Making a training spot in your home town:

The hardest part of living somewhere as an amateur athlete is finding a spot to train that is easy to use and accessible. At a certain point I do not think that any climber can get by just with the local cliffs and ice routes.  It may be easier in the desert but a gym just adds so much variability to climbing.  

There are so many aspects of training that stop people; Clean Space, Times available, Motivation in space, Cost of training, Overuse and gym crowding,  Limitation of routes or movement.

I feel like all of these things have to be managed and kept fluid in order to train effectively and also to stay motivated.  For the last 3 years since I moved to Montpelier I have been working with a local bunch of friends to get a small training spot going.  The closest place with a bouldering wall that is not someones hangboard is 45 minutes away in Burlington.  I feel like Montpelier is one of the few state capitals with a climbing gym at 45 minutes or farther away.  Even Augusta Maine has come colleges with Gyms closer.  The gym space that we found is primarily used for the CrossFit program.  They had some extra space and the director thought that a wall meshed with the crossfit program.  I think it will work out well because we have the access code to the gym and can go in whenever we want so long as it does not interfere with their classes.  It is a neat gym because it is a non profit community based gym so there is really a lot of neat things that happen there and for me it is the tip of the iceberg at getting into a new training regime.  The people at the gym are all nice and invested in their own gym.  I have been surprised at the atmosphere and I feel like I want any gym that I train at to be like this.  Usually you find inspired people at a climbing gym because the climbing aspect of learning and doing a route requires a creative mindset.  I feel like the Crossfit program must attract those same creative thinkers.

The wall had materials donated from me and the director of the confluence and then some additional wood was bought from a fundraiser that was held last year when we thought that the wall would go in a different spot. I also donated all of the holds that I had, and a bunch of wood so there was a lot of people to get together to get this thing built.   Four of us ended up donating time to erect the wall over multiple weekends and weeknights and it is still a work in progress.    After getting the wall together and putting so much time into that both before and after my AZ trip I am not sure I want to do anything other than train for climbing now.  I put pictures in from start to finish to highlight the wall coming together. It took 4 guys over 160 hours of work collectively to build and that doesn't include any of the logistics and planning of building before we started the actual building of stuff. It was about a thousand dollars of donated money and that is going towards the crash pads and framing materials.  The holds were already present and are fine for now. Tonight I am going up to finish putting holds on the wall I will update with another picture later. 


The Starting Space

Framing the 45 degree

End of the first full weekend