Yesterday (it was sunny again yay!) Kali and I went to Queen Mary's rock climbing club. The club itself is really quite chill, basically whoever can meet on Wednesday afternoons to climb does, but it is more of for organizing trips where they go climb actual rocks in France and such. Also if you are in the club you get discounts when you go to climb, so it is quite cheap and climbing shoes are included in the price.
Once we had signed the paper work that basically said that we were adults, hence anything stupid we did was our own fault, we got a tour of the facility.
Most of the climbing done is without ropes. There is one room specifically for rope climbing that is much taller then the other ones, but most of the rooms have the hand holds all over the wall so you can just scamper around like spiders. The walls are pretty dang high for no ropes, but most of them have huge mats underneath.
There were also several "practice walls" that you would climb horizontally, just to get a feel of climbing and work on technique.
Speaking of technique, apparently you are not supposed to cling for dear life onto the wall and instead should keep your arms straight as possible (its less work) and have your legs do most of the work. This means your body should actually be quite far away from the wall most of the time. Lets just say I'm working on that part.
Anyway, we climbed for about 2 hours. It was a ton of fun and by the end of it I was off the very beginner walls and could climb up (and back down! this is important because only one of the walls has a ladder to climb down) some of the still-beginner-but-might-have-some-more-confidence walls. Needless to say my arms and hands are still very sore.
After that I went to the gym to try out a street dance class.
I am very very white. In class we were learning break dancing. It was a ton of fun, and I will probably go back next week, but I did not exactly do a very good job. Luckily, the instructor was very very nice, only a few people in the class actually dance, and I knew a few people in the class through mutual friends so we could laugh at out inability to break dance together.
Also, break dancing requires you to at times put all of your weight on your arms and have the rest of your body of the floor. My arms were already sore from climbing and this just about killed them haha. Who knows, maybe I will actually develop some upper body strength!
Anyway, here is the website of the climbing wall
mileendwall.org.uk
they have a photo gallery and stuff
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