Climbing: why not take a vertical journey?

When was the last time you jumped? I’m not judging. There’s nothing inherently good about jumping. Only that I’d imagine a lot of people have kept their feet firmly planted on the ground for quite some time. Beyond stairs and lifts, most of our lives are decidedly horizontal. But we can choose to go up too. It’s worth remembering that.

What better way to explore the possibilities of vertical travel, than wall or rock climbing? The purest form of ascension. Lifting yourself higher with only the aid of your own hands and feet. It’s a sport too, if that makes it sound more appealing. And a sport that’s seen a surge in popularity over the last few years. Biased as I may be, having been a regular climber for a good decade, I’m certain that its time in the cultural spotlight is well earned, and not simply the result of novelty or riding the latest trends.

For those feeling crushed by city life, stuck in a maze of buildings, climbing offers an escape. A chance to rise above the maze. For those pressured by work and obligations, climbing is a release. No expectations, as many attempts at the problem as you like, with nothing to compete against besides your own limits and the wall.

Some might find the lack of competition disappointing; I find it a relief. It’s nice to be able to succeed without someone else needing to fail. At the highest levels, people will compete, but down among us mortals, it’s all of us against the wall. The shared struggle is part of what makes climbing centres such welcoming places. From my experience, asking someone for advice will usually cause them to offer all the tips you may need and then some more on top.

Sports that aren’t zero sum games aren’t uncommon. Sadly, most of them tend to be rather straightforward. Without a human opponent to struggle against, the unpredictability and excitement that makes competitive sports so engaging is lost. When your opponent is the wall, with its abundance of varied challenges, you have the best of both worlds.

With some experience, you’ll come to find that improving your climbing requires developing a combination of abilities. Strength, endurance and flexibility are the obvious ones, as is technique, your balance, coordination, the efficiency of your movements. Finally, the special one, puzzle solving. A climb is only as hard as the moves you need to perform to get to the top. Figuring out the easiest moves is a special kind of challenge. Especially on harder routes, if you can’t find the moves, you’ll fail to reach the top just as consistently as if you weren’t strong or skilled enough. It’s this testing of the mind as well as the body that can make a well-set route its own small adventure.

Climbing walls at gyms aren’t left to get stale either. If you attend a centre often enough, you’ll soon see a dedicated team of setters tearing down all their hard work to put up fresh routes with new puzzles to solve and new adventures to go on.

Once you get the hang of solving climbs, any vertical surface presents possibilities. I don’t recommend climbing up the front of someone’s house, but the point is you could. The path was always there. Wall or rock climbing helps you see that up is an option. Our lives aren’t horizontal; we have three dimensions to work with. There’s freedom in looking up and seeing paths open to you, even when you choose not to take them.

This freedom you can take with you into the rest of your life. In the abstract, when you find an obstacle, instead of going through or around it, maybe you could go over. There are always more options. Knowing that they’re there is the first step to finding them.