I have only a few months remaining before the big week. My first outdoor rock climbing/bouldering session…

It was May 2022 when I first started my rock climbing journey. I remember two years prior to that, I had gone to an indoor bouldering gym with a few friends and fell in love with the sport. I made the decision then that I wanted rock climbing and bouldering to be one of my main hobbies. Unfortunately, 2020 was when COVID-19 was starting to get worse and I had to postpone my journey into the sport until after I received my vaccine.

With a year of waiting, I decided to make good use of my time and research all I can about the sport before I started climbing. I researched everything from all the different types of rock climbing, the techniques that were utilized, and the equipment that was needed to climb. On top of that, I watched all the professional rock climbing competitions I could, so I had a rough idea of how to climb. From all the research, I gained a deep respect for the sport. The amount of effort, strength, and technique required was simply astonishing.

Rock climbing is unfortunately not a sport that you can get really good at without significantly increasing the risk of injuring to important parts of your body needed to climb. One major part is out fingers. Unlike muscles that grow relatively fast with proper diet and exercise, tendons take a lot longer to grow. As a result, our progress in climbing can be stunted simply because we have not be climbing long enough for them to grow. Because of this, I made sure to be extra careful about not overdoing myself when I started climbing.

After I was able to get my vaccination, I quickly set up a membership at my local bouldering gym and got to work. With a year to plan out how I plan on improving safely but also quickly, I dove right into climbing as much as I safely could each week, which was pretty much twice a week and has remained that way for half a year. The first half of the year, I made tremendous growth in climbing without any injuries. I partly had my planning to thank, but genetics also did play a factor in my improvement.

In fact, I made so much progress, I felt comfortable starting out training with the Moonboard! The moon board is a bunch of different but tough climbing holds held at a 40 degree angle. It is mainly used as a universal training tool for those around the world to train on. And I know many climbers will get mad at me for starting the moonboard so early, but I honestly believed I was capable to training on it without injuring myself. Plus I really wanted to train on it!

I plan on going on my first outdoor rock climbing trip in the middle of July 2022 and I can’t wait to see how I fair there! Till then, I’ll be training as hard as I can at the climbing gym to prepare for it!