If At First You Don't Succeed

Try, try again; you’ll probably fall again, but try not to hurt yourself.  More life lessons from the climbing wall.  I know, I’m my parents are paying thousands of dollars [for me] to go to Cornell and I seem to be learning the most from my PE class.  This only looks like the case because somehow, I don’t think the general population would find nested for-loops and inhomogeneous linear higher order ordinary differential equations as fascinating as I do, so I keep that fun to myself.

In rock climbing two Mondays ago, instead of learning a few new climbing techniques like we usually do after snack, we were put into groups and told to come up with our own bouldering problem.  We were told that the other groups would be trying our problem, so the goal was to find something kind of absurd, but that we could still climb.  As in, no choosing handholds fifteen feet apart because that’s just ridiculous.

The instructor who was with our group mostly came up with our route, but then two out of the three of us had to climb it.  One of the guys in my group was pretty tall, so he did it after a couple tries.  I, on the other hand, occasionally have trouble getting off the ground because I can’t reach any handholds.

The route began with some solid hand and footholds.  The next move was to move my right hand into a pocket-type hold (I know, I've got the terminology down solid.) and switch feet so that my left foot was free.  At that point, there was some mantling (pushing down on a hold instead of pulling up or to the side) and smearing (using the friction between the wall and your shoe), and that’s where I kept getting stuck.  With both hands jammed into a hold, I was supposed to pull myself up to reach the second to last handhold, but I kept slipping out.

What the instructors have been teaching us in class is that where you put your feet is as important as where you put your hands, and shifting your weight can drastically affect your balance.  I didn't really have a choice about where my feet were, but by shifting my weight onto my left leg, I could push myself upward, move my left hand to the next hold, and finish the route.

It took me almost ten tries, but I did it. And now I have a route on the climbing wall, which I think is pretty cool.