May 2015 – the Severe climber

Me climbing problem orange 12 at Buthiers Piscine in the forests of Fontainebleau.

If it were not for bad customer service, I wouldn’t have been bouldering at Fontainebleau this week. On my first trip to Fontainebleau a year ago I tore the meniscus in my right knee while pulling hard on a heel hook. Since surgery on the knee, I’ve been trying to get back into climbing in a way that is slow, gentle and careful enough to avoid injury. Bouldering outside on boulders that often have sloping holds and rounded top-outs wasn’t necessarily what I would have picked as my reintroduction to climbing on real rock. However, I’d really enjoyed bouldering at Fontainebleau and I had a free Channel Tunnel ticket that expired at the end of June. This ticket was by way of apology from Eurotunnel for a four-hour delay to the train taking me to France on that first Fontainebleau trip and for failing to even reply to my initial complaints. That ticket was a good excuse to go. Read more →

I’ve taken my first steps back into climbing following surgery on my injured knee. They’re just small steps at my local climbing wall, because I worry that anything else will see me injure myself again or at least slow down my recovery. My physio was clear about how to not hurt myself – avoid jumping down or falling off from boulder problems until my legs have regained the strength needed to cushion the impact. The only way to follow that advice was to carefully climb easy problems and down climb everything.

This was limiting and could have been a bit irritating, but I decided the best thing to do was to accept climbing this way and ended by enjoying my session. It’s sometimes fun to just focus on moving well during a climb and to forget about pushing yourself to climb harder. I think that I’ve been guilty in the past of getting so caught up in things like the next gear placement, the fall below me, reducing rope drag or how to complete the next move that I just forget to enjoy moving on the rock (or on plastic). My injury has been frustrating, but it is getting me to think differently and to think more about how I move, how I balance and how I can just relax into climbing. If I can change my focus in this way then may I can enjoy the climbing I can do more and build up the fundamentals of good climbing technique so that I can be a better climber in future. Maybe I can also not get frustrated about how rusty my technique is right now and how much strength I’ve lost.

My climbing wall session was the start of all this. I’ve got quite a way to go yet to return to my previous climbing standard, but I’m happy to be back climbing.