The only way is up ... My climb to Tokyo starts here
With bouldering about to make its Olympic debut, Marcus Armytage sets his sights on scaling new peaks in the year ahead
You must plan the route like a game of chess, rather than just launching into it
In about 2010, when The Telegraph was gearing up for London 2012, a memo went round asking for writers to volunteer to cover some of the more obscure Olympic sports on which we would not regularly report.
With an eye to an opportunity, I put in for archery and sword fighting in the belief that no one else would and that, essentially, it would be a one-horse race. The job, I reckoned, would be sealed by one disputable fact; that Robin Hood’s supposed resting place was on what remained of a now long-gone Armytage family farm near Huddersfield.
I never made it to London to cover archery or fencing, but Tokyo looms in 2020, and I see my ticket to Japan as this paper’s first bouldering correspondent.
In 2020, climbing becomes an Olympic sport for the first time. Each climber has to undertake three disciplines; speed climbing (fastest to the top of the wall), lead climbing (with a rope) and bouldering, the dictionary definition of which is “the sport of rock climbing on large boulders, low cliffs” or – and I have added this bit in myself – up an indoor wall or overhang with artificial routes of varying difficulty.
Recently, I was walking through Vauxhall in south London when my eye was drawn to the whitewashed walls with colourful foot and handholds of Vauxwall West Climbing Centre underneath the railway arches. So, this week, with the sage advice of the too-jolly-by-half station announcer at Didcot Parkway ringing in my ears – “Have a nice day and give it your best shot” – I set off for Vauxwall, determined to do just that.
I was to receive instruction from Silje (pronounced Celia), a Dane. I thought it unwise to hold the fact that the highest “mountain” in Denmark is 482ft, not much bigger than a molehill, against her.
Silje was right about there being a “dude vibe” – chilled people in a nice space – about the place as she taught me the basic moves, told me about the importance of the social side of climbing (short bursts of intense activity interspersed with quite a lot of cake eating), to use my legs more than arms to save energy and to plan my vertical route like I were playing chess; thinking ahead rather than launching into it.
Bouldering has been gaining in popularity for some time. Three climbing centres a year are opening in the South East alone, and the Lakeland Climbing Centre, of which Vauxwall is a part, has enjoyed a 30 per cent year-on-year growth for a while now. Its inclusion in the Olympics will inspire more people, but what saw it take off exponentially was the release of Free Solo, the Oscar-winning documentary of Alex Honnold’s remarkable free climb of Yosemite National Park’s “El Capitan” last February.
Of course, like many sports, bouldering does something other than give you a full-body workout. Vauxwall is managed by Paul Cottee, who started bouldering when he had depression; the intense focus required to climb a 16ft wall makes it a great form of mindfulness.
Of course, it is not a stipulation of being a racing correspondent to have once been a jockey, but this experience can, surely, have done my ticket to Tokyo no harm?
“Should Spiderman be worried by my progress?” I asked Silja at the finish.
“You are a little spider,” she said, which I take to mean I have made a reasonable start. So, if I fail to get The Telegraph gig, I suppose I could yet try for the team.