My Life Told By Rock Climbing Shoes (Part I)

I thought it might be interesting to tell a little bit of my story of a journey through graduate school as seen through a tool that has been with me for a good portion of it. Namely my rock climbing shoes. There have been more shoes in my life than women (and thank god for that) throughout grad school, but each series tells a story about where I've been and the people that made the travels with me.

So my first pair of shoes I bought right after learning to climb was a neat pair of velcro Evolv's. They were way too nice of a shoe for me to be my first but they were recommended to me by the girl I was seeing at the time when we made our first trip ever to REI (a outdoor store which I am now a member of). The funny thing was that since my foot work was garbage as a new climbing and I was climbing 4 - 5 times a day in a gym I blew a hole right through the toe of the shoes in 3 months. Now that was WAY to quick to go through a pair of climbing shoes and the retail clerks at REI were sympathetic to my plight. So without too much hassle they replaced the shoes with a better beginner pair of Mad Rocks.

These shoes were big and clunky with no sharp toe and basically wore like a tight pair of firm gym shoes...perfect for a beginner climber like myself. They wore on with me beating them up in the gym for some time (maybe 6 months) and got me to realize that I needed to learn about foot work well before I worried about shoes.
This lesson might be a parallel to the lessons I was learning in life at the time...but I'll have to figure that out more later.

Finally came my brown La Sportiva's that I bought again from REI. These shoes were great and I took them on three of my first outdoor climbing expeditions around the Austin, TX region. They wore great, lasted a long time, I could wear them all day without too much discomfort, and performed wonderful on limestone and granite. I would recommend these shoes to first time climbers searching for a good shoe to take outdoors.

This basically takes me up through the first year of climbing I did while in graduate school. It was a fun year and took me on a wild trip around Austin area gaining experience with some sport climbing and getting introduced to the people at my college that did serious climbing both indoors and out. I had no idea that this sport was going to grab me the way it did and I certainly couldn't see where I was headed next.