In the ostensibly male art of rock climbing – and perhaps in life - some of the biggest lessons for men can be learnt from an old man and a young woman.
Just how tough are you? And what constitutes toughness, anyway? The blokes who run ultra-marathons, triathlons or iron-man competitions can certainly be considered tough. So can people who can haul themselves up rock-faces by just their fingertips. And they're certainly not all young and not all men.
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Four different kinds of climbing
Climbing's been rated as one of the fastest-growing sports. What attracts many people is that you can tackle it on your own terms. You can try sport climbing, where you zip up artificial walls, closely watched by hanging judges - not people in wigs who like to execute offenders, but people suspended by ropes, who monitor your progress with clipboards and stopwatches.
Then there's rock-climbing, where you tackle single pitches, or rock faces while someone belays you - holds your rope and stops you from hitting the ground if you fall. The pitches are given funky names like Hallucinogen, Stratosfear (STET), Sarchasm (STET), and Tangerine Dream.
For the more adventurous there's proper Alpine-style climbing, where you head off for a towering peak with mounds of equipment and rope, and return with ice on your beard. Truly committed mountaineers tackle epic climbs like The Great and Secret Show, climbers' name for the terrifying, 4 700-foot face of the Polar Sun Spire on Baffin Island. It took them 29 days, during which they lived on the rock face, sleeping in bivouacs suspended above thin air.
Then there are other variations, like free solo climbing, where the real aces simple scamper up rocks that appear as smooth and windows, without ropes.
That's climbing in a nutshell, and there'll be climbers out there muttering, "Eedjit, he left out..."
Join a local climbing club
And yes, all the stuff about the adrenaline, the primal thrill of it being just you, gravity and soaring rock, all left out. If you want to find out more, find a local climbing club. Most clubs welcome newcomers.
And when you've done a climb and feel so masculine that you make Chuck Norris look like Boy George, read about the following, which are both covered in a special edition of Climbing magazine, titled Mini Epics.
Decisions on a knife-edge
Jeannie Probala is a living legend in climbing. She's a good climber, yes, but that's not why she's spoken of in glowing terms. But a climbing partner accidentally dislodged a rock above her and it landed on Probala's lower leg, crushing it. During the time it took for her to be rescued, she saved her own life by using pressure points to staunch the bleeding.
Doctors tried to convince her to let them amputate the leg below the knee and fit a prosthetic limb. The other option - one that incredibly involved more pain than amputation, was to grow the eight inches of missing limb between her knee and her ankle. It meant fitting a grotesque metal cage around her leg, with steel pins anchoring it to the bone. The bone might not grow and all the pain would be for nothing - the leg might have to be amputated anyway.
She opted to keep the leg and the bone took two years to grow. She stopped using morphine during this time, for fear of becoming addicted to it. Keith Johnson writes that he joined Probala the day she started climbing again: "She still had her metal bone-stretching cage on her leg and I'm sure the doctor would have ordered a himself a bypass if he'd seen what the two of us were up to. The flesh on her leg was constantly tearing as the bone grew like a tree branch. She managed to only bang her cage on the rock a couple of times."
The bone did re-grow and Probala is a formidable climber again, "On a foot that doesn't bend normally... on a leg that was fabricated from parts of her ass, back and shoulder muscles," as Johnson puts it.
Granted, Probala had youth on her side; but even people who don't often choose the hard option.
85 and still going strong
Take Stimson Bullitt, age 85. Bullitt had always loved hiking, but at the age of 50, he discovered climbing. That's an age where many blokes find muttering about their prostates and reaching for the remote control, crisps and cold beer a chore.
He climbs in one of Seattle's climbing gyms three times a week and goes cragging – a form of rock-climbing - whenever he can.
Bullitt - shown in the Climbing feature as a sinewy, lean man with forearms many gym-rats a quarter of his age would envy - is philosophical about his climbing.
He tells Tim Matsui: "I never (scored high marks) in high school. I didn't make the football team, so maybe I'm struggling to make up for it."
It's a modest remark for World War Two veteran who won a Purple Heart and whose entire career as a lawyer was spent promoting civil liberties. He campaigned against African American discrimination, internment of Japanese-Americans, litigated for stricter air pollution controls. And he still works as a lawyer part-time. Bullitt regards his greatest achievement as making it onto Richard Nixon's famed Enemies List, thanks to his liberal bent.
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