THE FIRST STEP ON THE ROAD TO HARD CLIMBING Text: Jenny Wikman / Photo: Emelie Voltaire
What’s a beginners’ shoe? They can look dull and boring – flat, symmetrical, and...utterly, completely wonderful! The walls of our Addnature store staff toilet are covered with memes about how we regularly push this shoe to our customers. But what else are you supposed to do when La Sportiva has designed one of the world's most comfortable shoes? “Look, how pretty they are, I want these!” My sister-in-law texts me with a photo of some orange shoes (her favourite colour) – maybe the most aggressive shoe on the market. She’s shopping for her very first pair of climbing shoes after a few tentative gym sessions wearing rented shoes. She’s window shopping, drooling over the Ferrari of climbing shoes. What she needs is a Fiat Cinquecento. I sigh. Here we go again. Where do I begin? I start texting, stop, erase the message, and start again. I’m trying to compose a message about lasts and fit. I want to explain asymmetry and downturn fully without writing an essay. The typing and erasing continue. I end up telling her to calm down unless she wants to lose her nascent climbing passion – or, even worse, her toenails. I try to prepare her for the reality that tomorrow we won’t be buying beautiful, angular shoes; we’re buying the training wheels of shoes –
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ugly, functional, and perfect. She’s about to enter my nerdy world, and I need to guide her down the same path that so many of us at Addnature have walked in our early climbing careers. We’re talking Velcro and green suede; we’re talking Tarantulas. Produced by an iconic brand with 100 years of experience making everything from leather shoes for farmers and lumberjacks, to alpine boots for mountaineering, technical boots for ski mountaineering and – since the 80s – perhaps the world’s most famous climbing shoe. – What about this one? I ask as I casually pass her the Tarantulas. She’s fighting a frown but agrees that today is about function over fashion. The shoe fits nicely, yes. It’s comfortable. Really comfortable, actually. It feels great to climb in. Grippy. Stable. But I see her look longingly at the other models on the wall at the Addnature store. We begin the usual dance of putting
on, climbing, taking off again. The heel is too loose in this one, she gets hot spots in the other, and the third is way off. We’re going through the models, A to Z. I’m running backwards and forwards. It’s like trying to find Cinderella, and I’m starting to break a sweat. We’ve been here for over an hour. Bring out a pair of shoes – try them on – bring out the same pair in a different size – try them on the wall – repeat. After what seems like an eternity, her eyes move towards the ‘no’ pile. She looks back down at the first shoe on the floor. My significant other and I give each other a knowing look. We’re holding our breath. The penny finally drops. – “Well…” she starts to say with a grin, and we know we’ve passed the test. We weren’t born yesterday. One pair of Tarantulas to go, please. Another climber is born.
