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<\/a>The Marine Military Academy Rockclimbing<\/b> <\/a>Team has kicked off another season and already the cadets are working hard preparing for this year.\u00a0 This marks my 13th year as coach for the team and we are looking forward to a very fun and exciting year.\u00a0 This year we have 7 cadets on the team with four of them being returners from last year.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This year’s team is made up of, left to right,\u00a0Cadets Canyon Sandford, Chace Andrea, Team Captain Samuel Hudson,\u00a0\u00a0Kyle Rogers,\u00a0\u00a0Team Captain Stevan Banker, Yang Yi Wu, Charles Lemaster and Coach Compton.\u00a0\u00a0The returning rockclimbers\u00a0will provide for a good solid basis of experience to help our newest team members; Cadets Wu, and Andrea.\u00a0 Cadet Rogers has a good bit of rockclimbing<\/i> experience prior to coming to the Academy and has already demonstrated excellent skill.\u00a0 One of the comments made by team members is that they find rockclimbing<\/u> enjoyable because it is just them against the wall and each route is like solving a puzzle.<\/p>\nRockclimbing Team’s First Days<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>The first days of this rockclimbing season have been spent covering the most basic skills; belaying, knot tying and getting all the cadets back into shape after a summer off.\u00a0 The team starts each day with a good jog out to the LEAD Complex followed by an exercise workout that includes mostly upper body and arm work, followed by some figertip pullups.\u00a0 After their initial exercises the cadets prepare for a day of working on the climbing wall.\u00a0 The routine is composed of some speed climbs along with some extremely difficult routes that push the limits of their flexibility.\u00a0 The next weeks will also cover rappelling, more work on knots and some endurance climbing.\u00a0 Our climbers are already pushing each other to do more difficult routes and challenge each other as they set routes for this year to see who can do the most difficult one.\u00a0 While all of this is going on we are also engaged in completing the climbing hold installation on our new west wall.\u00a0 Each day one of the cadets works on installing holds and we expect to be ready to climb on this wall soon.\u00a0 As soon as work in completed we will post some pictures of the finished wall.<\/p>\nRockclimbing Plans for 2012-13<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>We are already planning for a rockclimbing trip to the Austin, Texas area next month to do some climbing at Reimers Ranch\u00a0County Park.\u00a0 We have climbed there before and it has a large number of shorter routes of all grades for the climbers.\u00a0 We also are planning to participate in a couple of rockclimbing competitions at University of Texas, Pan American later this year.\u00a0 This is an annual event for the cadets and in past years they have done very well competing against college age climbers.\u00a0 We fully expect to continue performing the same way this year.\u00a0 We will be reporting on our rockclimbing trip and the rockclimbing competition in later posts here so check back.<\/p>\nLearn More About Rockclimbing\u00a0and Marine Military Academy<\/h3>\n
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