Gym bunny

Seasonal calendar for the Melbourne (Victoria) area.
Compiled by Dr. Beth Gott of the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University.

Start of April, end of Daylight Saving Time. Sunset happens closer and closer to Close of Business hour and the air is becoming decidedly chilly. By the European calendar, April is Autumn, and by the Indigenous people's seasons it's already early Winter. Feels like it, for sure.

The throng of climbers that gather weekly at the library wall is dwindling, and Climber Boy finally declares ... it's time!

Time to shift operations to the climbing gym.

I've seen photos of breathtakingly awesome climbing gyms that are massive human-made caverns containing every perceivable arrangement of protrusion, over which training climbers can contort themselves. Some are so realistically intricate that patrons need never venture to the outdoor world, finding all their needs for climbing challenges met amply within the confines of the synthetic.

The walls of these gyms are beautifully textured, to give the impression of gnarly rock surfaces, plus there are plastic handholds of varying degree of purchase (or lack thereof) bolted strategically into the walls to add further dimension. The holds are a multitude of bright, cheery colours, with individual routes marked out by same-colour holds.

The holds remind me of the globs of wet toilet paper that we used to throw high against the school toilet walls and ceiling; if you gauged the water content and throwing force just right, the glob would pack itself into a compact mound on impact that would stick nicely to the surface and dry there, creating an emblematic monument high above the ground, that you and your school-friends could admire for years to come.

Our two local climbing gyms are nothing like this.

Canberra's two public indoor climbing gyms consist of a large box-shaped space about two storeys high, with flat plywood-lined walls whose non-slip paint has long since been scrubbed off by the hoards of chalked hands and rubberised feet traversing it. For added effect, some of the walls have varying degrees of backward lean to them, and some might have a leaning-back kick at the very top. Many of the walls also have oddly shaped boxes attached to them to act as mini obstacles. The walls are festooned with plastic holds, as in more salubrious gyms, but the vividness of their colour reflects their age - over time and traffic, all colours - regardless of their original brightness - tend towards the same brownish hue. It takes an experienced eye to discern these well-worn routes, and many a climber has been thrown off-route or left hanging in perplexity mid-route because of the blending of moulded plastic colour.

Our modest local indoor climbing gym, with the requisite patient non-climbing parent on belay duty to keen young child.

In front of each wall hangs a sparse curtain of ropes to which carabiners are securely attached at either end. Each rope is anchored to the floor at one end (the belayer's end), ascends to a pulley near the gym ceiling, and then plummets back to ground level and a double carabiner (the climber's end).

Dragon entrails.

The tortured squeals of the old pulleys, as each climber is lowered gently back to ground, can be heard from outside the gym. Inside the gym, the pulley squealing intermingles with raucous head-banger music that's meant to spur you into upbeat attack-that-wall mode. Judging by the the widespread flexing of exposed muscles (and both males and females abound here) it seems to work for most. I'm contemplating bringing my portable music player next time.

Not that I'm complaining, however. The nearest public climbing gym is but 5kms from home and a convenient cycle after work or on a cold weekend afternoon when rain is imminent.

CB fastens us to our respective ends of the gym rope and clambers up one of the brownish-hue routes while I belay and observe. The plastic holds might've been a lovely purple colour in their early days. CB shimmies up the wall, using the grippiness of the surface for purchase as much as the actual holds. By the end of two such routes his forearms are pumped and rock solid.

We swap over. I'm getting another "hospital rocks" moment, with a vertical wall looming above me and a multitude of hand and foot holds that seemed so obvious and useable when CB found purchase on them, having suddenly shrunk or morphed into smooth, slippery blobs on the wall.There's an added level of difficulty here in that you have to use only specific holds in order to pursue a route - and if they looked much the same colour from below, they're even more uniform from the front and above, where people have been grappling with their sweaty hands and rubber feet.

CB starts me on a blue-coloured climb made up of big, positive jugs. I hoist myself up, bit by bit, feeling stiff and unbalanced. It still amazes me how unintuitive this exercise is for my otherwise quite fit and nimble body.

About two metres from the top, the wall suddenly juts out above my head. I've reached this overhang and now I'm totally stuck. CB is calling instructions up to me. At this height, all I can hear is squealing pulleys, headbanger music, and the odd guttural groan from some Amazon man aping their stuff up in the bouldering deck. I'm looking at the holds on the overhang and my brain just has no idea how to tackle this. I'm hanging there contemplating my future, meanwhile my arms are screaming at me more and more loudly to "get the F*CK off this wall".

OK, time to let go.

CB lets me dangle up there for a while, hoping I'll swing back onto the wall after a rest and some contemplation time. But, no - I have a dragon at my heels again and the relos - cousin ICDI and auntie INGE - are engaging in a major brawl with my more logical mindset ... and winning hands down.

This little gym bunny needs some time out and a good cup of tea.