Saturday, May 28, 2005

In my 17 years of existence, I've never ever climbed so much before. It left me bruised, burned and battered. Really, sports climbing can be tremendous fun (provided you reach the top of the wall), but more often than not it only serves to torture you, both physically and mentally. It taught me how to push myself to the limit, achieve heights (literally) I never thought I could reach, and the power of endurance and perseverance.

In the past 3 days I've learnt that a little fall can't kill you. Neither can a big one. You just gotta get up, take a little rest, and you're ready to go again. In the course of the programme we were taught to lead climb. Basically it just means you gotta attach the safety rope to the anchor point at the summit of the synthetic rock wall yourself... in simpler terms, it just means that if you fall there's nothing to safeguard you.

(I've never had good impressions of rock-climbing since a bad experience in Sec 1. And its still a baffling mystery to me why in sanity did I chose this elective in the first place.)

So I was climbing this slightly inwardly inclined wall, and clipping on the safety rope at certain height intervals. After like a thousand years, when I finally reached the last anchorpoint, I was hanging on with my right hand onto a jutting rock, and with my left, reaching out to clip on the safety rope. Everything suddenly happened in slow-mo style... One moment I was reaching with my left hand to the attach the safety cord directly above me, and the next moment my right hand lost grip of the jutting rock and I felt myself pushed by gravity, free-falling through a height of 6m probably? It happened so suddenly my belayer didn't have time to react, and as I was gaining speed during the fall I felt myself suddenly stopped short of hitting the floor by a mere 10cm? I almost fainted lah. Thankfully my belayer was able to hang on to the rope in time, but not before suffering rope burns to her fingers.

I almost died from heart attack I tell you. When I was falling it felt as though I left my all internal organs up at the top where I was hanging while the rest of me fell. It was one experience I'll never forget ah.

But that didn't stop me from climbing. So for the next 2 days I continued to climb. The tiring thing about climbing is when fatigue sets in. Mentally, you want to go higher, but physically, your body parts starts to disobey you. Your fingers lock in a vice-like griphold, refusing to flex, your arm muscles cramp up and tightens so it becomes a hard lump, perspiration trickles down but you have no hands to wipe them away 'cause you're holding on for dear life. And I fell more. And there are variations of my falls. Sometimes you just fall a straightline path down, you land on your feet; sometimes throughout the fall you bump into the various jutting rocks on the wall, get a few bruises here and there; other times, you hold too tightly to the rope when you fall, and you get rope burns. But all in all, whatever the falls, small or big, vertical or horizontal, it can't kill you.

What's the saying again... What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

Ha.

writing at 2:19 PM

---