On Top of the World – 2/1/25

At this point, I really wanted to do some more sports in my life. I was talking to my dad and he said that I should try a new sport, rock climbing. For all of my life I thought that rock climbing was easy to do. Turns out I was wrong.

I tried to do it the week after my dad told me at Planet Granite (officially now called Movement Gyms) and it was really hard. I didn’t try the more difficult types of climbing like bouldering. Bouldering is when you climb with no harness, just powder and pure strength.

A picture of a man bouldering!

There are two people, a belayer and a climber. The belayer is the person who takes care of the rope and makes sure that you don’t fall. They do this by having the rope in a pulley. When you climb up, they pull down so there’s less rope and you can go further. The climber is, of course, the person who rock climbs. Once they reach the top, or want to go down, they yell, “Ready to lower!” and the belayer lets go of the rope slowly so you can get down.

When you go down, there’s a certain technique you use. You use your legs and gently push them against the rock and lean back. If you don’t do this, you can get severely injured if you accidentally go against the rocks. 

It’s super hard to rock climb, as you have to use both your mental and physical capacity. Your arms and legs need to be super strong. It’s like doing fifteen pull ups continuously but your legs have to go from one rock to another as well. You have to be smart about it as well or else you’ll trip and be swinging in the air. Which rocks you put your legs and arms on are super important and you need that strength to lift yourself up.

A belayer making sure a rock climber doesn’t fall

My advice if you are starting is to always start off on the easiest one and exercise a lot before you try to rock climb, or else you won’t have that strength (don’t exercise thirty minutes before you climb, exercise two or three days earlier). Try to drink a lot of water and take breaks. Don’t look down because they are super tall, but it is really fun and a great experience for beginners! Go and check out my next blog post!