Climbing the walls at MurMur

Every week Sylvain and I have a date night- each week we trade responsibility for planning it. Sylvain usually plans a dinner date which is sort of perfect every other week, but I'm more keen on doing something out of the ordinary, and today we went to MurMur to do some climbing. I tried it once on a Hyde retreat and Sylvain is really sporty with a lot of upper body strength so I figured he might enjoy it.

For reasons I still don't understand, he thought I was skilled in climbing- that I could show him how. I told him I'd only gone once, but when we got to actually doing it, we had to ask the person next to us to show us how to knot the rope. When I did it at Bath with Hyde we had a belaying device that was sort of idiot proof where even if you were texting on your mobile and your partner fell, he'd live. These were not the same kinds of ropes, but it was super simple after someone shows you once. Nonetheless my initial ignorance made Sylvain uneasy and it took him a few climbs before he felt comfortable with me belaying him. In short, what a great way to determine whether your partner trusts you- every couple should have to do this before committing to anything regarding a marriage contract. Before we met Sylvain broke his leg climbing a wall so he had reason not to want to take it lightly, but still, I was surprised he found it so difficult to trust me/enjoy it at first. I jump into everything, I trust that if it was life threatening or super hard they'd make you inscribe in a class before letting you off on your own.

I like sports and trying anything new although I'm not bothered by achieving any kind of expertise, Sylvain is competitive though, and wanted to do the line climbs where you are only meant to use the red grips, or the white grips and these are labeled with a difficulty level. I just want to get up to the top and am less bothered by following a line or "cheating" with a quick step on a green grip. We did a lot of lines anyway, as it was tempting to try, but when the walls were inclined I was just happy to get up. There were some really incredibly difficult wall courses and it was fun just to watch advanced climbers scramble up or plan their maneuvers - there was one girl climber with some agility which was impressive, all the male climbers were light, but men in general have the kind of upper body strength that makes this kind of work a little easier to manage. What we didn't have was the hand chalk that becomes essential after a couple hours of climbing. The grips can be so tiny and your hands just can't maintain a hold on them without it after a while; this was not included with the equipment rental, but the regulars had their own pouches attached to their climbing belts which I had first imagined were pockets for water bottles.

When we were finished I told Sylvain that one of the things I like about date night is how much we've been able to experience in Paris just because every week we make and effort to get out and do something, already we've done so much more than we ever did in New York I explained, but then he reasoned, if we had started date night in New York, I would have had to host every week as he had been skint and I covered most of our socializing as it was. He had a point.