This year, I’ve joined the 219 in 2019 workout challenge: the goal is to work out 219 times this year. We check in with each other on Facebook. There are two groups, the general one and one that grew out of Tracy, Cate and Catherine’s feminist fitness challenge. I post my updates to both of them, and in both cases when I mentioned I’d been bouldering, people asked what it was. So I thought I might blog about it here, since it still doesn’t seem to be a very well-known sport – even though you wouldn’t be able to tell by the amounts of people at my bouldering gym!
Bouldering is a type of climbing, but it’s done at relatively low heights (I’ll come to that in a moment) where you don’t need a harness and rope. You can do it outdoors and indoors, although I’ve only ever bouldered indoors. For outdoor bouldering, there are special mats, called crashpads, you can carry to where you’re climbing. At an indoor gym, the floor is one gigantic soft mat. So if you take a fall, at least you fall onto something soft (again, we’ll come back to this). Here’s what a bouldering gym looks like:
On the walls of a bouldering gym, you’ll find holds (aka boulders) of various colours drilled into the wall, forming different routes (aka problems or routes) of various levels of difficulty. The goal is to complete a problem without touching the boulders of another one. You’ve successfully completed a problem once you get to its “top” boulder with both hands.
So what do I love about bouldering? The short answer is: almost everything. It makes me feel strong and badass. By the time I finish a problem, chances are I will have overcome moments of fear, my arms will have almost given out, and my hands are sore. It turns out I’m more afraid of heights than I’d previously thought, so higher walls are a real challenge for me, and it feels fantastic to rise above that. It often takes me several attempts to finish a route because I get scared. There is some reason to this – despite the soft mats, it’s not a danger-free sport. You can fall and break something. You can hit boulders while falling or scrape yourself. I’ve definitely come home with more than one big bruise. And yet.
Bouldering has taught me that I’m stronger than I often think. Yes, there are problems I can’t do because they’re too long and I run out of strength before I make it. But at least as often I just think I won’t be able to do it, while I actually can. It’s a full-body workout that requires a lot of body tension – core strength combined with the ability to use your arms and legs to push into a wall or against a boulder all at the same time. So it’s tough, but it’s also made me tougher, and I’ve found that being able to control my muscles better has actually had a positive impact on my swimming. Plus, the longer you boulder, the more you figure out what your individual strengths are. Mine are balancy problems and slab walls. A bouldering mate of mine loves overhangs (he has excellent body tension), and so on.
That’s also why I find bouldering to be quite gender-inclusive, at least from what I’ve experienced. Yes, there is the odd gang of muscle-loaded “super manly” dude-bros who need to show off in front of each other (and everyone else). But then a women will often come along and leave them mouth agape because she could do a problem they hadn’t been able to manage. There are routes for everyone: the stronger and the less strong, the more and the less supple, and the taller and the less tall. It’s very empowering. Also, by and large, it attracts an open-minded crowd that’s in it together and has decent manners. At least at my gym, the “super manly” dude-bros are far and few between.
And then there’s the mental challenge of figuring out how to approach a certain route. I love tackling stuff head-on, but here I’m learning to think before I do. Strength is precious, so you don’t want to waste it by not being able to complete a route because you got stuck somewhere and hadn’t thought about how to best place your hands and feet, balance your body, or manage a particularly long reach. (Sam blogged a while ago about how climbing seems to appeal to philosophers in particular, and I think this extends to researchers more generally.)
Finally, bouldering is a social sport. I enjoy going to the gym alone – you always end up chatting with strangers anyway and giving each other tips -, but it’s more fun in a group. We help each other through problems. We egg each other on, celebrate our victories and share our frustrations. There’s a lot of resting involved between exhausting problems, so we hang out on the mat and chat, or squint at walls together trying to figure out a good way to tackle a route. And afterwards, we have a beer together.
Yay! Bouldering is one of my favorite sports, and you’ve captured a lot of the reasons why I like it! I am a lot stronger now than when I started (which helps me do more challenging problems than I could before), but even when I was a beginner, there were plenty of routes for me to think about, talk about, and learn on.
At my gym, I do sometimes get frustrated with the route setters, who are mostly men and tall women, for setting a number of climbs that are difficult (in some cases, near-impossible) for me to complete because I can’t reach certain necessary holds. I imagine this might be less of an issue at a gym with more experienced and diverse setters (as far as I know, the setters at my gym are mostly just student volunteers who climb there a lot) or outdoors (where I might be more likely to find an extra hand or foot if I need it).
Thanks for your comment, Emily! Sorry to hear about your route setting frustrations. I think I must be lucky, and the route setters at my gym are quite diverse in terms of height and gender. There are definitely some problems where I’m just not tall enough, or that would be a lot easier if I was taller or stronger or both. But we also get those where I have a much easier time than the guys I boulder with because I’m more flexible and can contort myself into shapes they cannot. And then, of course, there are those that leave all of us scratching our heads and wondering what the heck the setters were thinking 😀
To be fair, there are definitely times when I’m at a relative advantage, and I agree with you that different types of climbs are good for people of different sizes and abilities. My small hands are better at gripping small crimps and fitting into pockets, and I certainly have an easier time moving around cramped climbs (there are a couple of overhanging areas that start pretty low to the ground, and traverses through those can be difficult for tall people!). And my partner (who is much taller than I am) tells me that I look impressive when I get a move that is much harder for me to reach than it is for him! 😎 I just suspect that, overall, it pays to be closer to the average height at my gym.