This is going to be a shorter post containing just a few quick ideas which will be elaborated on in the future. My skin happens to be pretty good. It’s not too thin or wet, and it’s not particularly susceptible to cracks or problematic callus buildup.
I climb on gritstone when it’s not raining (so about three days per year), and it’s particularly abrasive on the skin. The biggest problem I suffer is worn down, sensitive tips that need a few days to recover before I have enough skin to climb again. Occasionally when it’s really dry in the winter my skin will get a bit glassy and I’ll “dry fire” of holds; which leads me to the first product on this list…
Rhino Spit: I tend to train a lot on wooden holds. Humidity plays a big role in whether I can hang that fucking 45º sloper on the Beastmaker 2000 fingerboard. If the air is too dry, I slide right off. If the air is too wet, I slide right off. If it’s dry I can do something about it by breathing on my hands immediately before hanging, but this is approach is inconsistent and when it’s wet in the height of summer, chalk only works to a certain extent. Rhino spit really helps by extending this optimal window of humidity by a quite a bit in either direction. It feels like spraying plain water on your hands but when it dries the skin is more pliable and a tiny bit tacky. It makes the chalk work better in the summer and means I’m less likely to suffer from glassy skin in the winter. It can be applied mid-session and on top of chalk and when I’m climbing on slopers I might apply it three to five times during a session depending on conditions.
Growth Hormone: Experimenting with growth hormone secretagogues, I noticed that my skin healed remarkably quickly after an afternoon sessioning “Dry Wit in a Wet Country” at Robin Hood’s Stride. The night after climbing, immediately before going to bed I injected 300 micrograms of Ipamorelin and 300 micrograms of Modified GRF (1-29) subcutaneously into my belly fat. The next day I woke up and my fingertips were almost entirely back to normal; holding a hot cup of tea wasn’t painful and I felt ready to climb again. More research is needed on this but the results of this single experiment were promising.
Methenamine: This topical drug has been used for decades by climbers looking to toughen and dry the skin – most notoriously in a German product named Antihydral. Rhino Skin offer three products containing it. They are in order of increasing strength Rhino Performance, Rhino Dry, and Mikey’s Tip Juice. Dry and Tip Juice had absolutely no effect on my skin. Performance just acted as a very expensive, but pleasant smelling moisturiser. Methenamine is a very fragile molecule and degrades easily. My hypothesis that the Rhino products aren’t formulated in a way to preserve the activity of the active ingredient so by the time it’s reached me from the USA there’s no therapeutic potential remaining. I have some pure Methenamine I bought from eBay and I’ve been meaning to apply a 10% solution to my hands every night before bed for a week. I’ll report back with results.
Doping For Climbers 