Seven or eight times over the last few weeks I’ve gone to a nearby park with some friends from work during lunch break. The park has two large climbing boulders, like this one:
Each boulder has four sides, with one easy face so kids can climb. As you can tell from the picture,  the other walls are actually inverted.  The first time we went I looked at the inverted walls and though, “What a joke, I can’t climb these, nobody can climb these.”  I tried anyways, I was right I couldn’t climb any of them, at least nobody else could either

We didn’t quit though, back in the office we did pull-ups and griping exercises, trying to strengthen our climbing muscles, and we kept going back, several times a week. Eventually we all started to notice an improvement. Our goal was to be able to climb up all eight sides in one climbing session, at the beginning that seemed an impossibility, but two days ago Pete did it!  He’s nearly a foot taller than the rest of us, so we joked that it was his height that gave him an advantage, but in reality he’s been hitting the pull-up bar more than the rest of us and has bulked up. I didn’t feel too bad though, I did six of the eight sides the same day, a far cry from only being able to do the two easy sides.

Finally, one hour ago, I was able to climb all 8 sides consecutively! Even better, when I finished, I climbed one of the hard sides again, just because I could.

SUCCESS!!!

We’ve already been certified to belay at the local climbing wall, so our next goal is to climb all 16 corners, and then we’ll start some top-rope climbing at some of the local rock formations.