Regarding my climbing, this year so far has been completely different than the 7 or 8 years before.

Coming home from my trip to Hueco this winter and having had a really amazing and intense time bouldering once more, at the same time I felt like it was time for a change. After so many years of just bouldering and mostly leaving all other types of our sport, like routes, trad or alpine, out of my schedule I simply thought it would be a really interesting and fun challenge to change my game and do something different, not just blocs.

As it was winter I went to the gym and did routes. Lot's of routes, for weeks... My main goal doing that was to get fit for the rock in spring. The amount of great hard sport routes in the local Zillertal Valley is insane and, in terms of quality and quantity, lies above the bouldering there in my opinion. After getting better and better in the gym I decided to take part in a Lead National comp in my home town in western Austria. Visiting the parents and doing a comp with the best fitness I’d had in years seemed like a good combination worth the effort!

The comp was real fun and went well, the next one in the series was at a close location too, so hey, why not go there as well?!? It turned out that all of the four competitions in the national series were pretty close to Innsbruck so in the end I took part in all of them!

The Austrian Cup series basically is to determine who enters the National Team besides the Pros (Jakob Schubert and Mario Lechner - who don't take part in it). And being such a busy bee and doing all of them, and with good results, I ended up 3rd overall in the men’s category. Oh yeah :D!

The rock climbing was a bit more epic since the mass of rainy or hot days this spring is messing up lots of redpoint tries on projects with long no-chalking-sections and small crimps. Guess what, it's raining as I write this. Oh well, they won't run away and cooler temps will come sooner or later, until then it's good practice.

So the status of this crazy, all so different and fun year is, that I am nominated to enter the IFSC World Championships in Arco this July, starting in all categories, bouldering, lead and speed! And that's because I got 3rd at the speed comp at the last station of the Nationals... off the couch...

What's next, 2011? I can't wait to find out!