One More Move

"Deep breath, your almost there. five moves through the crux sequence and your at the top.”

Hundreds of feet of climbing lay beneath this weary rock warrior and the summit is within reach. Arms are shaking, and beads of sweat glisten in the hot sun. Sweaty hands are thrust into the chalk bag attached to the harness, and return to gripping the jagged limestone.

“This will be it, my hardest climb yet.” The moment is so intense, a pounding heartbeat echoes through the ears.

“Here we go.”

A body hardened through hours of rigorous practice surges forward, one hold after the next being left behind, precise movements generating the perfect amount of momentum, carried forward to reach the summit, two moves left then the chains, one move left…

A hand slips. The fingers open. The climber is flung out into open air, to be caught by his belay partner. Slowly, they are lowered to the ground. Another attempt. Another fall. Will this climb ever be finished?

For those of you who don’t know, this is the constant struggle of those who have dedicated their life to the pursuit of rock climbing. In this particular instance, a variant known as Sport Climbing, is when a climber is attached to the wall through a series of bolts & carabiners or nuts & cams and a rope. This equipment is used to safely catch a falling climber while they attempt to scale a vertical (or semi-vertical) rock face.

This is a sport I have fallen in love with and am incredibly excited to see competed in, at the upcoming Summer Olympics. For 10 years I have slowly gained finger strength, movement technique, trained my body, and developed my mental control.

And then a little over a year ago lockdown happened. The climbing gym I climbed and trained at (and obviously worked at) was forced to close it’s doors. And once it was made apparent that this Covid thing wasn’t going away anytime soon, the gym was forced to stop paying expensive liability insurance which meant the staff were no longer permitted to climb in their glorified domain. I’ll admit the tears were real. No climbing gym to train at and simultaneously, the outdoor cliffs and bouldering areas were also closed to the public.

All that hard work started to waste away, my happy place vanished. The scene you experienced at the beginning of this article? That was the goal for last fall. Alas, it was not to be.

But as a glowing, yellow animated character once told me, “You can always turn things around” (quote by Joy from movie “Inside Out”). So my wife and I decided to make some of our own happiness and create a small piece of that climbing passion in our extremely small basement apartment. Home climbing wall here we come!

The first step was needing the okay from our landlords to build an 8’x8’ wall in the basement. We’ll just say they weren’t overly thrilled at the idea, probably didn’t want to be kept up at night by all the loud grunting and groaning… that comes with a hard climbing session, of course. But they reluctantly agreed that we could build our dream wall, so long as we didn’t have to attach it to the nicely finished basement walls.

Cue intense research montage!

How much wood do we need? How steep of a wall angle should we build? Can we make the wall adjustable? Is it going to be safe? Will we end up crushing ourselves with a couple hundred bounds of wood and plastic? How expensive are climbing holds? How do we attach them to the wall? You get the point, we aren’t exactly experts (and still aren’t, youtube can only teach you so much). But we forged ahead. This lockdown might be here to stay for a while, but we will be strong and ready to take on any climbing challenges by the time normal life can start up again.

Fortunately, we were able to find ClimberDad on youtube and roughly followed his instructions on building an at-home free standing climbing wall. Some modifications were needed to fit the wall into our limited living space but the dream was coming together!

The lumber was purchased, cut, and carried into the dark interior of the basement, never to see the light of day again. Beams were cut on dotted lines, boards were trimmed to exact measurements — okay I was off by like three inches but who’s counting — and the assembly began. There were only about three separate trips to Home Hardware to pick up parts I forgot to order and I consider that a win.

The frame eventually came together, resulting in only one panic attack, and there standing before us was a gloriously blank canvas of climbing potential.

Now to the second half of those questions. Climbing holds? Fasteners? Layout?

Way ahead of you. Remember that aforementioned job at the climbing gym? Well it just so happens that role was the Temporary Installment of Interactive Modern Art or if you’re familiar with indoor climbing gyms, I was a ‘setter’. Which basically meant I got paid to attach climbing holds to the wall in an eye catching and technically demanding way. Naturally this left me more than qualified to take the crates full of holds (generously loaned from the gym) into the basement and start screwing them into the wall.

Some hours later the fantasy was real, we could safely rock climb from the comfort of our own home! Oh happy day!

The finely textured holds once again are within our grasp. Free to monkey around in the basement to our hearts content. And with a bit of blood, sweat, and tears, be ready for that next attempt up the challenging rock face.

This Covid thing can’t be too much longer right?

“Deep breath, your almost there.”