An article un-ironically titled “How Climbing Gyms Lost Their Soul” has been circulating my social media feeds last week, evoking a handful of rather negative reviews from some readers who seem to be, for a variety of reasons, tweaked by the title. My initial reaction was to roll my eyes. Climbing gyms are like Red Bull athletes—they don’t have souls. Rather than getting tweaked, the title for me was as ennui-inducing as, “How Bed, Bath, and Beyond Lost Its Soul.”
Nevertheless, I clicked the bait to grapple with the article’s arguments as genuinely as I could, and a week later I’ve found myself lingering on some of the downstream questions that this inquiry into climbing’s missing soul provokes. The article’s premise is that gyms from back in the day…
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What’s it called when you do the opposite? You know, look back and say, “Thank God it’s not like *that* anymore!”