Winter motivation - a podcast and a book.

For anyone looking for something to listen to over the winter months, looking for some direction in their own climbing improvements, a nice place to start is with the writer of the intro book to climbing training, Eric Horst. He produces a podcast for Podclimber, you'll find it here (note: it's an iTunes link for all you non-iTunes users :)



Also, if anyone is looking for a book to peruse, Eric Horst's "Training for Climbing 2nd Edition"(Amazon link)* is a good place to start. There's a lot of books out there. Some are ridiculously technical (but perfect if that's what you're looking for), some are just lots of text with good ideas (again, good if you know what you're doing), but for all the comments against this book, it's an excellent resource to start out with. Basic movement skills, basic-to-intermediate fingerboarding information, basic stretching, a great introduction to goal planning, it has a some of everything. If you're interested in a read, it's worth checking out. I've slowly been collecting all books I've in my library also onto a page linking directly from Amazon - see here.

*this blog is obviously free, but I do get a small (tiny!) cut for sending you onto Amazon if you use the link above. You don't get charged anything extra, so there's no reason not to :) Think of it as a small donation towards all the wifi bills that have been racked up while writing posts in random parts of the world in the days when you had to pay for wifi!

New role

This is going to be a once-off as this is my personal writing, thoughts, opinion blog so not usually related to work. But since I've had a spike in traffic in relation to it, I thought it was worth mentioning.

As of the weekend, I'm officially the Talent Development Officer for Mountaineering Ireland. For anyone who knew her, I'm replacing Ang in many respects. While they aren't physically the biggest boots to fill (I jest here, and can say this as I know Ang so well) they are huge boots as regards the amount of work (both visible and behind the scenes) she did for climbing in Ireland in her role. Of course, she's gone off to other roles now where she's making another enormous input to the development of Irish climbing but that's her story to tell.

All I can say is that it's an exciting time in Ireland so I'm privileged to be involved and very psyched for getting stuck into supporting the scene through Mountaineering Ireland. I may have been traveling extensively in the past few years, but all my climbing was started and honed in Ireland - the photo above from a few weeks ago being the earliest known example I have (although if someone wants to make us all laugh, send me on an even older pic and I promise to post it :). I'm now full circle and looking forward to giving back to a sport that has given me so much over the years (and will continue to give me so much into the future)! So, on that note, if you've thoughts on climbing and the future direction of the scene in Ireland, make sure to contact me through all the various means (this blog you're reading, mobile (again, if you know it), my personal email (for those who know it), my work email, Facebook, Google+, Twitter - either of them, skype - neal.mcquaid, or even better face to face somewhere at a crag!**).

Now on that note, back to the usual waffle........ :)

**and in case the above communication list in ridiculous, in a previous life, I worked in IT and had a fascination with technology and mobile trends that still exists to this day!