Average Beta

First Session After a Month Off

February 2, 2025 · 2 min read

A chest infection took most of December and the first week of January, and when it was over I was so tired of being indoors that I went straight back to the wall as though nothing had happened. Nothing had changed on the walls themselves; everything had changed about me. I warmed up on problems I would normally not count and was breathing hard after four of them.

The strength loss was less than I had feared. I could still hang on, still pull, and the first problem at my usual grade went on the second attempt, which was an enormous relief. The skin was the real casualty. After a month without contact my fingertips were soft and smooth, and by the forty-minute mark they were pink and stinging on anything textured. I stopped at an hour, which is about half my normal session, because the alternative was a flapper that would have cost another week.

What surprised me most was how foreign the movement felt. Little things: reaching for a hold and finding it ten centimetres from where I expected, over-gripping everything, forgetting to breathe on hard moves and then gasping at the top. My body remembered the strength better than it remembered the coordination, which is the opposite of what I had assumed would happen.

I gave myself a rule for the return: two weeks of easy volume, no attempts at my limit, sessions capped at seventy-five minutes, and no hangboard at all. By the end of the second week the skin had hardened up, the breathing had settled and the movement was starting to feel like mine again. The first proper attempt at a hard problem was on the fifteenth day, and I fell off it, and it was fine.

Looking at the whiteboard from before the illness, the grades were the same as now. A month off cost me about two weeks of feeling awful and no measurable grade, which is a useful thing to know for the next time life gets in the way. The fear of losing everything is much worse than the actual loss.