I do most of my climbing in an indoor gym, Island Rock. I find that climbing in the gym trains me for short powerful climbs, but outside I was getting pumped after the 30-40 vertical feet I was used to. A great training routine for endurance is to do long traverses, so I laid out a traverse route that hits every wall in the gym. The difficulty varies over time as the gym resets each wall; Some sections felt around V.2, some around V.5. At first I found it difficult to finish the entire traverse. When I finally was able to complete one full traverse it took me 40 minutes to complete it. I was forced to learn techniques to rest on the wall, hanging on straight arms, finding ways to place my feet with opposing force to rest. Eventually, with practice in resting and in finding the best sequence of holds I got it down to 16 minutes.
I made up a poster explaining The Big Traverse and hung it up. Within days I was seeing people working their way across the traverse. I’ve included a link to the full poster below as an example so you can make something similar for your local gym.
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