It’s really hard to explain, but once you start bouldering on a rock wall… you’re hooked!
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Watching someone attempt to scale El Capitan is so nerve-racking, it’s hard to watch… but you can’t look away. I never really understood the draw of rock climbing.
But now that I have tried “Bouldering,” I may be hooked.
“And so much of it is, it’s not necessarily physical strength, it’s body position and how to use the muscles you already have,” said climbing instructor Andrew Andress.
He was giving me an orientation before we hit the wall, which included how to fall. If you do fall, you land on a foot thick foam mat, so it doesn’t really hurt.
Everybody goes through the orientation, before you can climb. Once you do, they start you out on something really easy. That way you can get a feel for what muscles you’ll be using and you get a sense of the methodology of how to climb. If you are even mildly athletic, you’ll take to it pretty quickly.
The routes or climbs are laid out in a way that you have to think about how to approach each climb individually.
Andress says, “We want to create an experience, which is much more than climbing a ladder, that it sends you this way, then there’s kind of like a plot twist that sends you back the other way on each climb.”
Each climb made me want to try something more difficult. Once we reached the reversed incline walls, I found out just how hard the sport can be. The first was just a slight incline, which I did fairly easily. Once we moved to sharper angled wall, I couldn’t even complete a level 1 climb.
“It takes a few climbs to realize that hey, oh there’s actually way more to it than just pulling and pushing, pulling and pushing,” Andress said. “There’s a lot of body movement and body position.”
I don’t have a lot of upper body strength, but the incline made the climb unachievable, for now.
But not being able to complete it, made me want to come back. I tried several other climbs, most of which I completed… but there were also a couple I couldn’t. They have routes for absolute beginners and climbs that will test the mettle of the most experience climber. They also have a kid’s wall for the little ones.
They will see me back at Armadillo Boulders again! If you’d like to check it out, click on this link to their website.