different post. These next few posts are about the competition itself. It’s broken up into parts, and of course I did things backwards and started with finals before talking about qualifications. Whoops! There will also be a part about how

Overall, the competiton was great! I really liked the routes, and it was fun to watch everyone give it their all on the wall.

Before I talk about the routes, let’s talk about the format. A typical IFSC World Cup will have one day for a qualification round and one day for a finals round. All of the categories compete on the same day for both. Finals is usually the day right after the qualifications round. For this World Championship, however, the qualifications and finals rounds happened on separate days. Some categories went on day 1, and the others went on day 2. In addition, there were a few days in between the rounds where we all got to do our own thing. Usually the paraclimbing competitions are before or after the able-bodied comps, or not close time-wise at all. For the World Championships, the paraclimbing and able-bodied events happened simultaneously. In fact, the paraclimbing competition happened right in the middle of the able-bodied comp!

The rounds being separate and then finals not being directly after qualifications is a big difference. When I go to competitions, I’m used to there being a break period between when I get to the city where the comp is being held and the start of the competitions. Once the competition begins I’m used to giving it my all at qualies, and then getting ready for finals the next day. I like a quick in-and-out competition schedule because I don’t have to get into competition mode twice. I don’t have to worry about finding things to do that won’t tire me out too much in between qualifications and finals.

Because the World Championships were spread out the way they were, I had a harder time maintaining my readyness for the competition. In between qualifications and finals I ended up going on a hike that I thought wouldn’t be too bad. I had a day between that and finals to rest so I figured it’d be okay. Welp, I was wrong. The hike wasn’t all that bad, but it was pretty long. I inadvertently tired my legs out a little too much. Unfortunately, the rest day wasn’t enough for them. By the time I had to climb for finals, my legs were way stiffer than I’m used to. Walking was a challenge. Nothing I did during the warm-up helped my predicament. In the actual finals round I ended up slipping off a hold that I definetly could’ve moved off of if I wasn’t busy fighting my legs the whole time. I still ended up winning, but that was because I spent a long time building up my arms as a just-in-case while training.

That said, I’m not being entirely fair. Qualifications and finals being spread apart wasn’t the only reason I had a harder time in finals. The hike we went on in between the two rounds wasn’t the only thing that threw off my climbing. This competition was held outside. That’s pretty normal for the international competitions. The problem with it, though, is that it was pouring rain on our qualifications day. I usually bring my crutches to avoid walking around too much and overusing my legs before the qualification routes, but this time I couldn’t use them. I don’t really walk with the crutches. I do this hop and swing thing that uses more of my arms than my legs. This tires out my shoulders, but they recover faster than my legs would if I were walking around all day. I don’t use the crutches in the rain because I worry about them sliding out from under me as I hop around. This thought was heightened by the fact that if that happened in a competition, I could get hurt and not be able to climb at my best.

So I’d spent the entire qualifications day walking around, which tired out my legs before those climbs. That wasn’t as big of a deal because I started the day off fresh. I was able to control the legs enough to get myself to finals in first place. All that said, you’d think I’d take the next day to just sit and relax as I watched qualifications the next day. That’s not what happened. I instead spent the qualifications round the next day walking around to chat with friends about their routes. I did use the crutches a lot of the time, but I also walked more than I should’ve. Those two days of moving around, plus the hike that we did two days later, really tired out my legs. On top of all that, we did a ton of standing just before the finals round as we waited to be presented and allowed to go view the routes.

But Melissa, you said earlier that you had to fight your legs as you climbed up the finals route. What does that mean? Why did you have to fight them?

Great question! To explain that, I have to explain my disability a little bit.

So I have spasitic diplegia Cerebral Palsy. For a more in-depth explanation of what that is check out my Cerebral Palsy post. Anyway, I think of Cerebral Palsy as being a developmental disability that causes a disconnect between the command center in the brain and some parts of the body. In other words, it makes it so that affected limbs take longer to respond to ques that the brain is giving them that make them move. For example, most people don’t have to think too much about walking. It just happens. In my case though, the commands that the brain sends to my legs takes longer to get there, which makes it so that my movements take longer. The problem is that my upper body gets the signal that I’m moving and moves in the direction I’m trying to go in. This throws off my balance and causes me to manually help the upper body correct the balance issue in order to not fall over. If and when the I can’t do this in time, or the balance is thrown off too much, I will fall over. That’s part of why I use a cane.

The disconnect also means that there some muscle groups I either can’t control at all, or I have a very hard time getting to work. My hamstrings are an example of this. I can’t engage them well enough to pull the leg up behind me when I’m walking, or extend them forward as I take a step. My body compensates for this by using my quad muscles to lift the leg off the ground. When those muscles get too tired, the control I have over them diminishes too, which leads to me dragging my feet.

The spastic diplegia is the stiffness and spasms that typically come along with Cerebral Palsy. My lower body is affected, which means that everything from the lower core down experiences some gorm of stiffness, spasms, or lack of control. This causes the already slow movement to take even longer to happen. It also causes me to have a much smaller range of motion than the average person.

Okay so that explanation was longer than I meant for it to be. Sorry!

But yes, the circumstances of the competition itself, plus the standing on the day of, caused my legs to stiffen to the point where I had a really hard time controlling them. I had to manually tell them to move, and I had to wait for them to respond. The climb was fun, but fighting my body is just annoying, and in the end it becomes pretty painful.

Okay so that was finals. What about the qualification round?

Qualifications were fun! I managed to finally get to the headwall on the first route (the part of the wall just out of the overhang), which for me is a new record. I’ve come close to topping routes before, but never on a wall like the one at this competition. This wall has 3 main sections: there’s the vertical part at the beginning, the overhang in the middle, and the vertical wall after the overhang.

The vertical part at the beginning doesn’t give me any trouble usually. This section usually has good holds and straightforward movement, so it’s not that bad. The overhang, on the other hand, is the hardest part of that wall.

But Melissa, don’t you usually like overhangs?

Well, yes, sometimes. The thing about overhangs is that they demand a certain level of core and leg control to do them. As I mentioned in my long explanation earlier, my lower core and legs will sometimes just not work the way I want them to. They had a hard time in finals due to the reasons stated above, but they also had a hard time during qualifications. We had travelled for almost an entire day to get to the competition, and then we only had a day and a half to recover from the long flight and the fatigue from the long travel time. On top of all that, travelling long distances is another thing that causes pretty bad leg stiffness and spasms. It’s hard to stretch and move around on long flights, and then having to figure out the city after all that right afterwards is also pretty bad. All of that made it really hard to loosen up in time for the competition.

That said, I’ve been working on being able to climb through that. That’s why I was able to do so well in finals, and it’s also why I got so high on the first route. I learned how to campus with more momentum so I’m not wasting energy and tiring out my core. I also learned how to get my legs to swing back on and catch the holds the first time so I’m not hanging too long on my hands and getting overpumped. I spent a lot of time training my grip to get strong enough that a hanging on literally just a single arm is more of a rest than fighting to get my legs on. I added a lot of helpful skills to my climbing toolbox which makes it easier to climb on those days where my legs don’t want to cooperate.

Anyway, all that to say that the World Championship went pretty well. It’s always nice to win, but I came back with more than just a medal. I came back with new training ideas, useful data about how my body performs under non ideal circumstances, and confirmation that the training I’d been doing up until that point was yielding good results. There’s still one more competition before the season is officially over, and I’m looking forward to ending the season off strong. After that there’s a rest period, and then training begins again.

Happy Climbing y’all!