A vertical way to strength
I’d spotted the cavernous building called Jungle Gym a couple of months ago as I was leaving a restaurant next door. I was intrigued by the thousands of climbing grips in all shapes and sizes screwed into the walls of the gym.
I made a mental note to return later and give it a try -- my first attempt at indoor rock climbing. Occasionally, I’d clambered up the side of a hill while hiking. And I’ve acted as the belayer -- the one who holds the rope -- when my children talked me into wall climbing sessions during vacations. But I’d never scaled a wall myself, mostly because it looked so difficult. Even my slender, nimble kids would call it a day after no more than an hour on the walls.
Jungle Gym is a new Arcadia outfit that opened in October. My instructor for the day was Kate Howe, an ebullient young woman who operates the business with her husband, Tom Wight. According to American Sports Data Inc., wall climbing is becoming seriously popular in the United States these days. About 7.3 million Americans have tried the sport at least once during the last three years, and those numbers are up significantly from several years ago.
Howe said climbing walls are springing up all over the place, from cruise ships to Las Vegas casinos. One San Francisco club has more than 4,000 members and a number of others dot the Southern California landscape. It’s a younger person’s sport that attracts more men than women, according to the Outdoor Industry Assn., a trade group in Boulder, Colo.
Howe said that in planning their business, they’d tried to guard against the bane of other indoor climbing operations -- snobs. “In a lot of places, if you’re a beginner, you’re looked down on,” she said, recalling times when she herself had been the victim of such snobbery. “So we’ve set it up to keep the beginners and the experts at opposite ends of the room.”
It was plain to see which was which. At the entrance, by the front desk, was the beginner’s area, where novices are strapped into harnesses before they climb. At the other end of the room were walls with seemingly impossible angles and no harnesses. Instead, thick mattresses lined the floor, ready to be moved into place once a climber chooses a route to attempt.
Naturally, I was led to the novice area, where Howe helped strap me into a harness, connecting the rope with a knot that looked reassuringly secure. The key, said Howe, was to think of wall climbing as being akin to scaling a ladder: The legs supply 80% of the power; the arms supply the rest.
After showing me how she would belay the rope, pulling in the slack to keep me from falling, I started my first ascent up the wall, which looked to be about 15 feet high.
It was, of course, the easiest route, following a series of white grips that meandered toward the ceiling. (There are more than 4,000 such grips on the building’s walls, making up more than 200 routes.) At first the going was easy, though some of the grips looked incredibly small as I tried to plant my feet. But then, I mistakenly started depending more on my arms than legs as I ascended. Howe shouted encouragement and advice from below as I touched the top of the wall -- it couldn’t have taken more than five minutes -- and was gently lowered to the floor.
Once there, Howe instructed me to shake my arms to get rid of the lactic acid that had already accumulated in that single climb. Then I began a different route. I made it, but just barely, and my arms were burning from the strain. My heart rate monitor was beeping as well, an indicator that I was well above my optimum zone.
The next phase of the instruction was called bouldering -- or movement over rock -- which is climbing along a route parallel to the floor. This was done without a harness because I was only several feet from the floor and, after several missteps, I made it around the three walls of the beginner’s area.
After a short break, it was back in the harness again, this time to try to ascend a wall that leaned slightly outward, making it more difficult than the previous two ascents.
As I pushed off, I knew my wall climbing was done for the day. My fingers were simply too tired to go on and my arms felt like jelly.
“Looks like you’re fried,” said Howe, who is familiar with the phenomenon. She assured me that people’s skill levels increase dramatically in a very short time. I looked at my watch and saw that I had been climbing a scant 30 minutes.
On the other side of the room, a young woman studied a route and then began skillfully to ascend the wall. Howe said a lot of climbers never transfer their skills from the indoors to the outdoors.
“Many have never climbed on a real rock,” she said.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Snapshot: Indoor climbing
Duration of activity: 30 minutes
Calories burned: 332
Heart rate*: Average, 132 beats
Time in zone*: 7 minutes
Where to go: Jungle Gym, 305 N. Santa Anita Blvd., Arcadia. (626) 446-5014.
*This information was obtained using a heart-rate monitor. Time in the target heart-rate zone is a measure of the intensity of a workout. Target zone varies based on age, individual heart rate.
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Times staff writer J. Michael Kennedy can be reached at j.michael.kennedy@latimes.com.