A bloody finger


I put on my compression sleeves and went to the climbing wall tonight.

That sentence fails to convey the gibbering minutes spent with my wife helping me to pull the compression sleeves up my arms (you really need two hands to get them over your biceps) and giggling. But enough of that.

I wore a t-shirt, so my compression sleeves didn’t look like the taxi-driver fashion disaster that my co-worker referred to yesterday. It just looked to the casual observer as though I was wearing a long sleeved shirt under a short sleeved shirt. None would know my compression secret.

The sleeves turn out to be really hot; I suppose I was also wearing long trousers rather than shorts, and that’s not the most efficient way to regulate your temperature in Singapore. I clambered up various problems, all things I’ve done before. I’m experimenting with ways to make simple problems more difficut. Not so much by doing things wrong and then trying to find a way back to success, but by testing other techniques: trying to squash a big hold between both of my feet ("the bicycle") or taking time with each hold, rather than scrambling up as quick as I can. There was one moment where I could see myself falling off a slab, which would have meant smashing my face into every bolt-on all the way down, but at the last second I pushed myself away from the wall.

At the bottom, I found I’d bent back the nail on my little finger and it was bleeding. Well, that smarted a bit. When it was clear it wasn’t going to make a mess, I carried on climbing. There’s one problem in particular where you’re meant to put your hand on a hold at about waist height, then hook your leg over your hand and swap hold from hand to foot. But it turns out I don’t have the flexibility for that, and just have to use brute force to get myself up wihtout bothering with that smoothness.

Which worked the first few times, but coming to the end of the night I was growing weak, incapble of getting my feet up the wall. One of the staff was cleaning excess chalk off some holds, and she cajoled me to get my feet higher up. I suppose the combination of embarrassment and encouragement worked, and I made my way to the top, but it was hard, and the way to success is to do something hard until it becomes easy. I was just doing stuff that was hard and it was still hard. So then I went home and got on a conferance call. The end.


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