On the 23rd December 2015 my friend Edie and I did the Boulder360 challenge at The Climbing Works to raise money for The Sheffield  Children’s Hospital Charity.

We got to The Climbing Works at 11:00 to start our day of climbing.  My Dad made a sign that was attached to our collecting tin that had all the information people needed to know about our challenge.  We took this around the centre with us as we climbed so other climbers knew we were doing something special and not just climbing for fun.

We both had on special Sheffield Children’s Hospital t-shirts and were both wearing our favourite climbing shoes – FiveTen Anasazi LVs.

As a warm up did a pulse-raiser which involved running around the castle seven times and then did some mobilising from our shoulders to our toes.

I did the odd numbered climbs and Edie did the even number climbs, but more often than not we both tried each others climbs too.  We were only going to have one attempt on each climb to make sure we didn’t run out of time, but sometimes if the problem was a fun one or we felt we could do it we would have another go (or sometimes another 10 goes!!).

As part of our warm up we did the green circuit (which has 40 climbs) and red circuit (also 40 climbs).  These went well as we topped every climb and also got our first donations in the tin!

We decided to then do the much harder black circuit (33 climbs) as we didn’t want to leave all the hard ones to the end when we would be tired.

Brian from the Climbing Works then very kindly gave us a hot chocolate to keep us going and Edie did some repairs to my hands with some finger tape – they were beginning to feel a bit sore!

Then we did the yellow circuit (40 climbs) so we didn’t do two hard circuits back to back and we felt we could do quite a few of these.

By now it was lunch time so we stopped for half an hour and had a bit of a rest and another hot chocolate too (yum yum – thank you!).

Next we did the blue circuit (30 climbs) and is the hardest circuit in the Climbing Works.  We wanted to get this one out the way while we had some energy after our rest.  We didn’t expect to top any of them but did at least manage to start and even move off on a few of them.

Then we moved on to the new Irn Bru circuit (39 climbs) as a break from the hard climbing we’d been doing before this one.  We managed to top most of them with the exception of a few which required fresh strength that we didn’t have at the time!

Then we decided to do the white (25 climbs) and “murple” (35 mint / purple) circuits as these were both very hard to get them done and over with.  We only managed a few of these as we we so tired!

We then stopped for dinner which was a delicious pizza that was  very kindly given to us by the lovely people at the Sunshine Pizza Oven . They park their mobile pizza oven outside the Climbing Works on Wednesdays and we recommend you give them a try!

After a good long rest we decided to try the wasp circuit (40 black/yellow climbs).  On a normal day we would probably be able to  do most of these but as it was now after 7 o’clock and we’d been climbing for over 8 hours we only managed a few unfortunately.

For our final circuit we chose the “Pinkles” (40 pink / purple climbs).  We’d saved these to do last we felt we could probably do most of them and this would be a nice way to finish the day.  We didn’t quite do them all but managed most of them.  We were sooooo tired (and pretty pumped!)

Then, finally, we were done.  We’d been climbing for over 9 hours, starting at 11:00 and not finishing until nearly half past eight in the evening and were absolutely exhausted!

We wouldn’t have been able to do this challenge without the support of the amazing Climbing Works staff and customers who generously donated over £200 into our collecting tin on the day.

As of today we have raised over £830 – so thank you all very much for donating!  It’s not too late to donate so if you want to please visit our fundraising page here.

Share this!