I’ve been bouldering for about eight months now. Not as often as I’d like — it’s an expensive.. hobby? That word doesn’t feel right. Nothing that demands this much of your body is just a hobby. It’s a sport, sure, but even that undersells it. Somewhere between the chalk dust and the sore forearms, bouldering became a part of who I am, part of how I treat my body, how I care for my own wellbeing. Which is funny because I didn’t arrive at the wall looking for any of that.
Yoga and pilates have always been my home. Spiritual and core-strengthening? An immediate yes. I had a ritual around it: carving a pocket out of my busy days to truly stop, breathe and flow with my being. Soft light, soft movement, soft landings. Bouldering is none of those things. It’s calisthenic, raw, vertical. There is nothing soft about hanging off a wall by your fingertips.
Let me be honest: I’m not strong at all and I’m afraid of heights. So, picture my first time. I couldn’t visualize the path. I struggled to find my next reach, my next foothold, the strength to hold on at all and the ground kept getting further and further away. It was TERRIFYING. I cried. There is a specific kind of fear in being “helpless”, stuck mid-wall with nowhere to go but down or up. Up meant going over. At that gym, finishing a climb meant throwing yourself over the top of the wall, except up there, the holds run out. There’s nothing left to grip but the flat, smooth edge, like any wall you’ve ever leaned against, and you have to hold onto it for dear life and push/pull yourself even higher than the wall itself to swing your body across. I froze and climbed down. Tried again and froze worse, so badly that my friends had to reach down from above and pull me over themselves. The wall gives you sixty holds on the way up and abandons you at the very last move. Fuck you, wall.
And yet — the adrenaline, the sheer determination to push myself (literally) harder and finish the climb anyway was indescribable. I was hooked as soon as my quivering, SO glad to be on the ground, feet touched the mats.
They say mentality plays a big part in bouldering, and it does! Mine, unfortunately, was the mentality of a sore loser. I kept forcing myself up routes far beyond my strength, refusing to let the wall win, and I paid for it. Injured, in pain, moving like a rusted hinge for the week that followed. Soreness after a workout is normal but this wasn’t that. A stiff neck, a locked-up back, an arm that wouldn’t lift a feather.. it felt exhausting and wrong.
I drew what seemed like the obvious conclusion: Okay, I’m not strong. I’m getting hurt because I’m attempting things that are wayyyyy out of my league. I should focus on technique! Maybe technique can make up for the strength I don’t have.
I can’t express how wrong I was.
I had filed technique away as “a bouldering thing”, a set of tricks for the wall. IT’S NOT. Technique was never a substitute for strength, it’s the grammar of movement itself. It teaches your body to use the strength it DOES have effectively, to recruit the right muscles the right way, exactly like any traditional training.
It felt like a shortcut at first, a cheat code for finishing routes. What I didn’t realize was that every time I climbed with intention instead of desperation, I was getting stronger — by moving the way my body is meant to move, by bringing consciousness to the wall instead of brute force.
Yoga is still in my day-to-day and I’m easing into calisthenics to build a real base of strength. For a while, I believed I had to earn bouldering, that I needed to be good at calisthenics first, needed to be able to hang from two holds and pull myself up before I deserved to climb. But bouldering is just too amazing. I can’t help myself. So I climb anyway, exactly as strong as I currently am.
Today, I climbed for five or six hours with my friends.
I started big, too big, and felt the soreness arrive faster than I’m used to. But here’s what changed: Instead of gritting my teeth and throwing myself at the wall again or giving up entirely, I stepped off. I sat down. I looked at the route. I thought about what went wrong and what I could do differently — and not once, not even for a second, did I ask whether my arms were too small or whether I was simply too weak.
I have never been so in touch with my body and my surroundings, so in sync.
I read the routes. I moved with intention and purpose. When I messed up, I climbed down (or slipped.. oops), rested, thought it through and tried again. For the first time, my determination didn’t feel like re-packaged self-hatred. Not the drive to prove myself, the guilt of an expensive session demanding to be worth it or the desire to be as strong and independent and present as the boy I loved. The same boy, funnily enough, who brought me to bouldering in the first place.
I was climbing for myself.
By the end, everyone was wrecked. We stayed until the gym closed, or rather, until we got kicked out because I wanted to keep going.
I felt my muscles, sure. Felt my grip fading. But I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t injured. I wasn’t drained. Part of me wondered if that meant I hadn’t worked hard enough, old habits. But here are the facts: Today, I completed V7 routes and I climbed twelve fucking meters into the air. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never even come close.
I’m happy about my progress but more than that, I’m happy for myself.
Life has been throwing me curveballs lately and I’m grateful for the chance to feel capable of getting better, to feel at home in my body again, to spend hours with people I truly care about and to climb, with exactly the strength I have, no more and no less, out of that hole.
Turns out the way out was up.