Climbing Health Care: Pain Killers

Hi Steph,
I love your blog and all the info you put in to it, especially the videos of your climbing adventures. Well, I love the wingsuit flying and base jumping too. I commented on one of your photo’s on facebook about wingsuit flying, ie., what kind of ground speed can you achieve. I’m thinking about just a skydive from 12,500 in max track. We used to have tracking contests and the most anyone could get was maybe a one to one ratio in an old Pioneer jump suit. Yeah, I’m old, having started jumping in ’63.

My big question is how do you climb Indian Creek splitters without pain killers?? !! You make it look like you could do that all day .
John

Dear John,
The answer to your question is: I don’t! I rely on good old aspirin!
Okay, let me qualify that a little. For most Indian Creek climbing, I don’t need pain killers because I wear big slippers and the foot pain is the biggest issue otherwise. But for very hard/painful routes, I depend on tape and aspirin. When projecting a very painful crack route, I usually take two aspirin first thing in the morning (with coffee which is also a natural pain reliever), and another couple at the base of the route. It helps a lot.
I like aspirin for a few reasons, mainly because I have been told by several vets that it’s safe for dogs (unlike tylenol and ibuprofen, which made me immediately suspicious of those), and also because I learned that aspirin was originally made from willow and was used for thousands of years by early people in that form.
With regards to coffee and pain relief, I was recently amused to see a scientific article published on the internet, with the amazing discovery that coffee offers pain relief. I could have told them that! Phase two was to research exactly why it offers pain relief…. Whatever, I’ll be climbing at the Creek
xx Steph