National Bouldering Championships!

This weekend the best climbers from the whole country were attending the National Bouldering Championships in Blocs & Walls in Copenhagen. I was there to try to win the title and I felt really good just before the competition.

It has been 5 months since my last big competition. I knew that I had to get back in the game. So the qualification round was my "warmup" for this years competition. I had to do well in the qualifications to get one of the 6 prestigious spots in the finals. And I knew that if I got to the finals I would try as hard as possible to succeed.

In the qualifications I had to climb 5 boulder problems. I did very good on the first 3 problems. But when I got to the last two boulders, I did not choose the right beta and therefore I got no tops. I should have topped at least one of them. They were very straight forward, but I was stuck in the wrong sequence.

It is very good feedback which I have been thinking a lot about. I want to improve as a competition climber and this is clearly something I have to train more.

So - I made it to the finals and was super psyched to try hard. The 4 boulders looked super good. I saw that two of the boulders looked harder than anything else and that I had to climb well on those to win.

1. boulder:

Slab - The first boulder was the icebreaker. A nice start: feeling the body, the crowd, the situation.
Super easy moves, but with very high risk. I would say that it could be graded around 6A. So the boulder would be divided into 3 parts. First part was very balancy, second part; two transport moves: tricky-but-not-tricky, and the last part where you were standing nohands on the slab. One very slippery foothold kept me away from flashing the boulder.

2. boulder:

Vertical terrain with climbing on friction holds and the hardest move on the boulder being the campus swing to the bonus hold. I had so bad skin on right hand. It meant that I could not hold on when launching to the bonus hold. A few more attempts and the friction just got worse.. I really thought that I would top that boulder.

3. boulder:

The 3rd boulder was in the big roof. It was long and it was clearly meant to steal as much power as possible from us!
Once again I saw myself climbing the whole thing, but when it came down to holding the swing to the bonus hold and jumping to the next sloper, I was executing the moves too fast. I think I should have slowed down and focused on sticking the individual crux moves perfectly and not letting go with 5-10% left in my arms.

Another feedback which I will try to train..

4. boulder:

The final show-off boulder. The winner would be the one who would flash this beast!
This was a perfect final boulder - with a running start to a fairly good hold I was super confident that I could pull off a flash.
I was standing in front of the boulder knowing that it was possible to run from left to right, but that would require a very coordinated catch and result in a big, uncontrollable swing. Therefore I believed in running from the right side. I remember that the DJ was playing some very nice hiphop beats and it was perfect. I was in the zone.. Emptied my mind.. looked at the top one last time and started running..

I executed the moves perfectly and won the title:


Boulder DM 2014 #BJØRNENSOVERALDRIG from Lasse Arnel Iisager on Vimeo.

The routesetting team did a very impressive job pulling off this event. They had been setting for Youth A, Youth B, Juniors and Seniors in both male and female!

It was the biggest and coolest National Bouldering Championship ever. I would like to thank everybody there for the best atmosphere I have ever experienced in a competition! Lets hope next year will be even more crazy!

Now I will look forward and start preparing for international comps! Hopefully I will be able to find/raise enough money to be able to represent Denmark in the World Cup.. Stay tuned!

B.