The Only Way Is Up

I’m obsessed with rock climbing. No point in beating about the bush, it really is something I enjoy probably more than is natural. My dad says, and I don’t know whether to believe him or not, that as soon as I was old enough to stand up I was trying to climb things. My earliest memories all seem to involve me falling over, so I don’t know – maybe that was as a result of trying to climb somewhere, or maybe I was just a clumsy child. As things stand today, though, I cannot look at any tall edifice without trying to pick out a way to the top. I was bitten by a spider once, although it was barely toxic. Maybe I’ve got a Peter Parker thing going on.

I remember watching something on TV, if I remember rightly it was some kind of game show featuring some quite stupid challenges. One of the more sane ones – as far as I’m concerned anyway, involved some guy who’d never tried rock climbing before having to complete what was a pretty challenging course – a beginner’s challenging course, but a tricky one nonetheless. From that point on I was interested, which is weird. I mean, I wasn’t immediately hooked, but the more I saw people rock climbing, the more into it I got. When I was old enough I joined a club and took on a few courses like the one I saw that guy trying. I didn’t even bat an eyelid, strangely. So it was always pretty much a certainty that I would take it on more seriously when I was old enough.

At the races the other guys have a tendency to rib me for the amount of preparation I put in. We’re all at pretty much the same skill level, and we all take the climbing more or less seriously. But I am really fastidious about preparing because I heard someone say once “fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. That got into my head and bugged me every time I had to do something that involved preparation, until the point where I just gave into the instinct to micro-manage everything. So when I go climbing I follow the same procedure to the letter. It involves packing the rucksack with everything I could conceivably need without me being too weighed down.

Although the ribbing is almost constant, it’s good-natured, and the guys also understand why I’m even more pernickety about it than I used to be. The biggest race I was in, I was within sight of the finish when I lost my grip on a firm handhold and smacked into a protruding rock. It gouged a good lump out of my arm and hurt like the blazes. I was ahead by this point, but I could see my rival catching up. I was able to get into the rucksack with my good arm and pull out my liquid pack so that the arm could be washed, and I pulled myself towards the finish. I possibly should have stopped properly to bandage myself, but I thought there’d be plenty of time at the finish. There was. The benefits of preparation.