HARD - MOVES 2013 Wuppertal

We just had an amazing weekend at the hard-moves competition in Wuppertal. This is currently THE biggest thing happening for indoor climbing worldwide. More than 150 volunteers, shuttle busses, amazing boulders ,a 4 star hotelroom for each athlete!! free food and drinks, deepwater bouldering in Wuppertal swimmingpool, more than 4500 competitors....
This is just a short list of all the amazing things about this competition.

Thanks to City Lizard for creating this opportunity.

When i was sitting at the breakfast table in the morning i asked myself: "is this real?". Free hotel, free breakfast i felt like a soccer star.

We went to this competition with a very strong team: Gabi, Yannick, Jurgen, Robi, Bram, Benjamin, me, Nat, Liesbet and Magali.
Beforehand we expected to get close to finals with this team but unlike last year this time we had to do 35 boulders instead of 40 and instead of 200 climbers, this time there were 300 climbers.
With people like Jan Hojer, Juliana Wurm, Jonas Winter, Bernhard Fiedler, Robert Leistner, Christoph Gabrysch and many hungry young talents we soon found out that it would be a lot harder then we expected...
and there was the unfortunate fact that there were just too many climbers in that small gym.

Some quick maths can tell you that when 300 climbers have 35 problems to climb, this will create a queue of +- 10 people for 1 boulder and when it takes 2 minutes per attempt it will create a 20 minutes waiting time.

So you just had to be a flash climber....
As the competition went on, the remaining boulders got really crowded.
So if you didnt flash in the first 2 hours of climbing you would now be stuck with waiting times up to 30 minutes for one try...
This aspect of the format will need to be sorted by next edition.
I didnt let this ruin the fun tho and we truly enjoyed this boulder fest!

The Super Finals took place in the local swimmingpool....

Here the athletes got front row seats to view the show up close.

An awesome spectacular show of bouldering in a sold out swimmingpool. They even had a second location with live stream on videoscreen for the people that didnt get the chance to buy a ticket.



So we finished 15th of 29 gyms competing, with about 233 boulder climbed.
For reference the best gym climbed a total of 268 boulders.

Were already looking forward to next years edition and curious how they will solve the issues.