Stubborn: An 8 Month Indoor Climbing Project and Training for Twin 8-Year-Olds

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Like many kids their age, my kids can have short spans of attention. They can buzz around from activity to activity, leave detritus behind them (until they are “reminded” to pick it up), and literally bounce around and go on 10 meter runs in the house to expel the energy of their mile-a-minute minds.

But my kids can also latch onto specific activities or challenges or goals.

If you think about life spans, the boys’ spent about a twelfth of their life working on this route. Of course, it wasn’t the only thing they did. We have the local bouldering gym, and outdoor climbs galore in the area around our home. But every time I asked them if they wanted to change the route, they refused. “Not until we climb it on lead, Dad!”

More than the focus that it took to work this route for so long, though, I was most impressed by their desire to put in the work training and learning tactics. We instituted a three-days-of-climbing and two-days-of-resistance-training weekly routine. And we worked individual moves on top rope before moving on to mock leads (also finding good positions for clipping while on top rope) before finally trying the lead climbs.

If you were wondering, I also set a rule that they had to climb four mock leads in a row cleanly (not every weighting the top rope) before they could attempt a lead climb - which they each completed at their first attempt.

What could have been a frustrating experience, then, turned into a very positive one, with the boys seeing the direct link between preparation and outcomes.