British ex-pat Dan Smith is making good use of his move to New Zealand and has recently made the first repeat of NZ's hardest boulder problem, Chris Sharma's Trifecta Middle, 8B at Flock Hill, near Castle Hill.

Dan climbed Trifecta Middle on the 19th of June after six sessions spread over three months, with these sessions being interspersed with hard training sessions utilising a 45º board, a finger board and big core sessions. Dan had checked the top moves out on a rope on previous sessions, sending it during his first session with a team of spotters and pads. 

Dan commented on the quality of the problem saying:

"It's a brilliant problem, one of the best I’ve ever done. Hard and fingery dynamic start to a hard, reachy, and very slopey, scary top out"

Trifecta is the hardest problem Dan has climbed to date, with months of preparation, including quitting his job to climb full-time, coming together on a day of perfect, cold conditions when he had a large enough amount of pads and spotters to allow him to fall from the top three times before topping out.