The Year I Became a Sports Dad

I never tried rock climbing when I was young and reasonably fit, but I’d always thought of it as a sport for thin outdoorsy types who were incredibly lithe of limb. I am…not that. These past months, I’ve often stood in front of even the simplest boulder problems (as the color-coded climbing routes are called) with a mixture of sheer hilarity and terror. What do you mean I have to contort my arms and legs into that ungodly position? Just whomst, exactly, do you think I am?

I have become intimately familiar with the way gravity hits different in your mid-40s — with all the unlikely angles at which this old and heavy, half-decrepit body of mine can come crashing down onto the mat. Or, in my prouder moments, the way I wheeze my way up to the top, forearms burning, only to spend the next two days bed-ridden with a thrown-out back.

All of this is the source of much merriment for my eight-year-old, who has taken to the sport like she was born to do it — light as air as she tip-taps her feet from boulder to boulder or, on the steepest-angled walls, hangs upside-down, like Spiderman, for longer than seems possible. On the way to practice each Monday afternoon, she is as excited as she ever gets, with her monkey-shaped chalk bag strapped over her shoulder, her pink unicorn water bottle filled to the brim. She is ready to CLIMB.

Which isn’t necessarily to say it’s come easily for her: She is by far the littlest member of the team, which means sometimes she simply can’t reach the starting handholds, not even with a running start. She’s also always been the most cautious one in our family of careful rule followers — wary of new people and new experiences, occasionally prone to worrying herself to tears over school projects a full week before they’re due.

You’ll have to forgive me, then, for the way I teared up when one of her coaches pulled me aside, a couple months in, to tell me how much he’d enjoyed having her on the team — how she was a very careful, deliberate climber, and also very, very brave. Her sweet, exuberant coaches — some of them still just college students themselves — who have her doing multiple sets of burpees and ab crunches, and who are also so incredibly gentle with her, kneeling down to face level to give her “beta” (climber-speak for strategic advice) on tough boulder problems. Who model for all the kids a kind of non-toxic masculinity that I myself am still aspiring toward.

About a month ago, we drove up to Santa Rosa for my daughter’s first formal climbing competition, and I watched as she tried to ascend a particularly tricky wall — the handholds set maybe just an inch too far apart for someone her height to reach. Still, she scrambled up and up, and I almost started to cry again when I heard the booming chorus of voices — her coach and her older teammates — ring out: “Come on, you’ve got this. YOU’VE GOT THIS! Don’t give up. You’re almost there!”