Having just graduated from Norwich University of the Arts photography course July 2024, I wanted to share my experience of climbing while at uni and some tips for keeping it sustainable and affordable for those currently at uni thinking of starting climbing, or people moving for the start of their first year.
How I got into climbing as a student
I first got into climbing when I was in my first year of university back in 2022, just after the Christmas break. I made friends with a new group after returning from the holiday and ended up tagging along on a group trip being supervised by one of the experienced climbers. After this, I decided that I wanted to keep climbing and after a few sessions being supervised by them, I got signed off to climb as an unsupervised boulderer.
Why I kept climbing
There were several reasons that I decided to keep climbing after that first visit and even more why I stuck with it throughout the rest of my studies.
Before I moved to Norwich, I lived in Northampton and my main sport was horse riding. After moving, I didn’t have the same connections and abilities to ride horses that I had back home, so I was already looking for another more accessible sport to start doing to keep myself fit while I was studying. After starting climbing, I found that the community of people within the sport was much friendlier and more willing to help than any other sport that I had done prior. I also found that the more I climbed, the easier I found studio sessions and workshops due to gaining a lot of strength to move the kit needed
How climbing affected my mental health
Another factor to why I kept climbing was the positive effect that it had on my mental health. When I first moved away from home, I had undiagnosed PTSD, which left me with chronic anxiety and insomnia. Due to this, I struggled to keep up at uni due to struggling to focus for long periods of time, and finding it hard to make it into lectures.
While climbing, I found myself pushed to challenge my anxiety by talking to my fellow climbers as well as tiring me out enough that my insomnia reduced slightly. I also found that while I was climbing, because I had to focus so much on what my body was doing, and how I was planning on finishing the climbs, I wouldn’t worry so much about my coursework, or about life in general, and therefore left the gym feeling a lot calmer and more capable of doing my work that I was when I arrived.
How climbing affected my studies
Because of these effects, I found that my studies started to get more consistent. I had something that I enjoyed enough that I wanted to incorporate it into my work again, which gave me more passion for what I was doing, as well as more focus on my written coursework. I became more confident mixing with groups of people and starting getting into lectures more often which allowed me to get the help I needed from my lecturers. These changes, though not immediate, made a huge difference to my grades, from scraping passes to graduating on 2:1.
How I balanced climbing in my final year of my degree, nearing deadlines
I started climbing more frequently in my second year of uni and initially struggled to balance the time I spent in the gym with the increase of work from uni.
I started looking at the times in the week where I wasn’t getting much work done, like in the evenings after I had a full day of lectures, or started particularly early in the morning. I then planned my climbing around these so instead of spending 3 hours at my computer and writing 3 sentences, I would come climbing. This allowed me to not spend so much wasted time in front of the computer as it would give my brain a better break from work, but also didn’t take away from time working so that I would have a chance of getting stuff done.
This way of working climbing around my degree became much more important closer to my final deadlines, and I began to use climbing as a reward for myself, if I got enough work done in a day.
While my climbing still reduced slightly closer to deadlines, I was still coming once or twice a week, even if it was just for an hour to see friends.
How I balanced the cost of climbing throughout the term, and buying equipment.
Having not climbed before uni at all, I needed to buy any climbing stuff that I needed on my student loan.
I stuck to very basic stuff, only buying climbing shoes and a chalk bag, until I had been doing roped climbing for a while and started to need my own harness. I used birthdays and Christmas to save up money, as well as waiting till student loan had initially dropped.
With my first climbing shoes, I bought a pair that was quite stiff for 2 reasons. The first being that as a novice climber, I needed a bit more support in my feet for longer sessions, and the second that a stiff rubber will generally last for longer than a soft one will. This meant I didn’t have to think about replacing the shoes for nearly 2 years, and even then they were in a good enough condition that I could keep climbing in them. I bought the shoes from a budget website that generally sells last season’s stuff, and now wait until end of season sales, black friday or new shoe releases making the old models cheaper to buy shoes.
For the costs of climbing in the gym, once I was climbing more frequently, I got a monthly membership, and used the pots in my Monzo account to put the money for each month aside as soon as my loan came in to ensure it would be there until the next loan drop. Before climbing so much, I would buy a multi-pass at the start of the term, which would allow me to prepay for a chunk of climbs and not have to worry about keeping money aside for them until they ran out.
