Blokfest - Castle Climbing Centre London

On Friday night my Dad, my brother Oscar, and me travelled to London for the third round of the Blokfest bouldering competition. We missed the second round in Brighton because we were in Dublin for the Irish Climbing Championships. We stayed at my cousin's house overnight so that we could didn't have to drive very far to get to the Castle climbing centre.

When we woke up on Saturday we drove across London to the climbing centre. We passed Big Ben just as it was striking 8 o'clock!  We got to the climbing centre early to get a parking space so we had breakfast in a café opposite. My breakfast had hash browns and chips!!!

After breakfast we got our stuff from the car and took it into the Castle Climbing Centre. We Registered and got a score sheet. I had loads of time before the comp started so I went round and read the blocs some were OK but a few were hard! My dad listened to the briefing while I was warming up.

Once the briefing was over I started on the top floor and managed to complete all problems apart from one. This meant I had 20 left. My brother and I went round together to save my Dad some hassle. We went down a floor and I demoed some of the under 16 boys routes for Oscar and to warm up for my routes.

The next bay we tried was reachy but I was just tall enough to do them. The first one was easy and I topped it. The second one was OK but there was a reach at the top, I did it fine but my bro couldn't reach the top and he was up there for ages before he finally giving up. There were 2 other climbs on this wall and they were both really easy and I topped them both!

The next level was OK because there were only three climbs on it, one of them was all jugs so I tried that first. The next one was pretty easy too and I topped it. To get down from this climb you had to climb over the top and go through lots of tunnels - this was as much fun as the climb!

Next we went to the mega slab. They looked really easy because they were so slabbed but one of them was really hard. I did them all apart from the hard one which I left until later.

Just behind the slabs was a room with the overhanging climbs. These climbs weren't that hard and I topped them all.

I only had two blocs left to try. Number 20 which was a really difficult roof and Number 22 which was on the mega slab.

I tried the slab first and failed to top it. I didn't think I would top that one at all so I went to try the roof.

On my first go I got to the third from top which was a pyramid volume. On my second and third attempts my foot slipped off the volume of the start hold. I was really sad because I thought I could do really well again like I did in the first attempt. Catrin was there and helped me figure out how to do the move. Before having another go  I decided to try the slab again because there were more points available on the slab as I had only had one attempt.


I failed the slab again twice so this was only worth one point as well but I thought that I could top it so I carried on working the problem. I had loads of attempts before finally topping it. This meant that I had topped all but number 20 and I scored 228.

I spent the rest of the time attempting number 20 on the roof but I only managed to match my first attempt. I handed in my scoresheet at 1:30 and my Dad drove back to Cardiff.

The was round was better than the first round because the problems were more interesting and spread out over the centre.

The Castle Climbing centre was an amazing place - the climbing area was spread over loads of different floors and rooms which I really liked. I can't wait the for next round of Blokfest which is in Bristol (closer to home).