My first lead-climb in 3 years

I had my first lead-climb at the rock-climbing wall in three years today. It was dismal, to say the least. It was just a pokey 15m-high 5C route, and three years ago I could have done it without so much as a struggle. But that was three years ago, and I also had not worked out for an entire week since my recent Shanghai trip.

To begin with, I just wasn't feeling confident at all with the moves. And on top of that, a week's absence from the gym made me feel as if I had lost 30% of my upper body strength. I was stopping to rest at literally every clip-in point!

Here's the capper: I was struggling to clip in the rope at the last clip-in point before the anchor. My fingers slipped at the gate of the caribiner. My belayer Chee Keong heard the snapping the caribiner's gate, and assuming that I had successfully clipped-in, proceeded to give me rope tension - effectively hauling me down! It wasn't his fault at all, really - one normally assumes that a rope clip-in operation proceeds without problems, and this was also Chee Keong's first hand at lead-belaying.

Anyway, the force of his pull on the rope, coupled by my muscular exhaustion, caused me to lose my grip and fall. Now, I weigh 96kg, and that's a good 30-odd kg more than Chee Keong. The force of my body weight yanked the poor bloke towards the wall, and there was probably a split-second when he lost grip of the rope. I plummeted about 5 metres before Chee Keong managed to arrest my fall.

That's not the worst part. In my panic at moment of the free-fall, I made a desperate attempt to grab onto the rope. Not only did I fail to arrest my own free-fall, the force of my body weight under gravity gave me a severe rope-burn on my left hand.

It's funny what an adrenaline rush can do to you. As I said, I was stopping to rest at every clip-in point. But after the fall, which caused me to drop 3-4 clip-in points below, I immediately started off again, oblivious to the seething pain from my rope-burn injury, and prompty cleared the height I had lost during the fall. Too bad, by the time I got back to where I had left off, I was way too tired to complete the climb.

Oh, well... every climber has to experience a hard fall once. In my case, it happened only six years after I started rock-climbing! Well, at least I did not get it as bad as my Penang climbing buddy Joo Biau - the poor guy not only fell, his whole body flipped upside-down, and he came within a nose-hair of crashing his face into solid granite!

Note: For those of you who are unfamiliar with rock-climbing terminology, there are generally two types of climbs - top-rope climbing and lead-climbing. In top-rope climbing, the rope is already set-up and anchored at the top of the route. In lead-climbing, the climber is responsible to bring the rope up on the ascent and set it up at the anchor.