A love letter to bouldering: my first year of climbing

So with the start of the new year, it's the perfect time to reflect on the past and look forward to the future. Looking forward to the future gives me an incredible amount of anxiety, so instead I will just be reflecting on the past in this article. Last year was the year that I started something that has consumed my life, personality, soul, and skin (literally): bouldering.

Why write about bouldering?

First of all, why should you care about my experience with bouldering? Well, technically you shouldn't, but I've been having a really bad writer's block recently and I wanted to write about something that would come easy to me. Since I can't keep my mouth shut anyway about this subject, I thought I might as well write about it. Besides that, I also want to use this as a way of introducing bouldering to the ones that haven't got any experience with it, and for the ones that do, provide some of the things I've learned over the past year.

What exactly is bouldering?

With all of that out of the way, let's first discuss what bouldering is. At first I was planning on writing a very long paragraph here describing the correct definition of bouldering, but what's the fun in that? Instead you will get my personal short definition. Bouldering is the art of climbing (mostly) colored plastic rocks on walls that are usually not taller than 5 meters. I say mostly, since outdoor climbing is also a thing, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to touch real rock, so I'll stick to indoor climbing in this article. Bouldering involves completing routes, also known as ‘problems', which have a defined start and end point. The difficulty of these routes are defined by grades.

How it all began

My first experience with bouldering was through a good friend of mine. He took me and a friend of ours to a gym in Tilburg, where we all studied at the time. Funnily enough the friend that introduced us to bouldering has stopped since, and me and my other friend are still going strong to this day. This experience was years ago though, since at the time I was still preoccupied with other sports like Kendo, but I still loved every minute of it. Fast forward like a year and my time with Kendo was coming to a close, and I was searching for something else to fill the spot. I went bouldering again in the spring of 2024 in a new gym that had recently opened in Tilburg, and I've been obsessed ever since.

Why I love bouldering

What makes bouldering such a fun sport? I think there are hundreds of reasons one could come up with, but today I will keep it limited to my personal 5 biggest reasons I love this sport so much.

1. It's like solving a puzzle with your body

If you've ever seen a bouldering competition or been to a bouldering gym, you've likely seen the absurd ways people use their bodies in climbing. Some do a split high in the air, some decompress themselves to mere atoms, and others take shapes that would impress even the most skilled yogis. Don't worry though, this isn't something you'll likely be doing in the beginning of your climbing journey, but it's a great way to illustrate the puzzle solving that comes with bouldering. Every route is different, and you can be as creative as you'd like in completing it. This comparison gets made a lot, but I tend to agree with it: bouldering is the most video game-like sport there is.

2. Exercising while playing

All this puzzling and problem solving is a great way to train your brain, but it's also a great workout. It mostly focuses the upper body, particularly the back and forearm muscles, but you still use your legs and the rest of your body a lot. When I go bouldering, time flies by just as quickly as if I'm doing any other hobby, but it still gives me roughly a 2 hour workout whilst feeling that I'm just playing a game.

3. Sense of progression

The sense of progression and accomplishment is one of the most rewarding things I've personally experienced while practicing a sport. Bouldering is so rich in its techniques and its variety of routes, that especially in the beginning, you feel like you're improving with each session. It's inevitable that this rate of progression will slow down eventually, but there is always something to work toward, a new route you want to complete, a new technique you want to master. There is always a reason to keep moving forward and become better than you were yesterday.

4. Diversity of routes

I've touched on this subject shortly in some of the previous sections, but this deserves a highlight of its own. There is such an amazing range of varied routes that you can climb, that there is something for everyone. There are, at least in my brain, 2 main differences in routes. The first are overhanging routes, where the wall is tilted outward. Overhangs are mostly focused on upper body and grip strength, since gravity pulls you away from the holds. These are my personal favorite kinds of routes, and they could be yours too if you want to feel like you're a spider crawling out of your nest.

The second one are slab routes, where the wall is tilted inwards. Slabs are more focused on balance and precise footwork, since gravity pushes you towards the wall. If the route setters used the same kinds of holds they do on overhangs here, the routes would be way too easy (due to the aforementioned gravity situation), so it's (in)famous for its miniscule holds that the naked eye cannot see. Here you can feel like a mountain goat hopping to the top, if you don't slip, which I do more than I would like to admit.

The main takeaway here is that there is something every body type is naturally good at, and everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. This to me not only makes it inclusive, but also an expression of self. If you'd like to argue that there exists no such thing as a self, then I'd probably agree with you, but the more philosophical stuff will have to wait for a future article.

5. Community

I've been a part of some amazing communities over the years, having done a diverse range of sports and hobbies, but in my experience nothing compares to the warm hearted feeling I get every time I enter a boulder gym. There are people of all ages, children to adolescents to adults to elderly, trying the same problems and helping each other to accomplish what they themselves didn't think they could do. This sense of connection, everyone doing the same stuff in different ways with different backgrounds, is such a beautiful thing to witness.

Conclusion

I hope this article has properly conveyed my love for bouldering, and I hope even more that this convinced even one of my readers to try it out sometime. I've not yet hit my full one year of bouldering, but this sport has already grown to be such a big part of my life and it has meant more to me than I could possibly convey with words. For the ones that are wondering, the highest grade I've climbed to date is a 6c+, but I usually climb around the 6b+ grade mark. Thank you all for reading this article if you've made it this far, and I aim to write a lot more this year than I did the last, so stay tuned for more!