pushing standards since 2000: South East Asia Climbing Federation(SEACF) Circuit

The Advanced Lead wall - MASSIVE!

Headed up to KL over the last weekend of May for the SEACF Circuit(Msia Leg) which was held in conjunction with the IFSC route setting and judging course. It has been quite a while since i got into a harness as i was pretty busy with work at Kinetics and coaching my students. As such, the main goal of the trip was not to malu myself and catch up on sleep!

We traveled up as a huge Singapore contingent consisting of about 30+ climbers and had a good time on the routes which were set by Kim Dong Hyun and his team of Route Setters. Big Ups to them for the amazing work they did there.

The walls at Putrajaya Challange Park are seriously massive and anyone can get a good workout there. The only problem that most people will encounter is the heat and humidity as the place is non air-conditioned.

There was a total of 3 rounds for the Lead category - qualifying, semi and finals. Pretty awesome considering the fact that usually the Lead Competitions in Singapore consists of 2 rounds.

Although the qualifying route was pretty easy(7b), i got pumped and almost did not make it to the final hold. The semi finals was to be held on the same day itself and i nearly got DQ for not clipping. Had to down-climbed the route, and almost fell off as it sapped a lot of energy. To my surprise, i qualified for the finals in first placing due to my timing - which should not be the case as Leading is not about speed! (anyway a couple of Indonesians fell off at the same hold as i did)

The 'beginner' Lead wall

The final round was held the next day. Both Andrew and Hazlee who also qualified for the finals climbed before me. I managed to squeeze out a first placing by making 1 additional move so all in all everything didn't turn out as bad as i had expected.

I have come to realise that i do not perform well under stress and it is at my most relaxed state that i can think rationally and climb to the best of my capabilities. Not expecting a good performance probably helped a great deal as i had minimal climbing done prior to the competition. I only had two 1-hour session of climbing whereby i repeated all the Yellow taped routes(with minimal rest time between each route) at Kinetics Climbing. That was all the climbing i did for 2 weeks prior to this event. Plus knowing that the routes were long and i lacked endurance forced me to climb faster than usual to make up for the pathetic endurance i had. Will be uploading the rest of the videos soon. Enjoy!