Scrapes and Bruises

While I was at rock climbing on Monday last week, I came up with a slogan for the class: If it doesn't hurt, you’re doing it wrong.  In which case, I’m doing fantastic.

A couple weeks ago, we were practicing belaying in preparation for taking the belay test, complete with climber on one end of the rope.  I was taking my turn climbing and I was trying to get out of a cave in one part of the wall.  I reached out for a hold . . . and slipped off.

The pulley system and the belay device work to drastically lower how heavy people feel and make it easy to stop them from falling, so I didn't fall, but I did apparently crash into the wall.  I say apparently because when you fall, everything moves fast, and I got back on the wall by myself pretty quickly.  I finished the climb to the top of the wall, got lowered down, and went back to bouldering.

A couple minutes later, I noticed that I’d scraped some skin off a finger.  Oh well.  Didn't hurt too much.  Later that day, I realized my knee kind of hurt.  Turns out I bruised it falling into the wall.

Last week, sometime during foot matching or doing a challenge involving plastic holds and a very long stretch of rock for me to span, I lost some more skin off my hand and an elbow.  (Still not as bad as the time I slid down the last few stairs on the way to a band concert and didn't realize my elbow had been bleeding until after the concert.)

As an added bonus, I got a toe crushed by a door as I was leaving Appel after a two-hour MATLAB coding session.  It’s fine, just like the rest of my body.

Just to make it clear, climbing is completely worth it.  It’s just a little painful now and then.