Our journey to the Dark Side is now complete! Yesterday, Audrey and I purchased shoes and signed up for gym memberships starting in September when the summer pass expire.

When it comes to shoes, every sport has their own requirements. While most other shoes are designed around a flat foot, rock climbing shoes are designed around scrunched toes. I asked our helpful Earth Treks pixie, Sam, why this was. She said that when curved, you get more power out of your toes and can push off your feet much better. Also, the curve allows your foot to sneak into crags and little holds that would be impossible with regular shoes. The more aggressive shoes have deeper curvatures.

We’ve been hitting 8s-10s so Sam disregarded the beginner shoes (they fall apart once you move up to more advanced routes) and pulled out some more advanced shoes for us to try. She let us try a few on and head to the bouldering cave to step around a few problems. My god, you can actually feel the edges! So much better than the rentals! Here’s what we finally settled on.

Audrey chose Evlov’s Elektra. Dig that purple! It’s a little wider than the rental shoes with much sharper edges around the base and toe rubbers and it hugs the heel a lot tighter. Apparently, you’re looking for a sort of sucking suction in the heel when you’re sizing your rock climbing shoes. Even though the toes are more squished, the Elektra is much more comfortable than the rentals.

I chose the Anasazi from Five Ten. It sports a much deeper curve than the rentals. The rubber is sharper and actually stickier which makes climbing on really tiny chips of holds much easier. I say easier in the sense that now you can actually step on those tiny chips. That 11B will still kick your ass. The toes are nice a squished which makes walking for long periods of time pretty stupid, but they are quite comfy and a dream on the walls. Looking forward to trying our new shoes on some real rocks some day.

We thanked Sam for helping us out, paid for our new gear and new memberships, and headed over to the classroom walls. I’ve discovered that if I get stuck on the 40ft walls at any part of the route, I start to freak out and tense up. I got stuck on a 6 on Saturday when I’ve been going through 8s and 9s on the smaller walls. That’s the fear setting in. So I think I might start much lower on the high walls to get used to the height and use my time on the small walls to improve my climbing jutsu. By contrast, Audrey has no problem going up 9s and 10s on any wall. Even if she gets stuck, she still manages to finish the route.

We decided to tackle one of the hardest routes on the classroom walls, “Reality Check.” It’s a 10D which means 10 FUCK YOU in beginner speak. The holds are small and spaced far apart requiring you to lean and stretch and mantle to make it to the top. Mantling is when you pull up to a hold and then transition to pushing up. There are times when just two points of contact are keeping you on the wall. There’s this one move in particular that gave us both a lot of trouble last week. This week, we both managed to get past that. And for the first time, I made it to the top of a route that Audrey didn’t complete (which honestly doesn’t mean a thing as she went on to completely dominate a route I couldn’t even start). We spent most of the night hitting 9s and 10s (Audrey did a 9 on the high walls). And since our regular crew was off to Connecticon, we left a little early.

Going to have to get over this height thing if we’re going to ever make it outside. Now that we’re members, it’s going to be so much more tempting to get outside. Apparently, they plan some pretty interesting trips overseas to climb some rocks and some members-only rock climbing parties. What do you do at a rock climbing party? Drink a climb? Climb nekked? Spin the carabiner?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Rock Climbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.