It means treasuring the weekends away, crossing out the weekdays of your calendar as you approach Friday, when you plan to take yet another sick day and head out to the Valley, to Bishop, to Lost Rocks, to wherever you and your friends have planned, with already having called and e-mailed back and forth all the details of who is going to drive and bring food and who has what gear. To be an urban climber means training hard at the gym, finding like-minded and similarly addicted climbaholics who don't want to shed their obsessions and in fact find more energy, more fun, more life in their habit. You surf climbing web sites at work. You read climbing magazines in the bathroom. You watch climbing videos over and over and over.

To be an urban climber means you savor real rock in a way most dirtbaggers can only understand when they're away from rock. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, but in the case of the urban climber, absence makes the obsession stronger, the campus training more intense, and the actual experience of climbing sweeter. You appreciate where you are and what you are doing. You go for the highball because you know you may not be back here for a while, since there are so many crags to visit and boulders to climb.

There's a deeper and more intense camaraderie among urban climbers on the weekends, because as the hours tick by, as Sunday evening approaches, there's a shared dread of the weekend ending. Despite blown forearms, cut fingers, desperate tape holding together gashes and flappers, despite the tendonitis in the elbow and wrist, the strange little bump in your palm, the odd tweaks in your neck and back, despite the pain in your toes from jamming them into the too-small shoes, despite all this, you check the sun (we've still got an hour or so!) and head out to the next boulder.

And when the weekend is finally over, when it's too dark to see your next hold, and you know your spouse, partner, family, or the non-climbing attachments back at home will be worrying about you, you and your friends look at each other, nodding, and slowly pack everything up and load up the smelly and dusty car. And as you head back home, you talk about the V7 that you almost got, and your friends laugh this off as unearned spewing, but they do the same thing, and what you all agree on is that, dammit, you're coming back sooner or later to finish that project.

And then you cross off the days until the next weekend.

Leonard Chang
Oakland, CA

Leonard hit the nail right on the head-the ever-struggling balance between what we want to do and what we have to do to achieve what we want. But to help him out, MadRock is going to keep him from backslapping on slabs with a new Mad Pad. If you want the last word in UCMAG#09, as well as some new clothes from Rope Gun, drop us a line! Email words and pics to finishhold@urbanclimbermag.com.

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