Well after climbing for 10+ years I finally sent my first V7. I’ve always found bouldering to be a frustrating discipline. While my technical climbing ability is decent (ok fine, mediocre) I’ve always lacked the raw power for bouldering. One of the biggest challenges in climbing (or perhaps life) is recognizing your weaknesses and then choosing to train them.
Not the send go.
Yesterday I fell on what would have been my hardest redpoint to date. I made it through the boulder problem. I made it to the hands off knee bar rest. I still blew it. And yet, I am still happy with my performance.
My satisfaction comes from an outsider’s observation. “You didn’t even look pumped, I’m surprised you fell.” I don’t know if this person knew they were quoting Rock Warrior’s Way damn near verbatim, but it was nice to hear.
Ball ’til you fall.
Next go for sure.
Cisco Live presents a unique meeting of the minds in a manner that I have yet to see replicated at other conferences (be they vendor sponsored or agnostic). The breadth of topics is quite wide, covering everything from BYOD enterprise issues to IGP scaling issues to carrier ethernet evolution. (I make a point to attend the latter two). As a network architect I’m expected to keep abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies. Conveniently, the folks submitting RFCs and writing actual forwarding code are also in attendance. Most C-NSP superstars attend, and often present. (Oli Boehmer, Ari Vayner, Waris Sagheer, Tim Stevenson, Greg Schudel). With so much of Cisco’s organizational stack present, it’s possible to have very productive meetings. My most memorable example is a round table discussion with the product managers for the Provider Access BU where they solicited feedback from multiple SPs represented. I often find myself referring back to archived presentations from previous years when researching topics. It should go without saying that there’s a huge difference between attending a lecture and getting someone’s notes secondhand. Also, I’m that guy that asks questions. In summary, conferences like Cisco Live enable me to perform my duties in a more competent manner. Many presentations have directly applied to the challenges [REDACTED] faces, and I don’t anticipated that changing in the near future.
This will become my little corner of the world where I ramble about climbing. And networking.
