After almost ten days off, Jon and I found ourselves in Innsbruck, Austria. We trained in Tivoli, a gym that's basically built for climbers to train for world cups, so that I could make up for lost time off the rock. We tortured ourselves on the plastic until our skin couldn’t take anymore. All the legendary climbers that lived in the region inspired us. The whole time in Innsbruck, we rode our Rickety, borrowed bikes around town. We got rides to the amazing climbing areas close to Innsbruck like the old school limestone cliff in the north of Italy, Erto, and the immaculate granite of the Zillertal. But the whole time in Austria the thought of climbing Realization stung my sides like harness rash. So after two weeks Jon and I left Austria on a night train and made it to gap in about 14 hours, via northern Italy.

The weather was damn hot when we got to Ceuse, but it didn’t take long for things to cool down and our skin to re-adjust to the pocketed limestone. On my third day back on the route, I cleaned and chalked a hold just below the one I had been falling off that allowed me to crimp and pull more rather that rely on body tension and the low, spread-out feet to do the move. This hold might have had my name written on it, I just couldn’t see the writing on the wall before. I had dismissed the hold as being too small before, but it was perfect. It begged to be grabbed.

The next day was perfect conditions, cold and windy. I was really nervous but it didn’t matter. I finally climbed through the crux and grabbed the sharp pinch I had been waiting practically all summer to grab from the ground, got my feet up a little shaky, grabbed the jug and breathed a big sigh of relief. Jon, who had just sent his project, Dures Limites, his third of the four 8c’s he has sent in Ceuse this summer, came over to give me a hug and together we proclaimed it the end of an Epic.