{"id":831,"date":"2009-07-30T23:31:30","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T22:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/?p=831"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:52:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T12:52:04","slug":"upside-down-off-diagonal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/upside-down-off-diagonal.html","title":{"rendered":"Upside-down off Diagonal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight I was climbing with Al Halewood on Scimitar Buttress at Polldubh, where we did Nutcracker Chimney (steeply awkward HS 4b, and Al&#8217;s lead because I&#8217;d done it before&#8230; in 1990!) and Diagonal Crack (simply steep VS 4c, and my lead).<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Now, Al&#8217;s already got a <a href=\"http:\/\/alanhalewood.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/evening-cragging.html\">very prompt report with some photos<\/a> up on his blog, but what he doesn&#8217;t tell you is that I fell off Diagonal. And quite spectacularly after building myself a nice little nest of gear at the crux (so did I really call down &#8216;sorry about the gearfest&#8217;?), latching the last big hold of the last real move above that, finding that my hand just didn&#8217;t want to stay where I&#8217;d put it, catching a leg in the ropes and being unceremoniously flipped to take the first upside-down fall of my life (beautifully fielded by Al)! After which I got straight back on it and finished it somewhat more stylishly in the full knowledge that the move I fell from wasn&#8217;t even that hard&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So perhaps I might add that I&#8217;ve been having a bit of finger\/hand trouble recently (RSI, arthritis, whatever, I don&#8217;t know) and consequently finding my grip suspect from time to time, but I&#8217;m also aware that I&#8217;ve caught the rope below me round a leg before and need to watch that in future. On the plus side, while it&#8217;s naturally deflating to take the fall at a grade that&#8217;s technically quite straightforward, it&#8217;s almost liberating (when I hate falling at all at all) to know that I can take a fall like that onto good gear from steep routes without getting hurt when feeling better about that might (strangely enough) help me to stay on next time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight I was climbing with Al Halewood on Scimitar Buttress at Polldubh, where we did Nutcracker Chimney (steeply awkward HS 4b, and Al&#8217;s lead because I&#8217;d done it before&#8230; in 1990!) and Diagonal Crack (simply steep VS 4c, and my lead).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climbing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12008,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/12008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}