Hello!
Welcome to my climbing blog. This really is intended to be a personal record of how my climbing progresses over the next few months (maybe years) and so I apologise if at times it's poorly written or boring.
Why do I want to write a blog on my climbing? I think probably it's to motivate me to improve. I started climbing a long time ago; I was in year 4 at school. I suppose I must have been 7 or 8. If I had kept up climbing regularly from that age I'm sure I'd be a very good climber now. As it happened that wasn't to be. I loved climbing, but I'm not from a climbing family and I had no friends at the time who really liked climbing. I think at that age most people would need outside help for them to progress in a sport. I only climbed rarely: I used to have birthday parties at the Bristol Climbing Centre. It wasn't until perhaps year 7 that I started more regularly. At this point I did a 4 hour beginners course over two weeks. This taught me to belay and tie knots. After this I was able to go to weekly supervised sessions to the centre. I think I went pretty regularly, and started leading pretty early on.
Even at this age I could have been really good if I'd climbed more. Chris Sharma started when he was 12, and Beth Rodden started when she was 14. Not that I ever have been (/will ever be) close to as good as them, but still, I should be better then I am now.
I started to climb more regularly during year 11 (I think). I already had full membership of the climbing centre by now so didn’t need supervision. During year 11 I also gave up rugby at school. I never was very good, and it meant I could climb as a school sport option. This consisted of an hour long session once a week. I climbed with a few people who also had full membership of the centre, so we always stayed after the school session and climbed for a total of 4 hours normally. We also tried to go on Sunday afternoons and get two sessions in a week, but this was rare.
I suppose my problem was I would improve over time, and then take long breaks off climbing. Summer always seemed to be bad. Climbing partners away on holiday, and then me away on holiday and so on. I also had a few injury problems. I lost almost all my fitness when I had appendicitis in year 8, and then I suffered Achilles tendonitis. This prevented me from running for a year. In around year 11, I injured my knee down climbing an easy bouldering problem and needed surgery. It seemed like every time I improved my climbing I suffered a setback and had to start again.
More recently, the setbacks have been my fault. After finishing school, I did no climbing for the entire summer. I had been climbing at my best previous to this, which still wasn’t very good. I could climb generally at the level of 6B+ and red pointed some 6Cs I tried with several attempts. I had red pointed one 6C+ with several attempts over many weeks.
Coming back into climbing after that summer, I started climbing with a new friend at university. I struggled with 6A+s which was hugely depressing and motivation became virtually impossible. Routes I would have easily on sighted before were now hard. It took me a while to get over the drop in confidence this caused. As well as this, my new climbing partner, Rachel, was fairly new to lead belaying, so I had to teach her. Having never taken a fall with her created a bit of a mental block about falling, although I’m sure it would never have been a problem if I had.
Starting university gave me a chance to join a mountaineering club, the Oxford University Mountaineering Club. I’m studying medicine, and although I had intended to join the club before, on arrival at the university, I thought I might have too much work to go away climbing on weekends. I now know this was a mistake. The current secretary of the club is a medic in my year, and both of us passed our exams. I also had plenty of spare time which I wasted last year. I could have fitted in several more hours of climbing.
Despite not joining the club, my climbing has improved over the year. It took me ages to get back to level I was before. However, once I’d climbed with Rachel more and started to take some falls, my confidence came back. Soon enough I was making dynamic moves, or moving on tenuous holds in difficult positions above the last clipped quickdraw. It still took a long time, and I really only felt good about climbing during my third term at uni. At this time though, I couldn’t really focus on climbing as I had exams to think about. I still did quite a lot, but I didn’t join the club.
This summer, I decided that there was no way I was going to drop my climbing level. My partner from school was never available, (working or snowboarding in Canada) so I went bouldering on my own. I met a few people who also needed partners doing this, and so managed to keep up climbing routes. In Oxford I’d managed to get back up to red pointing 6Cs. Back in Bristol I red pointed a 6C in two attempts, a personal best, and a massive cut down on my previous best. Recently, I went to the climbing centre in Stockport with friends, and managed my first 6C on sight. Since returning to Oxford this year. I managed to on sight another, but I felt it had been over graded.
So that’s the position I’m in at the moment. I’m far from being what I’d consider to be a good climber, but it’s what I love doing, (to a point of obsession sometimes) and I really want to push my own personal boundary.
What do I intend to do in the future? Firstly I’m going to join OUMC. This will allow me to get into outdoor climbing, something I should have done a long time ago. I only have the smallest outdoor climbing experience; a little bit of bouldering in Stanage is the most recent. I’m really looking forward to doing much more. I also intend to push my grade indoors. I found a 7A I like in Oxford, and I’m going to work on it. My endurance is also abysmal so I need to work on that.
Joining the club will also give me free access to Iffley bouldering. This means I can start training my strength without having to spend vast quantities of money going into the Brookes climbing centre several times a week. I intend to really work on my finger strength and arm strength this year, working on finger boards and campus boards. On top of this, I hope to work on my general fitness by jogging more. Hopefully the combination of this will help me start pushing grades again, something I haven’t done in a while, and also help my bouldering which is poor.
So that’s it! A condensed version of my climbing history and what I hope to do now. I’m going to use this blog to keep a record of how my climbing goes. Hopefully writing it out will allow me to see how I’ve improved, and this will keep me pushing. At times my entries here will be short (always shorter then this one) and boring, but maybe occasionally I’ll have something interesting to say…
