"I'm really happy being in the radical present."
Amid so much uncertainty, some of us have accepted living in the here and now...and being ok with that.
“Enlightenment isn’t found with a full stomach, or on a soft pillow.”
— Conrad Anker, one of the most prolific explorers and mountaineers alive today
Name: Tim Bruns
Hometown: Born in DC, but my Dad was in the Foreign Service, so we moved every three years all over the world
Current Residence: Boulder, Colorado
Living Situation: House with a couple of roommates
Age: 28
Occupation: rock climber and co-owner of CityROCK climbing gym; recently worked at a food bank and as a carpenter
Photo caption: This is me climbing ‘The Web,’ 5.13b in Eldorado Canyon. ‘Sent’ (succeeded in climbing) the route on the first day back outdoor climbing after the lockdown.
What does it feel like for you when you’re rock climbing?
Well, first I should say that it’s quite all encompassing; I've totally designed my life around rock climbing. Some people kind of live out of their van and just live the “dirtbag” lifestyle and only rock climb, but that's not quite enough for me. It’s important for me to have work that's meaningful and to have pursuits outside of climbing, but on a daily basis climbing is a huge thing for me. I think part of it is because it’s a vehicle through which I set and achieve goals, and commune with the natural world in an intimate way. In the best moments while climbing, everything else fades away and I’m one hundred percent focused on moving my body up the rock.
Being a rock climber must feel so freeing right now because we’re all so cooped up in quarantine. And so I'm wondering if that's the feeling that you have right now, that the one place you can feel normal is up on the rock?
In these uncertain COVID times, rock climbing gives me a concrete way to progress.
I should mention that I stopped outdoor rock climbing for six weeks during the beginning of the quarantine. We didn’t really know if you could contract COVID from touching climbing holds. So, my climbing partner, Ingrid, and I went to Home Depot, bought wood, and ordered climbing holds online and then built a home climbing wall in our garage.
We ended up just training insanely hard for six weeks every day in the garage. It kind of kept us sane, and it's the hardest, most regimented I've ever been about training because I've always had other stuff going on. After some of the major climbing organizations released guidelines for climbing safely during COVID, we decided to head back outdoors. The first day back I climbed a route called “the Web” in Eldorado Canyon, which was a longtime project for me. The training worked. It worked really well.
Photo caption: This is our home climbing pain cave that we built at the beginning of the quarantine.
You’re a part owner in an indoor rock climbing gym. This must be a tough time to be a gym owner.
It’s called CityRock, and it’s in Colorado Springs.
Sadly, we had to lay off a lot of people. We got a paycheck protection loan, which got us through about three months, but basically it just delayed the inevitable. We had 48 employees and now we have 12.
I went down to Colorado Springs last month to have a meeting with the other owners. I think there’s some cautious optimism, even though at the moment we’re only bringing in like a small percentage of the revenue we used to have on a monthly basis. The plan was to build another ground-up facility up in North Colorado Springs. That’s still the plan, but it’s been put on the back burner.
How is the gym handling reopening?
Normally our max capacity is roughly 350 people, but right now the County is only allowing about half that number in the gym at once. People have to wear masks when they’re on the ground, and we installed all these sinks, hand washing stations and hand sanitizer dispensers. We also have a very robust summer camp program; it’s the only part of the gym that’s exceeding our revenue goals for this year. We had to really scale it back into smaller groups to keep it safe, but parents were just so happy to get rid of their kids for a little while!
Photo caption: This is me on a route called ‘Choose Life,’ 5.13c. My hardest route to date! Did it a few weeks ago.
What do you see the impact of the pandemic might be on people choosing indoor vs outdoor rock climbing?
That’s a good question. There’s an interesting statistic that before COVID, 70% of people who use a climbing gym will never go outdoor climbing, partially because climbing is way more accessible indoors in places like New York. But COVID definitely isn’t affecting people who were outdoor climbers; when I go out now there are climbers everywhere.
I do think that if we go into another lockdown it will permanently close a lot of climbing gyms. This is the kind of philosophical conversation I have with other co-owners at CityRock. We also have to be prepared for a future where there are more pandemics. So, we’ve been talking about even designing the second gym to be pandemic-proof. Including things like really nice air filtration where if you clap the chalk just goes straight up into vents, having big garage doors, more handwashing stations, things like that.
I’m curious if this pandemic has made you realize that things you once thought of as essential to your life, actually aren’t? And if so, what are those things?
I come from a privileged background, from a family of diplomats, and went to a nice liberal arts college. After college, I started the first climbing gym in Palestine. There was a lot of pressure when I came back to the US to feel like I had achieved some standard of success, and I don't think I've ever particularly liked that. I'm ambitious, but not on other people's terms, and I still feel the pressure. I was unemployed for a while and I'm like, “What am I doing with my life?”. There was a while where I thought maybe I wanted to go to business school, and I'm not sure if that was coming from a genuine place or if I just needed something new so I could tell people “I'm studying to go to business school.”
So one of the reflections I've had during the pandemic is that in the US we are so focused on freedom to do certain things: we have a million choices, we go to the grocery store and we can pick out any consumer product that we want. We have the freedom to travel here to do this or to go in any direction, but I don't think humans are necessarily all that well-suited to that sort of choice. And I think what the quarantine was in some ways was like a massive freedom from choice, which is kind of Orwellian, but I think it's actually very true. I could just bike to the food bank tht I volunteered at and come back and be like, “Well, there is no fucking job market so I'm just gonna do the things I love.” I did a lot of art. I memorized a really long poem. I planted a vegetable garden. I trained like crazy for rock climbing. Watched movies. Did a lot of vegan cooking. So, I think choice was limited and I ended up doing just the things that were available to me, and not worrying about “What's the next step in life?”.
I still think that general feeling lingers. Right now, I'm working as a carpenter, and sometimes it's not that glorious. But I'm making money. I’m being creative. And this type of work feels good.
Photo caption: This is a painting I did for my brother. It’s a wave because he is a surfer. The Arabic script says, ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,’ which is the final line of the Tennyson poem I memorized.
What do you want to take to the other side of this?
I think right now I'm really happy being in the radical present without doing a lot of planning for the future.