Drudgery

My job is a privilege. I get to travel to exotic locations and do anything my curiosity drives me to do, provided I can justify it to the taxpayer. The observatories where I work are breathtaking locations. The night sky contains views like these:



So I love my job. But sometimes, just occasionally, it's a pain in the ass. As part of my job, I help operate a special camera for astronomy. I wrote about it here. I'm out supporting other astronomers who want to use that camera, and it's been a total bitch. We've had loads of technical trouble, which means I'm up all day fixing things and up all night operating the camera for other people. I've been averaging about 4 hours sleep a day. It's all a bit like hard work.

On top of that, I'm trying to keep training whilst I'm out here. I've still got a set plan from Coach Randall, so I'm trying to do all of that all my portable fingerboard that the nice boys at Beastmaker made for me. This I have achieved with a clever combination of bungee cord, pulleys, weights and a harness. There's even a winch in the optics lab where I can train with the lights on, and not worry about disturbing the telescope. It's a weird place to train, amongst the lab equipment, and I can tell you now that stamina training on a fingerboard is pretty damn boring. So work feels like work, and even climbing feels like work.

But I don't care. I've got my eye on the prize, 'cos I'm coming home to September; the month of crush. I've got two weeks at Malham and a 10-day climbing holiday to look forward to and I'm going to be in the best goddam shape of my life, because nothing prepares you for heroics like sleep deprivation and hanging from planks of wood. Plus, I've got the Patxi training bit from Progression playing on a permanent loop on my laptop. So that's nice