When I was 7 or 8yo, I was always climbing into trees or on building, I leaved in a old town from medieval era called Villerest where many building are made of stone.
Then around 10 I think, I joined a sport club where I climbed only for fun and recreation, indoors and outdoors. My level was pretty low, around 5c, maybe 6a.
I stopped going around age 13 or 14 when my interests shifted to computers and programming.
After many years, I moved out of my little town to a big city next door, Lyon, which had 2 climbing gyms at the time, the biggest French lead climbing gym at the time, Climb Up Lyon (named Murmur before) and one of the first private bouldering gym, M’Roc. After a few months, I’ve convinced some friends to come try climbing with me, this was around 2008, I was 25.
I started climbing 1 or 2 times a week, which quickly became 3 to 4 times, sometime even more.
In 2012 I had the project to open my own climbing gym with a friend, so I started getting certification and I had to do internship to validate it. To do so I joined a new sport club, M’Roclimbing, and got 5 young climbers, age 9 to 10, to train for a year.
Meanwhile, the project didn’t go through and since I had loved training these young climbers, I signed up for another year, and another, and another… until June 2018.
After 5 years of training others, I needed to take a break and get back to my own training.
This is where we were as I wrote this post, July 2018.
Following that I took a year “off” to train for myself until July 2019 with the goal to reach 8a lead, which I failed to complete.
I went back to coaching as of September 2019 still in the same sport club, which changed name to Lyon Escalade Sportive.
And 2020 happened… I have trained at all since March 2020.
As of the time of writing, January 2021, my best performance in lead climbing indoor is 7b+. I got very close to do 7c (missing 3 moves) before the 2020 pandemic, but now there is a lot of work to get back to that level.
Outdoor I only did 7b during my year of training and, once again, was very close to top my first 7c (and again, 3 moves missing to clip).
For bouldering, my gym don’t use official grades, but I think I was around 7b before the 2020 pandemic. I had sent a 6c outdoor 6 or 7 years ago and my bouldering level had increased a lot since then. I didn’t do any outdoor bouldering during my year of training, I was focusing on lead.
That’s all for my background story!
Last update: Januray 2021.