Hi there!
I'm Marjan. I started climbing in 2011, spent a good chunk of those years bouldering and dabbling in alpinism. Somewhere along the way sport climbing became the thing I keep coming back to.
To put things into grades, what climbing is actually all about, currently I'm sitting around 7b, and chasing to climb 8a before I turn 40.
This blog is that chase, in writing.
Why write about it
Well, I already keep a journal, so putting words to a climbing project isn't new for me - but a journal is something private, and privacy is exactly what can let yourself off the hook. This blog is the opposite of that. It's a public record of attempts, plateaus, and the slow, unglamorous work of getting one grade stronger. If I say I'm projecting something, or that I'm going to train fingerboard twice a week, there's now a record of whether I actually did.
Call it accountability or maybe a scorecard I can't quietly edit.
What you'll find here
- Session logs and project updates - the actual routes, the actual falls, the actual number of times I fell at the same high point before I stopped kidding myself about why.
- Training notes - what's working, what isn't, and the inevitable adjustments after I read one more article than I needed to.
- The mental side - I'm an opinionated person with a lot of things going through my mind while climbing, here I'll vent write about them, from time to time.
- The unglamorous constraints — I'm working at a desk job with a young infant at home, and a finite number of climbing days per month. This blog is also, quietly, an experiment in what's possible with a small, honest amount of time rather than an idealised amount.
What this isn't
This isn't a highlight reel. There will be far more sessions where I fall on the same move than sessions where something clicks. If you're looking for polished send videos, there are better accounts for that. I follow them too! If you want to watch someone slowly, stubbornly work toward a number that currently feels a bit out of reach - you're in the right place.
A note on the name
"Redpoint" - from the German Rotpunkt - comes from climbers marking bolts with a red dot once they no longer needed them as aid. It's come to mean climbing a route clean after you've worked it, fallen on it, and came back. That's the whole premise here: not the flash, not the onsight, and not the fact that both onsight.com and flash.com were taken - it's the long, repeated, occasionally humbling process of coming back to the same wall until it finally goes.
If you're on your own long redpoint - toward 8a or anything else - I'd like to hear about it. Feel free to reach out.