Older and Boulder

Sunday was exactly 1 year since I started bouldering again, or to put it more accurately, 1 year since I started bouldering properly.

I’ve done little bits and pieces of climbing in the past, but never really stuck at it as I didn’t really have anyone to climb with.

I had completed an intro to climbing course at the GCC in 2003, and climber relatively regularly with my sister until her work commitments made it hard to regularly climb together.

I tried the (limited) bouldering facilities they had at the time to let me climb on my own, but back then, I couldn’t quite work out what I was meant to do on the big plastic rocks covered in bit of coloured chalk, and anyway, I was getting serious forearm pump really quickly so sessions were short. Eventually gave in.

Several years later I joined the TCA in Glasgow when it opened as I thought a dedicated bouldering gym might give me the chance to get back into climbing, and maybe I could get my son involved. There was no kids wall there at the time though, and they didn’t have hire shoes small enough for my son at the time either, so that all fell away too.

There were other attempts to get back on the wall in between, but again, for reasons i’m not sure I remember, none of that worked out either.

I had tried to get my kids interested a couple of times, which just about worked in early 2020, and then COVID came along and climbing was off the list of things to do.

However things changed when, during a period where he was banned from his PlayStation, my 13 year old asked me to watch Free Solo with him. At the end of the film he said “we should go climbing again”. Two days later we were back in TCA and have since logged 90 sessions in Griptonite and have climbed outdoors a couple of times too.

It’s fair to say we’ve both fallen in love with bouldering, and his younger brother is in on the action now too. This blog is my way of tracking the journey as it goes on, and charting and tracking goals and progress.