THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Around where I live, there's a roof with a few holds.

One is big, one is painful.

One is far away, one is good.

One is small, one is sharp.

I've tried the moves, because a friend told me it's possible to do them. As I really started to get sucked into the problem, one bad demon emerged, and at first I didn't recognized it: it's the demon that leads you to take the easiest way, and in my case, that is a long dyno to a good pinch, that can be fully locked down to reach the final hold of the crux sequence.

So what?

The good pinch sits close to a very good edge, and this one is close to another edge that's even better: but they're not under the roof, they are outside of it and are used for another sequence on another problem.

A perfect line has turned into a contrived eliminate: you can use the pinch but not the edges, you can use the sloper but you can't toe hook on that. The desire to get to the top made ethic fade.

Then a strong climber tried the moves, and he decided that he was using the pinch, the edges and whatever he could, under the roof or not, to get to the top, and to give a name and a grade to the thing. After being there just one time, he started packing in hundreds of kilometers, to go and try the line on his own, without telling me anything, without even asking if, maybe, I wanted to go there and have a few goes with him. He wants the line for himself. He wants to climb it first, and he doesn't want to take care of anything else.

The other day, he told me he had got very good news for me, because he had stuck the moves more that once, and was very close to the send. I really couldn't understand how these could be good news for me, au contraire, I'm close to defeat. My first reaction was to go there every day until I get it first, but then I understood in what those news were good: because they led me to think that there are no shortcuts, and no easy ways to be taken.

The holds under the roofs are what it's at. Unlike mountaineering, in bouldering it's more important how you get to the top, than getting the top: the climber and the guy who takes pictures from above, are both on top of the boulder, but only the climber has climbed it.

So, I'll take the other road, the less traveled. I'll have a nightmare in trying the line. I'll have moments of joy (will I?) and hours of delusion, but I'll be true to myself and to the line that always appealed me, that is the line of holds under the roof.

This, finally, will also make my life easier, because when someone will like to try the problem, and will ask me where does it go, I'll just say "use the holds that are under the roof".