Dutch Championships Iceclimbing

Yes, you read it correctly: Dutch Championships Iceclimbing!
Without mountains, waterfalls or ice but with a nice drytooling wall at the Uithof in Utrecht the first Dutch Championships iceclimbing were hold. Differently then with the Drytool event, Dennis and Marianne (the Dutch iceclimbing team) competed at this championship. Good concurrention!

After being in Nepal for about 7 weeks (another blogpost about this period is coming) I lost quite some strength and didn't had a good chance to train for this championship. I was curious on how the drytooling would feel like. Together with Noel I went to the Uithof, arriving there we immediately had to go into the isolation. After waiting for some time we were allowed to watch the route for 4 minutes. The routes didn't looked too hard, starting with a big piece of wood and then continuing on small crimpy holds, before reaching another woorden block. From there a few moves until an undercling from where you had to go into the roof. The roof existed of 2 big wooden icicles and 1 big horizontal "surfboard". It looked like a cool route and I really hoped to be able to reach the roof and show some figure of 4's / figure of 9's.

Finished looking at the route, we had to wait for a long time. Fortunately there was a small heater in the isolation, as the outside temperature was around 0 degrees. After some time we did some warming up and then it finally was my turn to climb. The first wooden block was harder and more difficult than I expected. Trying not to spend too much time on it I didn't hit my iceaxe into it deep enough which caused a fall. Fortunately you had a restart when falling before the first quickdraw so I jumped into the routes again, made sure, double checked and made sure again that my iceaxes were deep enough in the wood and then continued climbing fast on the crimpy holds. The second wooden block was softer and therefore easier. Rushing through the route and trying to climb and clip the quickdraws as soon as possible I made another mistake costing me costly time: a Z-clip. I repared it and rushed further, reaching the roof with not much more time left on the clock. Made a figure of four, figure of nine, worked myself up on te big wooden icicle and then run out of time. Not really pumped yet but certainly satisfied with my attempt.

Marianne did some perfect time management and showed everyone how to climb the final route, finishing it in the very last seconds.
In the mens route Dennis almost made it to a top, having clipped the last quickdraw but missed the last tophold with two iceaxes. Good enough for him to take the first place!

The first National champions iceclimbing are Marianne van der Steen and Dennis van Hoek, Ferdinand Schulte and me are very happy runners up.