<commit_before>---
title: Facing Hell
layout: post
date: 2018-07-26 19:00
image: "/assets/images/24hhh/20170922_091051.jpg"
headerImage: true
tag:
- climbing
- life
category: blog
author: ryanwestby
---

# Hell has a line to get in

On August 15, 2017, I found out I’d won the lottery to enter Hell. 

A little context. In April of 2017, I got a message from a buddy of mine, Chris, that he had entered us into a lottery to get into 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell, a marathon 24 hour climbing competition. Climbers from all over the country converge on a little ranch in Jasper, Arkansas to compete and see who can climb the most routes in a 24 hour period. There’s a lottery to get in, since thousands of people wish to compete in a comp that can only support a few hundred climbers.

So Chris, who had been climbing for less than two years, messaged me, who had also been climbing for less than two years, to let me know to cross my fingers and hope we get lucky. Most people find out in May that they're getting in, and since we didn't get a May email, I thought luck was on our side and that we wouldn't be going to Hell this year.

## We're going to Hell

Three months later, we found out that we'd won a supplementary lottery to gain entry. The competition was in September, so this meant we would have just six weeks to prepare for one of the most grueling and intense events that either of us have ever been through.

Again, at this point, I was still very much a beginner climber. I still am, but at that time even more so. My climbing technique was still unrefined and I didn’t know a thing about climbing training. Luckily I had learned to belay earlier that year when I began taking an interest in sport climbing. An even bigger stroke of luck was meeting the guy who taught us.
<commit_msg>a word<commit_after>---
title: Facing Hell
layout: post
date: 2018-07-26 19:00
image: "/assets/images/24hhh/20170922_091051.jpg"
headerImage: true
tag:
- climbing
- life
category: blog
author: ryanwestby
---

# Hell has a line to get in

On August 15, 2017, I found out I’d won the lottery to enter Hell. 

A little context. In April of 2017, I got a message from a buddy of mine, Chris, that he had entered us into a lottery to get into 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell, a marathon 24 hour climbing competition. Climbers from all over the country converge on a little ranch in Jasper, Arkansas to compete and see who can climb the most routes in a 24 hour period. There’s a lottery to get in, since thousands of people wish to compete in a comp that can only support a few hundred climbers.

So Chris, who had been climbing for less than two years, messaged me, who had also been climbing for less than two years, to let me know to cross my fingers and hope we get lucky. Most people find out in May that they're getting in, and since we didn't get a May email, I thought luck was on our side and that we wouldn't be going to Hell this year.

## We're going to Hell

Three months later, we found out that we'd won a supplementary lottery to gain entry. The competition was in September, so this meant we would have just six weeks to prepare for one of the most grueling and intense events that either of us have ever been through.

Again, at this point, I was very much a beginner climber. I still am, but at that time even more so. My climbing technique was still unrefined and I didn’t know a thing about climbing training. Luckily I had learned to belay earlier that year when I began taking an interest in sport climbing. An even bigger stroke of luck was meeting the guy who taught us.

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.040725244072524404, 'fraction_numerical': 0.024546722454672244, 'mean_word_length': 3.892223738062756, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 3, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '2864151', 'n_tokens_mistral': 1019, 'n_tokens_neox': 912, 'n_words': 648}