Saturday, 06-May-2023

I competed in a climbing competition!

Seriously! I can’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve been to a climbing comp… there’ve been a few here in Portland, since COVID, but… for one reason or another none of them quite worked out. And, let’s be clear here, when I say “a few”, I mean “one or two”, at least as far as I can remember, so… we’re not talking about a weekly occurrence here.

When I found out that there’d be a comp at my home gym? Well! Excitement abounded.

I… uhh… don’t really know where to go from here, with writing about the comp.

I mean, it was fun, right? All climbing competitions are excellent – they’re a chance for the gym to show off its stuff, for the route-setters to step up their game a bit, and go above and beyond the usual type of routes. For competitions, the climbs are almost always special in some way – the route-setters use non-standard holds, they add more “terrain features”, if you will, and they add a bit of style and panache to the gym for a few weeks.

It’s awesome, and fun, but at the end of the day it’s a bit hard to describe in a blog…

Instead, I’ll focus on how amazing it felt to compete again.

Yeah, the gym was absolutely packed full. And yeah, we ended up waiting in lines a bit longer than I’d normally be patient for. And sure, if I’d had more time to climb I could have placed higher (Ed Note: Ben actually projected it out, and if he’d arrived at the beginning of the competition, he could have tied for first in his division. Yeah, seriously.) but… at the end, I had a blast.

I felt strong. I felt good, and I felt like I’ve made some real progress in the past few years. Sure, I’ve gotten stronger… but more importantly, I’ve started regrowing into myself – restarting those parts of me that I’d powered down in the past.

I felt strong, I climbed strong… and I was strong. Both mentally and physically.