Ouch

I bashed my shoulder last night while rock climbing.

The guys I normally go with are good. (They call themselves the Xtreme Squad, which I still think is a stupid name, but whatever.) I've been climbing with them for months and I've never had a problem. Last night, though, we had a new guy, who shall not be named.

New Guy said he'd climbed before, so we put him up climbing with Ken belaying, and he did fine. Later, I was climbing, and New Guy was belaying, and that's when the screw up happened.

I was only a couple of feet past my last cam, when my feet slipped off my foothold. So normally I'd have about a five foot fall, but I'd be fine (twice the length of rope past the cam, plus a little for stretch).

Unfortunately New Guy is an idiot. He's supposed to arrest the rope as soon as he sees me falling, but instead he was, I don't know, looking at women or something, so his reaction was slow. Which means instead of me falling five feet and being fine, I went fourteen feet and smashed my shoulder into the wall hard enough to put me out of action for the rest of the evening.

The group decision was that New Guy isn't coming back next week. But my shoulder still hurts. I hope it's all just bruising.