Rock out with your chalk out

By: CADE GRUNST

Posted: 2/8/08

I honestly don't know why I ever anticipate that anything will be simple. I'm invariably wrong.

There I was, sitting in class on syllabus day listening to the audible whoosh of the instructor's material passing just over my head. While this is a phenomenon to which I'm growing steadily more accustomed, this lecture took me by surprise. It's not often that I find myself utterly baffled by my phys-ed instructors.

For reasons due largely to my stringent adherence to a complicated astrological table involving Martian moon phases and the fact that I took the intro course in the fall, I enlisted in Intermediate/Advanced Rock Climbing this quarter. I figured my 10 weeks' experience would be enough to let me sneak by.

I was terribly, utterly wrong.

From day one I've been out of my league. Coach Manera spent the morning poring over our syllabus in painstaking detail, pausing here and there for questions and clarification while I glanced around frantically for someone looking as confused as me. Day two was much the same. As we started to climb, it became rapidly apparent that my classmates and I have different approaches to the sport. More specifically, they can hack it, while I can't.

Don't get me wrong, I make a valiant effort. As far as I'm concerned, rock climbing is fantastic - it's like sex, except I get to do it occasionally. The feeling of triumph you get when finishing a difficult climb is incomparable, and there's nothing quite like the way a harness frames your sensitive bits.

Still, it can be incredibly disheartening to fall time after time attempting a climb you know your partner could surmount in her sleep. Quite frankly, comparing me to some of these climbers is like drawing parallels between a dragonfly and a tyrannosaur: They're both predators, but only one's worth mentioning. I head home every Tuesday and Thursday sore in muscle groups I didn't previously know I possessed.

An unreasonably good climber himself, Coach Manera expects a lot from us. Even on the first day he wasn't satisfied with merely "up." No, we climbed up, then back down, then back up. It was the same thing the next week, except to make it interesting we weren't allowed to use footholds. Then we couldn't rest on the ground.

After Half-Dome I figured I knew what tired was, but I was mistaken. Tired isn't a hike, it's that moment when you've taxed every sinew to the utmost scrabbling to hang on to a handhold the size of a grape while doing the splits to keep yourself adhered to the wall. I missed a week because I was sick, and when I returned I was almost surprised the class wasn't climbing with their faces, using eyelashes for stability and hoisting themselves up by leveraging their navels around holds while performing intricate belly contractions.

For his part, Manera patrols the base bellowing advice that Spider-Man himself would have difficulty following. "You can make this!" he'll holler. "Just move your left foot about 3 inches above your right shoulder, and bite the wall for support! You'll be fine!" More often than not it turns out his ravings aren't merely the by-product of a delusional mind, and up we go.

With Coach Manera pushing us up both figuratively and, at times, literally, we can't help but succeed regardless of how many attempts we require. Rock climbing is a deeply personal sport, and everyone approaches the wall differently. Once properly into the flow, climbing can be almost meditative. After days of mind-bogglingly complicated classes, it's extremely relaxing despite the pain to take to the wall. The repetition of handhold, foothold, handhold, foothold, rest, foothold, etc. centers me, readying me anew for the stupid-hard schedule I get as the prize for being a science major. "With enough chalk you can climb air," Coach told us, and at this point I guess it's only fair that I have to prove it.

CADE GRUNST wants to climb with you! Caterwaul in his general direction (cade@ucdavis.edu), and he'll set something up.