"For a ROCK?!" - Niagara Glen, Canada.
After roughly two years of indoor climbing, we finally decided to try our hand at sending real rock — and man, is there ever a stark difference between indoor climbing and outdoor climbing. In one setting, you’re in a highly manicured environment geared for safety and beta-filled sends. You can spam attempts and fail sessions with very minimal fear of there being any serious repercussions (though, I have heard of climbers hurting themselves during indoor sessions, so it’s definitely not fool proof).
Contrast to that, you have real rock; real environments; real repercussions; and very few attempts at problems you’re unsure about. Unlike the climbing gym, which can be treated as a lab for experimenting with new movements and ideas, outdoor climbs (especially higher climbs) are reserved for problems you know you can pretty much flash.
But where are the holds? Herein lies the beauty and the differentiator between gym climbers and rock climbers — in the gym, there’s a general beta which you can dial and repeat-send. In the outdoors, there are suggestions (from either leftover chalk residue or a book that you can purchase from the park centre) but the real skill lies is in reading the rock and trusting in your ability to top out. Think of it like a high stakes game testing your ability to real-time solve a problem in relation to your current skills and attributes, and move intuitively with confidence that you won’t fall (because falling can be dire).
Similar to jiujitsu (and probably why I’ve become obsessed with climbs), bouldering is easily one of the peak intelligence, intuition, and confidence tests that you can go after. However, unlike jiujitsu where you can just tap, a serious fall might lead to a snap.
In the end, the real allure of climbing isn’t in being able to send, necessarily, it’s about learning to build trust and agency within yourself despite the obstacle — while also being humble enough to know when you’ve met your match and backing down from a problem you know you might fail. And that is the real beauty; not the adrenaline during the top out, but the agency you build in relation to the world around you.
-keep climbing; keep aspiring.
A recap video from our very first session: