Bouldering: it’s not about the rock
Joy and peace amid plywood and plastic
I’m smeared to the underside of someone’s ceiling, facing up, pushing my suffocating feet against two nubbins no bigger than roots of ginger. On each hand, two fingers are hooked painfully into bowl-shaped bas-reliefs on the vertical wall the ceiling curves into. The position’s like sitting up. Except there’s no floor to sit on.
I’ve been here less than a minute. But my calves are molten lead, my forearms slabs of wet lard. There’s chalk dust in my eye, but no sweat pooling between my shoulders, because gravity’s making it drip off. Where next? There’s an outcrop I could rest on, but the rules say I can’t touch it. More sweat. Wait — there’s a pretzel shape further up. If I can wrap both hands around it, I’ll get the leverage to swing one leg onto a jutting edge nearby. I feel and flail. Then fall.
To a soft mat a couple of metres below.
I’m not a hardcore mountain man with frostbitten fingers and ice in his beard. Just a moderately sporty fortysomething with the luck to live close to one of Britain’s best indoor climbing centres. Two hangar-sized rooms enclose a collage of contoured plywood coming together at all angles: it’s part origami, part Mondrian, part MC Escher.
Attached to each surface — including the ceiling I was recently clinging to — are colourful blobs with names like pinches, pockets, jugs, and gastons. The challenge of moving your body from one blob to another is called a problem, and multiple problems make a route.
While you can join routes together for a greater challenge, most are short: you’re rarely more than four metres off the ground. Bouldering is about attitude, not altitude. And there are other upsides. You’re never far off the ground, which means no ropes, harnesses, or special equipment save shoes and maybe a bag of chalk.
And I love it. I don’t know many four-year-olds, but I’m pretty sure the feeling I get on arrival is akin to theirs when the soft play area opens. Even if I know that today I won’t get beyond a V3.
The story of V
Many British walls use the American scale of difficulty, the V or Hueco system created by John Sherman. It’s simpler than the heavily coded Fontainebleu system of combined letters, numbers, and symbols — where a 5B is harder than a 5b, which is easier than a 5b+, and a route easier than 2B (or 2b) might be marked F- instead. It’s also sometimes unclear which scale you’re reading: British technical grading uses similar notation, but refers to individual problems, not whole routes.
Not all people can scale even a V0 (so easy it’s not graded) climb at first go, especially if it involves an overhang.
When I started, I imagined (with a grip strength tested in the top 1% of my age group) I’d have no problems staying on the wall for the 4–6 metres of a typical climb. In fact, it took me half a dozen visits before I could complete (send) all 30 or so beginner climbs in a single session. And I was sore for days.
But that’s just where you start. Most walls will have a least a few V8 grade routes to aim for. In the wild, the scale gets even harder. V15 routes are only sendable by the world’s best; only a few V16s have been found in nature, and many of these have been sent just once.
(V17 routes have been proposed, but not confirmed. They’re not far off smooth surfaces.)
That’s what indoor does shares with outdoor rockwork: the sheer brutal physicality. On the wall you’re intensely, viscerally aware of the limits to your strength and grip. Bodyweight training is perhaps the best way to attain functional strength; most people can’t even lift their own weight against gravity on a pullup bar. But climbing — with leverage and momentum conspiring against you at unnatural angles — takes it up a notch.
When you boulder, you get an instant and detailed report on just how little all those hours in the gym have done for you. But get it right and it’s exhilarating, even on a V0 climb.
That’s why experienced boulderers gain an extraordinary stringy toughness, with about ten grams of discernible body fat per individual. Climbing is insane bodyweight training. But it’s not all about the body.
Climbing in your mind
Climbing is at least as Zen as surfing, if you engage your mind. One of the first skills you develop is simply seeing the route. To innocent eyes, that wall is a confusing mob of randomly-placed, candy-coated shapes. You climb using one colour, and there’ll be other holds in your way; avoiding the temptation to use them is part and parcel of bouldering. But after an hour or so, you start seeing set routes at your grade and tuning out the clutter.
Then the learning starts. You get frustrated on a particular route. Looking up from the ground, you can’t see a sequence of moves that work. So you start reading guides, and watching great climbers on YouTube.
You learn the different ways to grip a hold, how to recognise how it wants you to hold it. Whether you’ll palm two sides of a jutting volume, pushing your hands together to use surface friction. Or decide how much pressure you need to exert on the facing sides of two close-set gastons, using horizontal forces to keep you on the vertical.
And you learn to trust your shoes. Odd little slippers with strangely sticky soles that give purchase on an outcrop the width of a coin, modern climbing footwear is beyond awesome. But you need it to fit like a very tight glove, since the curve in the instep is designed to force your toes into a corner and your heel hard into the rear.
When you buy your first pair, you’ll be sending them back for a size bigger than your usual. With your second pair, you’ll be asking for a size smaller. But they’re the only equipment you really need. The rest is in your head and your limbs.
Why indoor ain’t outdoor
Without blue sky to enjoy or driving rain to endure, indoor bouldering isn’t inherently hardcore. There are Hollywood movies set on cliff faces, but not in these adult equivalents of a jungle gym. So why do it, when there are bigger adventures to be found in real hills and forests?
After all, those hills aren’t far away. France’s Fontainebleu, where it all started, is less than an hour from Paris. (So famous one of the grading scales is named after it.) In the USA you can go coast-to-coast or roam the flyover states, from California’s Bishop and Yosemite to Joe’s Valley in Utah or Acadia up in Maine. One country up, Squamish is a straight shot from Vancouver; even Australia’s incredible Wheel of Life is a daytrip from the big city at a pinch. Sandstone to granite, rain or shine: bouldering is cheap and you can start from nothing.
It’s true most serious climbers use indoor walls to practice or train for their outdoor work, not as a destination in themselves. But I like my indoor sessions for another reason. Because however good a wall is for priming your real rocky mojo, indoor and outdoor climbing have a fundamental difference.
Outdoors, it’s you against nature. Which is great. But when you climb indoors, you’re up against a person: the route setter who screwed the shapes to the wall by deliberate design.
If you watch a setter at work — most indoor centres change their routes monthly — you can hear the gears meshing in her brain as she plans and executes.
How will a tall climber handle that dyno? Are these gastons too far apart? Does this pinch, which works as a V5 on the vertical, degrade the route to a V3 if I put it on this sloping volume? How about two slopers here, right above a big easy jug for shock value? Every decision, of course, affects the route as a whole — necessitating moving stuff around until the route’s a solid set.
The result of a route setter’s work is a tangle of interesting problems, in patterns that… stretch you. Just as an RPG is an idealised model of the real world, where specific inputs lead to an output, a climbing wall locks you up inside someone else’s mind. And it’s up to you to make your escape.
And that’s the nub of indoor climbing.
A rock wasn’t made to be climbed. A bouldering wall was. Indoors, you’re interpreting and deciphering a puzzle. Like progressive calisthenics, the edges of the jigsaw are defined for you. And unlike famous bouldering areas outside, the puzzles change all the time.
I boulder because it refreshes. When you leave, you have the sense of having completed a workout that’s exercised both your mind and body. And later that day, as you find yourself making strange shapes with your hands and feet as you re-imagine a problem, the truth hits you: mind and body are the same thing.
Chris Worth is a London-based copywriter creating campaigns, content, and collaterial for marketers in the tech and finance spaces, in between authoring freelancing textbook 100 Days, 100 Grand. His other interests include kettlebells, punchbags, and progressive calisthenics. Married to Lynne, who got her book out before him.
