Did you ever do that thing where you stand in a doorway and push out hard against the frame with the backs of your hands, then step out of the doorway with your body at rest, and your arms raise themselves? It’s to demonstrate muscle contraction triggered by calcium ions—you know, for kids.
Anyway, that’s how my arms feel now—rubbery and hyper—after indoor rock climbing tonight. I’ve never done that before. I should have read up on the subject beforehand because mechanical systems confuse me, especially regarding levers and pulleys, and when I’m concentrating on not killing my partner, the climber, while I’m belaying. So I eventually learned the lingo, as you can see, and the levers and pulleys, and I didn’t kill Beth, not that there was danger in that, as she’s scaled ragged mountain faces in Wyoming and is as lithe and surefooted as Tom Cruise’s stunt double in the opening scene of Mission: Impossible.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation runs 15 indoor rec centers in Manhattan and Iggy works at the only one with a climbing wall, on W. 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. It’s a compact, maze-like building, smelling of sweat, chlorine and old wood, its exercise facilities reminiscent of an elderly but clean high school’s. There’s a basketball court, a pool in the basement, and men’s and women’s locker rooms with showers. A full-sized air-hockey table sits outside the climbing room, which is run by the City Climbers Club, a non-profit organization comprised of a bunch of crazy-folk with excellent muscle definition. They started out rappelling in Central Park and because there wasn’t any place to climb indoors at the time, built the 59th Street climbing wall from scratch on a disused racquetball court. The room’s festooned with signs warning everything from “This is not the lifeguard training room” to “Climbing is Inherently Dangerous.” Synthetic-rock handholds and footholds, marked with colored tape blazes indicating paths of varying difficulty, have been bolted into plywood masking the room’s original walls. Some of the climbing walls angle outward or are pitched upside-down for a more challenging climb.
Iggy is a climbing supervisor for the Climbers Club and runs its private parties, after-school programs and kids’ events, which is fortunate, because he was patient in teaching me the basics and repeating instructions, like, five times. Only at the bar afterwards did I learn he wanted to punch me in the neck because I was exasperating him.
I had a fun but tense time and learned I need to visualize my path in advance so I’m not wasting time and energy clinging to the wall, jerking my head around to locate the nearest tiny piece of white tape. I must also more efficiently utilize my long legs to push myself ceiling-bound instead of pulling myself upward with my comparatively weaker arms. On my final climb of the night, my upper limbs were too weak to grasp the uppermost hold. Muscles I never before realized I even had, like abs and triceps, ache now, but in a good way.