Chris Hughes, a fellow outdoor instructor and friend, and I managed to find some time in the diaries to get out for the day. During this time of year, we try to get out once a month or so. In recent months, we’ve been paddling and scrambling, so we thought we’d ring the changes with a trip to an indoor climbing wall. Wolf Mountain in Wolverhampton was our chosen venue.

In all honesty, it’s been a while since I actually got to climb myself, as work usually involves enabling others to have a go. So it was good to get back into it and realise that not all my skills have faded into the distant past. However, climbing is particularly demanding on the forearms and fingers and, while Chris struggled with forearm pump, it was my fingers that were loosing strength.

We started off with a few straightforward top roped routes as a warm up, before getting out the lead rope to up the stakes a little. After lunch, and the opportunity to put the world to rights, we stuck to top roped routes, but varied the difficulty of our chosen climbs according to our sense of strength more than anything.

I must confess that the last time we climbed indoors together, Chris showed me up a bit. It was refreshing to see him struggling a bit more than me today, but I’m sure it’s nothing that an extra 6 inches in height wouldn’t sort out. Chris is working towards his Climbing Wall Leader Award, so I expect we’ll be back at a wall before too long, by which time I’m sure he’ll be embarrassing me again.