These types of content — the ones that identify those commonalities shared by groups of like-minded or uniformly-pursuant people — are always good fun for the people that make up the targeted community. While most action sports look to the undereducated eye as individual pursuits, anyone who has chased a further or higher or faster or longer or BIGGER knows that so-called “individual” success is heavily reliant on the community surrounding the succeeding individual, from those showing them the ropes to those in support when they trip up along the way. And the quirkier the community, the more entertaining these commonalities are.
Describing the climbing community as merely “quirky” as opposed to “one of the quirkiest,” along with “overwhelmingly engaged,” would be selling the tight knit troop of Stone Monkeys (and all the monkeys) waaayyy short. They’re freaks of nature in the athletic sense while maintaining a stranglehold on the forever philosophical question of: why?
All that is to say the commonalities they identify in this particular edit are widely nurtured traits (presented in a rather blunt manner I might add) of those who scale walls and dangle from overhangs. While most are your run-of-the-mill descriptors, there are a handful of these nurtured traits that go a ways in representing that culture of hand-me-down — the carribeener and approach shoes demonstrate obvious physical inheritance and seeing every damn protruding object as a potential hold demonstrates the significant mental property climbing takes with regard to consuming one’s brain waves. And although the attempted buildering at the end is more or less an afterthought, his performance is the spitting image of my climber friends doing the same. Get it through your noggin already: NOT EVERYTHING IS FOR CLIMBING!
In retrospect, they might have saved all of us three minutes of self-description by going the straight-forward route: you are definitely a climber if you try to climb every ridiculous problem you come across.
