LET US START OF BY SAYING HOW HAPPY, PROUD AND TIRED WE WERE AFTER OUR ‘CLIMB FOR CAC’ BOULDER COMPETITION IN KLIMMUUR DEN HAAG. FEELING ALL THAT MEANS OUR EVENT WAS A BIG SUCCESS!
As most of you already know our trigger to do a charity event like this, was finding out last August that two of our friends and climbing buddies were diagnosed with leukemia. It was a real shock (like it always is) and the regular Monday evening bouldering session became heavy and we all felt strange – full of worries and feeling helpless in this situation imposed on our friends. Besides talking about it, visiting our friends and sending sweet messages we still felt we should do more. Somewhere in our heavy conversations between putting our climbing shoes on and off the name Climbers Against Cancer (CAC) popped up. And we had an idea – host a charity boulder competition in our home gym. Since we already have an amazing boulder building team that organises competitions every year we knew this was our cup of tea. It took 9 people to organise and set up the event in 2.5 months, next to our regular jobs.
There was a lot to do – naming the event was the funniest thing (people tend to get crazy ideas when they have to name things), designing the poster and shirts, finding sponsors, making new contacts, organising volunteers and the whole financial structure of the event.
And then the day came when we put on our super awesome green ‘Climb for CAC’ shirts and went from 9 am on the 8th of November till 2 am on the 9th of November. It was thrilling to see a sea of green CAC T-shirts in our gym. There were around 140 people in the gym of which 105 competitors. People could choose from 114 cool, creative boulders from 3 to 7c+ Fb!
We had fantastic sponsors that provided prizes (Richard Cremers from Summit Outdoor donated some cool La Sportiva and Climbing Technology gear, Core climbing sent us amazing prizes (beautiful climbing holds on a stand) and shirts for finalists), sponsors that fed the entire gym (Jasper van der Hoek from Patagonia Beach provided BBQ’s, loads of bread and vegetables and got Danny Bauman from Burg and Bol Slagerij to donate meat, Chris Pronk from Holland Vis to donate shrimps skewers and chef Ryan to overlook the BBQ). Besides that our volunteers made fantastic soups, salads, quiches and sweet stuff (Odiel, Karin, Jessica, Bouchra, Suzy, Liesbeth, Lola and Ludovic) and Jasper Kamerling from JK Fysio gave sport massages during the event from which 100 % of the price went to CAC. We had a Secrid wallets stand were 100 % of the profit went to CAC (!!!) and a Nihil stand with some cool climbing fashion clothes that also donated 50 % of their profit to CAC! We had super support from Siked.nl where they regularly posted about our event and made a nice reportage about it with photos (thanks Bram!), beautiful photos from Wouter Krasser and a beautiful video and photos from Feike Santbergen. Last but definitely not least our boulder building team that worked literally day and night to build the final wall and all the 122 boulders (including 8 final boulders): Hendrik, Jesse, Marnix, Mattijs, Rick, Barry, Jos, Bart, Ingmar, Adriaan, Paul, Maril, Stephan and anybody we might have forgotten).
One big thank you goes to John Ellison for starting up CAC and being very supportive and enthusiastic for our event.
All in all, it was a day full of fun, an amazing atmosphere, good food, wonderful people and happy faces, great music and good coffee (as always in our gym).
Through organising this event we met some old friends and got some new ones. And hopefully we helped a bit in the fight against cancer.
Thank you all for coming, participating, donating, helping, bouldering and smiling!
Odiel, Jesse, Thao, Bas, Suzy, Leander, Hendrik, Ingmar and Lola.
