Today Shona, who I will from now on call the Nimble Mountain Lion because that girl sure can scale a wall like nobody’s business, was gracious enough to take us through the ropes of indoor rock climbing at her local climbing centre.

I can’t remember what possessed us to take up this challenge but I think it stemmed from our outing to Go Ape. I’ve been to an indoor rock climbing centre before so knew the basics of what was going on however I’ve never been up the wall as I thought my giant fat feet could never find purchase on those small little holds.

When we first got there the walls didn’t look all that intimidating. That was until you stepped up close and realised just how far apart the little holds seemed to be and just how little the surface area to stand on or grab on was!

The first thing we did was do some stretching and then we tackled the horizontal wall which was a good little warm up. It was a little difficult actually traversing rather climbing and I guess it forced us to try and think about where we were putting our feet rather than just simply going for it. Not sure how the others found it but I know I kept slipping off.

Then Shona took us to an actual wall. It was leaning slightly and so I think was probably the easiest 5m wall there on the day. Jules and James managed to make scaling it look pretty easy with the toughest bit for them seemingly not the hard work of climbing but the leaning back at the top to abseil down. Not sure why but everyone seemed to find it difficult to just lean back. That was definitely the easiest (and fun) bit for me! Sandra did the half-climb but just as she was about to do the full climb the little kids having a party came over so we had to move over to a slightly tougher wall. Okay – it wasn’t slightly tougher it was heaps tougher!

Shona had the most difficult job of actually climbing to the top and clipping our safety line in. She really showed her amazing agility and strength to get to the top. Everyone else managed to probably about 60-70% up to the top whereas I think I only managed to maybe get to about halfway if that. I basically got stuck and my arms were soooo tired that I just couldn’t hold myself up anymore. After that we went back to the “easy” wall and managed to climb that okay.

Indoor rock climbing is a funny thing. You are so certain that you can get to the top and its soo frustrating when you can’t do it. When you get to the bottom you keep thinking – gee if only I had held on for a little bit longer, or if only I had stepped on this hold. Its definitely the kind of activity that you want to try again and again (even when your arms and legs feel like jelly!)

Below are the climbers. For some reason I didn’t get one of Jonathon so I’ve included a pic of him and the absolutely giant fish and chips that he had for lunch:

Shona	Sir Jules	James
Sandra	Jonathon	Me

See more of the pics here