Welcome! The story so far...

It has only been a couple of weeks since I caught the climbing bug, but I know already that climbing will become a major part of my life for many years to come. I wanted to start this blog so I'd have somewhere to write about my efforts to learn, my achievements, interesting links and information, and any news coverage that I do in the climbing world.

So far I've climbed at three indoor walls. On my first visit to the Extreme Dream wall in Aviemore I had the daunting pleasure of being watched by Pete Hill who commended me on reaching the top of one of the harder walls, although I did scale it using all holds, not a specific route. It was the section at the right of this picture with green at the bottom:


This was a great introduction to the sport, having the added pressure of being watched by such a well-respected figure. Adding to the sense of achievement was the fact that I stalled about halfway up and told my belayer that I was going to come down, but I then decided to rethink the situation and went for it, including a dyno move to get up over the orange pyramid.

Next was a trip to Ratho, the largest indoor climbing centre in the world, near Edinburgh:


I tried climbing one of their intermediate routes and reached about 3/4 of the way up, before suddenly and unexpectedly being gripped by a fear of equipment failure. I wasn't afraid of the height as such, because I could quite comfortably look down and talk to my belayer, but I was scared to go on in case I fell as for some reason I had lost faith that the top rope would hold me. An irrational fear, of course, as I then let go of the wall to be lowered down! This was the wall that beat me, with my girlfriend and climbing partner Katie to give a sense of scale:


A while later I tried another section of wall, graded at 6a+ if I remember correctly, which can be seen in the background of the next photo. I reached the green pyramid before hitting the same mental block and having to come down. But at least I had followed a moderately challenging route, working through several tough problems on the way.


This week my climbing partner and I signed up for the wall at Inverness leisure centre, and that's where we'll be doing most of our training. We didn't have long there on our first visit so I only had a couple of attempts at a route graded 5a, not particularly difficult but I struggled again with an irrational fear of the top rope failing, and it is now clear that I'm going to have to work at overcoming this mental block. I'm told that I'm already a fairly strong climber, but this fear is holding me back because I'm freezing 3/4 of the way up routes that I know I can do, gripped by a certainty that the top rope won't hold me if I fall. Frustrating!!

So that's my climbing experience so far. I've just bought all of my own gear (no point throwing money away hiring it each time) but I'll write more about that in the coming days. If all goes well, my climbing partner and I will be training at least twice each week, and we have out first outdoor climbs coming up soon. (Our first outdoor climbs together -- she has climbed outdoors before.)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I can report that I've started completing routes at the wall. As soon as I can start trusting the gear, that's when I can start pushing myself and going for the tougher routes and the big moves. And then the fun really starts!