BK Athlete Riku in Japan: Making it to the Finnish national team and Christmas in Japan

“November was a very busy time for me. On the 21st I had a climbing competition in Tokushima prefecture and on the 28th I came to Finland for a brief visit to participate in the Finnish national climbing team qualifiers. Tokushima’s competition was the perfect opportunity for me to get some experience for the upcoming qualifiers. Even though I didn’t win the competition, it was really fun to compete in Japan after a long break. Coming back to Japan, I had 22kg of souvenirs and Christmas foods in my luggage. Because there aren’t any Christmas traditions in Japan, we are celebrating a Finnish Christmas with my family.”

“I trained almost everyday for the Tokushima competition and preparing for it went really well. However, a week before the competition I hurt my right hand’s ring finger when I took a crimpy sidepull badly. I had to rest for five days and even though my finger felt better, I couldn’t crimp properly. I decided to compete anyway, but I changed my goal from winning to keeping my finger injury from getting worse. During the qualifiers I injured my finger again, but yet somehow managed to win silver, which was quite a surprise.”

“I flew to Finland a week before the qualifiers for the national team and it was wonderful to be back. The very next day I went to climb in BK Kino in Lauttasaari with BK’s competitive climbing team, which I used to be a part of. It was nice to do a different kind of training and to come up with all sorts of problems on the spray wall. BK Espoo’s monthly competition routes helped me prepare for the weekend’s qualifiers. The boulder qualifiers were on Saturday and they went great until I got too relaxed and didn’t focus on the last two problems. Despite that, I managed to climb all the problems and came third. Lead qualifiers were the next day and even though I hadn’t lead climbed in six months, they went really well. I arrived at the competition very late and started climbing the first route without having warmed up. Luckily the first route was easy and even though the second one was challenging, I managed to climb it as well. I’m very happy to make it to the Finnish national climbing team.”

“Now I’m back in a two week quarantine in Japan and as a proud climbing addict this is quite a torture. I hope I will make it.”