A week ago I was at my home climbing gym in Upper Saddle River, The Gravity Vault. I didn’t have much time to climb that day, as I had to cover for a girl at work in the afternoon, but I was making the most of it. I bouldered hard for a little over an hour and was going to pack up when my former coach, Ferdie, approached me.<\/p>\n
Ferdie sets routes for the gym every few weeks. He doesn’t set as much in the Upper Saddle River location, but you can see his signature on the start of many routes there regardless. He asked me what I thought of the setting at the gym, having had the opportunity during the school year to climb in gyms in Colorado, a major climbing state.<\/p>\n
I answered honestly, saying that I enjoyed the routes here in Jersey and that they still challenged me. I offered a few suggestions about making stronger delineations between route levels and changing the routes more often, but it was a pretty positive review. I did mention, additionally, that I had been working on V6s and V7s (boulder problems of high level), and would especially love more that had a lot of quirky moves that involve strong balance and had lots of crimps (tiny handholds). I said this with a grin, as those types of problems are my specialty and I always relish in them.<\/p>\n
I went on my way shortly after Ferdie thanked me for the input and headed back to his setting. I didn’t think much more of it. Today, a week later, I arrived at the Gravity Vault to climb for an hour and a half. To my delight, there was a small new section of boulder problems. On closer inspection, I discovered that Ferdie had set them all. What’s more, amongst the problems was a V6 exactly as I had described–almost all crimps, except for one sloper-jug that made for a dynamic, balance-y move. With even a closer look, I saw that he had set them all the day after talking to me.<\/p>\n
Maybe he was already planning to set some new boulder problems. Maybe that V6 was just made organically, with my request completely out of mind. But it’s nice to think that Ferdie set it all for me. It’s nice when people listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A week ago I was at my home climbing gym in Upper Saddle River, The Gravity Vault. I didn’t have much time to climb that day, as I had to cover for a girl at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ponderings"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}