I’ve been a route climber – you know, doing long things on ropes and getting pumped – for almost all my climbing career. That’s about 18yrs to be precise and rather surprisingly, I’ve never tried being a boulderer. I know that probably sounds obvious, but it sums up my experience in climbing as at no time over the years, have I completely sacrificed my fitness in favour of going bouldering.
Last year, I took a step towards the dark side and spent a long time not tying into rope and not getting pumped. As some of you who know me (or read my blog) will know, it was because I started working with Ollie Torr to get a bit stronger. I realised if I was to make a change so significant after 17 years of a very set training pattern I’d probably need to accept the body might find it a shock to the system! Other than the fact that I did get some excellent results out of it, I learnt quite a few new things about what it’s like to live life as a boulderer.
Typical route climber. Weird.
Having spent so much time being a route climber and watching “from the other side” as boulderers went about their every day life I have to confess I was a bit clueless as to how different things would feel. Below I’ve listed a few of my observations from this 6 month transition and whilst some of them are serious (and hopefully useful) observations, some should be taken with a pinch of salt!
1. I stopped getting ill or feeling on the edge of it. For years I’ve had this feeling each morning when waking up that I’m on the verge of being sick, but a couple of hours later I feel fine and I just repeat the process the next day. I’ve always put it down to the heavy volume of training and very late nights trying to fit endurance training in around kids
Message: route climbing hits your immune system hard
2. I’ve got way more energy than I thought I did. When I converted to being a boulderer, I no longer had to go to bed every day totally toasted and most evenings I didn’t even have to fit a last block of training in. It was all easily fitting into each day! As a result I found myself absolutely buzzing. At first it was pretty strange and I had to go out for 2-4 mile quick runs to burn off the excess of jitters but with a bit of time I realised I could just plough that energy into things I’d abandoned previously due to not having enough time. Artwork, cooking and TV became a reality again!
Message: route climbing uses way more energy. This is obvious, but possibly not appreciated by many.
Train hard, eat hard!
3. My house got way tidier. Most days previously would result in me dumping bags of ropes, kit, shoes and racks all over the place, but seeing as a crash pad doesn’t fit in my living space very well, it got neatly put away in the basement.
Message: I’m messy and lazy
4. My internet surfing went sky-high. Because I spent most of my time resting whilst training or resting whilst projecting, Too much resting for my liking. I had this terrible binge of web browsing. I started instagramming, actually following links on Facebook and thinking that articles on Buzzfeed were worth reading. They’re not.
Message: Instagram activity is proportional to number of moves not done.
Garden projects got done
5. The younger cool kids started talking to me. I think they were tricked into thinking I’d abandoned my weird crack and trad fetish, and so started engaging me at the crag. I had to pick up on some of the lingo – send, can you spot me, campus it, hashtag throwback thursday – and soon enough I was wasn’t asked any more about why Pete wasn’t with me.
Message: Routes aren’t cool, trad climbing is seriously uncool and Pete is not cool despite having a sister on the cool list.
Pete still being uncool, even though he’s on the Lattice Board
6. There’s just as many tricks on most boulder problems as the routes out there, but in general I think boulderers are much worse at spending the time to work this out, or persevering with making an alternative work. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, but as a whole, there was more brute force and less finesse. I think this is promising for many of the route climbers out there??!
Message: route climbers are weak and boulderers are strong.
Tricking my way along a Font 7B with 7A cunning.
I’m back “normal” climbing again now. Six months was enough for me to have a little sample into how the other half lives and I’m pleased that I did it. I’m not pleased that I have to go back to feeling like death every morning and working out how to squeeze the adequate training volume into a fairly complicated life, but it feels freaking awesome totally annihilating myself on the lactate rush. There’s not many things that come close to this for me and I’ll gladly stick with this for a while yet!
Tom Randall Climbing 