Disobey Gravity

Because of reasons, I made a post compiling assorted videos and podcasts of various badass adaptive/para climbers:

Adaptive climbing linkspam

If you've got more recs to add, please leave them in comments over there!

The Friday post of glee is where you get to tell us about your climbing-related happiness this week.

It can be a new achievement or adventure, or just that you climbed and had fun; it can be that your favourite climbing wall is expanding or that you bought new rock shoes or that you found a cool ice-climbing vid on YouTube. No glee is too small -- or too big. Members are encouraged to cheer each other on and share the squee.

N.B. Please feel free to post your glee on any day of the week; the Friday glee is just to get the ball rolling.

To enhance this week's glee: this lovely short film about the one and only Fran Brown.

The Friday post of glee is where you get to tell us about your climbing-related happiness this week.

It can be a new achievement or adventure, or just that you climbed and had fun; it can be that your favourite climbing wall is expanding or that you bought new rock shoes or that you found a cool ice-climbing vid on YouTube. No glee is too small -- or too big. Members are encouraged to cheer each other on and share the squee.

N.B. Please feel free to post your glee on any day of the week; the Friday glee is just to get the ball rolling.

To enhance this week's glee, something a little bit different. Dave Bowes, a member of the GB Paraclimbing team and Iceclimbing team, writes about climbing with invisible/hidden disabilities after a traumatic brain injury:

UKC: Behind the Mask: Climbing and Hidden Disability

In this video, he climbs several V8s and talks about life with hidden disabilities. And here he is picking off another V8 at Craig y Longridge.

British Para Climbing Champion Fran Brown has just become World Para Climbing Champion Fran Brown.

Here's the news report from the BMC, with footage of her in the qualifiers.

And here again is the excellent short film about her.

ARCH REPRESENT.

ETA: Here's her winning climb.

"Deep play" is philosopher Jeremy Bentham's term for any gamble or wager in which "the stakes are so high that ... it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose."

It's also the title of Paul Pritchard's first book, in which he chronicled his growth from a semi-feral child throwing petrol bombs down at the climbers in the local quarry to becoming one of the brightest and boldest British climbers of the '80s and '90s generation: the "dole climbers" who scrounged gear and food while creating ever-more-daring new routes, most famously in the slate quarries near Llanberis and on the sea cliffs of Anglesey.

Pritchard's a sharp, pawky writer, and the book's fragmented and lyrical and jagged, dodging around moments of self-revelation, from his impulsive decision to throw himself down a four-storey stairwell at school to his near-fatal fall (from a route named "Games Climbers Play" -- this story has too many ironies to count) at Gogarth.

( Cut for length )