Day 64 - Big Jugs and Flappers

climbing hands

For the first couple of years, climbing really beats your hands up.

You get blisters on the creases of your fingers, and cuts and bruises all over the back of your hands.   Your skin gets pinched, grazed, scratched and scarred.  Your knuckles get cut, gouged, swollen and bloodied.  Your joints, tendons and other soft tissues get tweaked, torn, pulled and popped.

Nothing in an ordinary life prepares your hands for the abuse they get when you start climbing.

It's brutal.

(am I selling this to you yet?)

But then at some point 2 or 3 years in, you realise that you don't get all those pains in your fingers any more.  You no longer have to avoid using one finger or another because you're nursing an injury.  You no longer have to cut climbing sessions short because blisters are developing, or your skin's simply become too sore to hold anything.

Moreover, you start to notice that your skin has become much thicker, tougher, like well oiled leather.   Your fingers are also a little thicker, and definitely more serious looking. 

And your fingers become super strong.   I regularly push the heavy doors at work open with a single finger.  I can carry a bag full of climbing gear, or a bag of heavy shopping, on a finger.  Or several bags of shopping, one on each finger!

That's not to say that your fingers become impervious to harm...

When climbing indoors a lot, we often climb on juggy holds.   "Jugs" is climbing terminology for the easiest sort of holds - they're big, very positive, you can get your fingers right in there (settle down, 'Stina!).   This sort of hold is often used when climbing upside down, or on the ceiling...see Day 8 for an example...

Jugs tend to put a lot of pressure on the skin just below the crease on each finger joint, and callouses develop here. (See my hand in tonight's photo, taken shortly after climbing for four hours).

Anna's middle finger demonstrates the classic "flapper" (down, girl!), where one of these thick callouses gets ripped off, usually when falling off a juggy hold. 

The best solution to this problem is to put some tape over it, and climb on!  (there's a bit of a pun there, for those in the know...)

Superglue can also be helpful, to stick the flap of skin back on again...superglue is remarkable stuff!

(yeah, yeah, I know, developed for use in military field hospitals to stick wounds together, but later found to be carcinogenic, yada yada)!

Anyway, Anna will dispute much of the above, and point out that from her perspective, the skin on your fingers stays mostly vulnerable to soreness and irritation, and rarely toughens up...at least, not without the application of fairly serious chemicals, which can work wonders.

So your mileage may vary.

Handy Hint (do you see what I did there?!) #1 out of a series of 1 (or maybe more):

If you want to develop hands that look like they belong to a gardener or a brick layer or some such, you can do worse than going climbing for a couple of years...

You're welcome.  

;-)