Sunday, March 3

Bouldering in plastic fantastic

I hate climbing gyms. I love the outdoors.  I moved to an outdoors-y place. I climb a lot in climbing gyms. Logico, si?

I have truly become the weekend warrior and the weekday working queen, but in the past few months I have struggled to find the motivation to pull on plastic. Plastic is just what the name says. Plastic. Artificial. Sometimes colorful. The routes are set most of the time by tall motherfuckers who do not think about other people. There are little extra handholds on which one could set one's problems and thus one cannot get very excited about projects. Not training on plastic makes one unfit for the outdoors. It does not help that there are only two small gyms in Adelaide, and both suffer from the same problems. And the bickering goes on and on.

So I try. I have at least two friends with which I set up climbing appointments that I almost never miss.

I try to get my money's worth every time: I must climb enough routes/problems that the price drops under $1 per route/problem. Sometimes, this works well: there is enough combination of psyche and route/problem difficulty that one gets very excited and forgets about leaving, eating, sleeping, nom nom-ing. Sometimes, it doesn't.

I started to watch climbing porn - I never used to before. I still have my sanity though, and put Chris Sharma on silent whenever he tries to talk the meaning of life to me.

It never occurred to me to quit though. So yeah. Don't hang up your shooz my friend, there are ways.

Later edit: perhaps dangerous and obviously increasing of the waist line, but food bribing might work: like in: finish one route, eat one delicious snack. Hm ...






5 comments:

ionuca said...

For someone who started climbing indoors and is not yet quite sure if she's not chicken enough for real rock climbing, this moment I can't picture my life with the climbing gym, the people there, my instructor, the cakes, and, of course, the climbing :)

san said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
san said...

what can i say? nus means no need to pay. so i can climb 1 route, and either feel crappy about it, or really good. and end my day. hah. i'll try to hang on. i still have 4 blocks of chalk and half a bag of metolius. so it'll take a while for it to happen.. when it happens.

claudia said...

@ionuca - what cakes?!!!

@san - as ionuca says, maybe we can try food bribing? Do one route, eat one delicious snack? Hm, I should not go down that path :)

Unknown said...

Come to the Gramps, you will get your money's worth :)