New Gym, New Challenges, New Growth

'Every mountain peak is in reach you just have to keep climbing.'
-unknown

Where have I been and what have I been up to?

As a child and like all other children I loved to climb. So it was my absolute joy as an adult when my older brother came back home for Christmas from an arbitrary place in the world and took me to a place where for £10.75 I could climb to my heart's contempt- or until my forearms burnt to the point of uncooperative response, my fingers ran out of tips and my feet went numb causing me to hobble like a baby taking its first steps- a place for a mad freak monkey to climb freely without judgmental adults looking down on me like some mad freak monkey because they too are all climbing...like mad freak monkeys. It was a painfully beautiful experience filled with physical exertion, strategy, and enjoyment and just like that, I was hooked on the sport, bouldering.

Bouldering according to a well-known source is ‘A form of rock climbing that is performed on small rock formations or artificial rock walls without the use of ropes or harnesses' whilst I don't disagree with the definition as its accurate I do find it to be unlively, So today I will give you my interpretation as to what I think bouldering is giving life to this definition, no need to thank me.

Bouldering is starting at the bottom of a wall with nothing, as a common humble human being and metamorphosing into a higher state of interdimensional galactic consciousness as you are manually ascending yourself gracefully to a transience snapshot of heaven but without having to die, it's connecting yourself back to mother nature in the rawest of forms taking you back an evolution, to prehistoric primate but with modern-day human brain. It’s a feeling of empowering freedom like riding elegantly on the back of a gold flying unicorn into brightly coloured rainbows made from the euphoric happiness and joys of a peaceful dreaming baby, it’s separating the inconsequential mice from the mightiest of men, you pick your difficulty and stick to it until the bitter end and discover what it really means to pallet the taste of victory.

So after climbing for the first time with my brother, destroying my fingers, toes and everything in between, me being the smart and highly intellectual decided I had to go again but this time drag in the calvary (my mate and cousin) so they too could re-experience childhood but with the added feeling of pain of destroyed fingers, toes and everything in between and just like me they too were hooked and I had myself a climbing crew. Four months later attending on a minimum of a weekly basis with a lot less pain we still climb, why?

Every climb is a new challenge and every challenge you grow. Climbing requires your full focus on the wall, your body and mind, whatever is happening on the outside in the world stays outside, your problems of day to day life no longer exist for a couple hours, who would not want that?

My gym is a ball of chalk, European size 42 climbing shoes, and a wall. What's yours?
 

If you want to see me in my natural habitat click here, here and here.