Indoor Gyms and the Softening of the Species

The indoor gym is a room where the weather has been fired. The holds are plastic, the fall is a product, and the floor is a mattress that reports to a manager. People go there to get strong, which is legal. They then talk about it as if they have been outside. That is the part the coalition is filing under erosion.

A colored hold is a suggestion made by a person who has gone home. It does not get cold. It does not break off. It does not require you to find it. You match the tape, you play the song they put on, and you tell the room you are projecting. The room believes you, because the room is in on it. The room is the product.

The auto-belay deserves its own paragraph, and only one. It is a machine that agrees with you. You cannot have a partnership with a machine that does not know you let go. Outside, a belayer is a person, and even then the coalition prefers you keep the speeches short. Inside, the machine lowers you at a rate set by a lawyer. This is exercise. Call it exercise. The species did not practice on a treadmill and then name the treadmill a mountain.

We are not confused about rain. Rain is why roofs were invented, and a roof is a fine place to get your hands tired when the rock is wet or the day is a workday. The softening begins at the moment the roof becomes the whole idea. When the send is a color, when the audience is built into the building, when falling is safe enough to do for fun between smoothies. Strength that can only be expressed at sixty-eight degrees is strength on a leash.

You can hear it in the language. Session. Project. Community. These are indoor words. They sound like a group activity because they are one. Outdoor words are shorter. Up. Off. Done. Again. The coalition can live with a short vocabulary. A long vocabulary is what people develop when the move itself is not doing enough of the talking.

None of this is a ban on getting stronger. Get stronger. The coalition is in favor of stronger. It is not in favor of the story that a Tuesday night under fluorescent lights, with a playlist and a membership card, is the same fact as stone that does not know your name. One of those facts ends when the building closes. The other one is still there in January.

The door of the gym is not locked from our side. We simply do not count what happens in there. If you want it to count, there is a parking lot on the way to the actual rock. The parking lot has no soundtrack. That is the first test, and it is an easy one.