Weekend Plans Post: Trust and Failing and Getting Over Oneself At The Climbing Gym
There it is.
The current traverse wall at my climbing gym. The problem that I am having is with the red route.
If I may bring your attention to the start, see that you have your hands on the two big chunky pieces and you’re standing on what may as well be a platform. Seriously, even someone who has never climbed before could comfortably hold onto those big chunky pieces for dear life while standing on that big red thing and stay there for minutes without any discomfort greater than that provided by one’s own brain.
It’s the moving to the next part that gets difficult.
Please let me draw your eye to the first move you make with your right foot. You have to get it on that red thing below the green piece.
That’s it down there:
You’ve got a little over an inch to stand on. Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but, in rock climbing that’s plenty so long as you’ve got good holds for your hands.
Except… well, this route is trying to teach you a couple of things. The first is that you don’t want to be standing straight up. Here, look at how you hold onto your leftmost starting grip if you stand up straight:
Oh my gosh. That feels awful. It feels like there’s nothing there! Like your hand is constantly in a state of slippage. It only works because it’s one half of what you need to have your arms in a pincer hold on the other not-particularly-great piece.
But now imagine just leaning 5 or 8 degrees to the right and, suddenly, the hold becomes a *GREAT* hold.
Seriously, you could hang on that all day.
So now you’re leaning and now you want to move your right foot to that hold under the green chunk, right? Well, look down to make sure your foot is centered and OH MY GOSH:
Seriously, the green chunk obscures the red piece and you can’t see where you are putting your foot. You have to remember where the piece was and, when your foot finds it, you have to trust that you remember where the center is.
This route was my bête noire for two weeks. (Well, bête rouge, I guess.) I did not, absolutely did *NOT*, want to put my weight on a toehold that I could not see.
Well, I kept at it and kept at it and kept at it and then the worst happened: I misjudged and fell.
And you know what? It wasn’t so bad. Oh, I only fell a foot. Oh, the floor is padded, like, really padded. Huh. That wasn’t bad at all.
And then I figured out where to put my hands next (the little hidden nub on the other side of the volume and then over there on the other hold that only works if you’re leaning:
Of course, that’s pretty much where I stopped because, after that, the route is totally insane. But, and here’s the point, the thing that was impossible became downright easy after I had failed. Before I failed? Terrifying. After I failed? Pfeh. Fail again, I told myself. No biggie.
As such, this weekend will be spent going back to the gym and figuring out that last part. When I stand on the ground and look at it, I can tell that it involves leaning. Like, a lot.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is The Traverse Wall, taken by the author.)
Rock climbing as a metaphor for life.
I don’t know what I’m going to be doing. We’re in a “bruised red” zone now, plus the road construction between where I live and anywhere out of town I might want to go has ramped up into a much worse stage, so even if whatever “wave” of this pandemic is in were abating, I’d not want to go.
I may scuttle out, very early and masked, for in person shopping at wal mart. Their pick up has gotten to the point where they claim items are out of stock that are actually in stock if you go into the store, and that tells me the system’s overloaded, so I’ll put myself at slight risk (of breakthrough infection) to protect the service for those at serious risk and I hate all of this.
Other than that, classes start Monday and I have a giant bolus of anxiety in my whole body over teaching in a pandemic again and the extra labor that entails and the fact that my brain is absolutely toast after almost two years of unrelenting sad things and stress happening and I literally do not know how I will teach a four class load without failing horribly at it. (Yes, I called the counselor I had been seeing again; I have an appointment next week)
It’s very hard to get out of bed in the mornings though with no promise of anything fun or joyful in the near future. It’s been too hot here to even go out and hike, which is what kind of saved me last fall and this spring.Report
As the temperatures are reasonable today, and the sky is almost blue instead of what has become the standard sickly yellow-brown smoke haze color, and the air quality alert is only ozone rather than ozone and particulates*, I headed out this morning with the bicycle to do the 20-plus mile loop around Loveland. Ducked off at one point to do a couple of miles up a mild slope in a bicycle lane where I could go faster and stress the heart/lungs a bit more. Note to self: remember to send a complaint to the air quality people; based on what I could smell, they are passing a lot of Larimer County vehicles’ emissions that they shouldn’t be.
41st wedding anniversary is Monday. I want to go out to dinner, Mrs. Cain seems to be inclined to stay in and make me cook.
* The federal EPA makes no allowance for forest fires. The Front Range, at least north of the Palmer Divide, is going to get so hammered next year when the cumulative violation days are counted up.Report
Happy anniversary! 41 is quite impressive.Report
Thanks!Report
Is it a sideways route? I don’t see a way to get up to the upper row of stones without doing a muscle-up or something.Report
It is, indeed, a sideways route.
If you look most closely at the topmost picture, you’ll see tape around a hold at the top of the upper rightmost hold.
That’s the finish.
BUT, you may say, you’d need a foothold *AND* a handhold to pull that off!, I can hear you say.
Well, you’re right.
Both are obscured by the column.
Lemme know if you need better pictures of the transit wall unobscured by the previous attempts of the amateur photographer in charge of the original photos.Report
Is there also a vertical wall? I never really got into climbing, but it hadn’t occurred to me that horizontal routes would be a thing.Report
Most of the climbing in our gym is vertical. This is the only space where the routes are horizontal (we call this the “traverse wall”). When the powers that be remodeled the gym, the original plan was to eliminate the traverse wall, but there was a great protest so they let us keep half of it.Report
Yeah, this essay has a representative wall from the lower level.
I’d say that 95% of the gym is vertical.Report
That must make using the restroom pretty dicey.Report
We’re preparing to head out on a family vacation… our first since we did the camino back in 2019. I think it’s also the first proper vacation from work since March 2020. Sure, I’ve taken days off (hey, we have UNLIMITED vacation!), but this is the first time I’ll ‘unplug’ for a week. And by unplug I mean only work on a few deals and skip all the corporate/regional meetings…
We’re even taking the train for extra adventure and fun… and just to make neo-liberal twitter mad about taking trains. I’m ready tho… prepared a few spreadsheets and charts with cost benefit analysis; I’ve even separated hard dollars from soft dollars and intangible QOL benefits. Thinking creating a graphic that is just a straight line from my house to the nearest city to illustrate the train route. Man, it’s exhausting to go on Vacation on twitter. It’s only possible because we can even take our car on the train, so packing is little more than throwing crap into bags … AS MANY AS CAN FIT IN THE CAR … and that’s it. We’re even packing a case of sparkling water, because we can. Anyhow, back to excel… these tweets don’t thread themselves.Report