Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Tour de Bloc coming to True North Climbing!

The Tour de Bloc will be making a stop at True North Climbing this coming season! This is the only national competition series in Canada, and has grown from 8 regional comps in Ontario and Quebec in 2003 to this season's 21 events in 7 provinces.

The new Season Se7en schedule (and no, that's not a typo!) is hot off the press, and has us scheduled on March 27th as the last of the Local comps for the Central (Ontario/Quebec) region. That will be followed by the Regionals at Centre d'escalade Délire in Quebec City on April 10th, and the 2010 MEC Canadian Bouldering Championships at Joe Rockhead's here in Toronto.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Tour de Bloc, these are fantastic events, both to participate in and to watch. Entry is open to anyone, regardless of level of experience. I have "competed" in 5 previous Tour de Bloc comps, in the Recreational category. Each time I show up, complete as many problems as I can, have a lot of fun, and don't care that I rank near the bottom of the pile!

These comps start with open climbing, during which climbers have a few hours to complete as many problems as they can. There are typically 60 bouldering problems spread throughout the gym, in roughly increasing difficulty, with more points awarded for the harder problems. Your final score is the sum of your best 8 problems.

The better climbers compete in the Experienced or Open categories, and the top few finishers in the Open category advance to the finals. The finalists are sequestered in an isolation area while the 4 final problems are set on the walls. Then they are brought out, one at a time, and given 5 minutes to work on each problem. The competitors are streamed through the final problems one after the other, with a 5 minute rest between problems, so that at times there will be 4 climbers at once to watch. Chief Routesetter Jody Miall and his team seem to always find the sweet spot in setting problems just hard enough to separate the top competitors: hard enough they can't all flash them all, but just possible for some of them to succeed. It is always an amazing show. You can get a taste of it from this video clip from the 2009 Men's finals.

Check out the Tour de Bloc site for more information and the complete schedule. I am very pleased and honoured to work with Tour Director Luigi Montilla to bring this first-class event to our facility to help kick things off soon after we open!




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