Last night was the 2nd round of the Sheffield bouldering league at “The Matrix” a bouldering wall at the Sheffield University. They never had that when I was there!

The set up was the same as the last round: 25 different problems of varying degrees of difficulty. 10 points for completing flashing it, 7 for completing it on your second attempt and 4 points for your third. If you don’t finish it, but get past a marked hold, you get 1 bonus point.

The Matrix is a nice little bouldering room. Mostly square in shape, with climbing surfaces on all sides, it was ~60% vertical ‘living rock’ style wall, with one big bulging boulder for some mean overhanging climbs and one wall which was a steep straight overhang.

I cleaned up on pretty much all of the vertical wall problems, flashing 7 of them and completing one on my second attempt getting me to 77 points. I then very quickly found myself unable to progress on any of the other climbs, most of which were either on the boulder or the straight overhang. This was rather frustrating, as I’d got 77 points in the last round and really wanted to beat that score.

Eventually, some grit and determination saw me get a bonus point on a climb in the corner of the boulder, but not finish it. I was very tempted to leave it at that. 78, verses 77, but decided to have one last attempt on the last uncompleted vertical climb, which was a tricky, stretchy traverse. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to complete it; (I somehow managed a foot swap on a tiny dent while on very poor hand holds!) but I did it on my 3rd attempt taking me to 82 points.

Yay!

I guess I’ll aim for 90 points next time. 🙂

Next up is the Foundry 2nd round of their bouldering league on Monday. I’ll cross my fingers….