Went climbing yesterday at a place called Karbin with a friend of mine. I’ve always thought that my skills at climbing have been atleast average or slightly over. This is based on the previous climbing and rappelling experiences I’ve had in the army and so forth. What I realized yesterday was that never before have I been faced with the choice of complexity levels of the paths you choose to climb. From what I gather there’s a French scale from 1 to 8 (well, actually it’s open ended) and every step has three sub steps (a-c), so 1a is the simplest and 8c is more or less a flat wall without protrusions. What I also realized that even though I have fairly strong arms that does not compensate for the lack of technical skill, oh no it doesn’t. Even though I can climb a 5b route with not that many problems I more or less died slowly while trying a 5c route (never made it actually). Watching some of the other more proficient climbers (of which a slight majority seem to be women) it dawned on me that being smart about where you place your center of gravity (i.e. keep your hips close to the wall) and the technique of resting (keeping one arm straight while the other is working) while climbing are still things I need to learn.

To sum it up – today my arms hurt and it feels like I can’t grip anything with a reasonable amount of force. But it was fun! =)

Oh, and another tip – don’t go bouldering in the middle of your climbing sessions, it’ll just ruin your performance later on. Go bouldering afterwards instead. =)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 08:32 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.