It was a stupid accident, slipping on the stairs but the agony of a toe slamming into the wall with all my weight behind it was very real. Luckily the A&E department declared that it was only sprained and that it would get better on its own. By the next day the pain had reduced considerably so I decided to risk a trip to the Castle and do some climbing.

The first problem was putting the climbing shoe on. Of course climbing shoes have to be tight and though it was quite painful actually putting the shoe on, when it was fitted the pain reduced to a dull ache. The problems really started when I tried to climb on it. The flexing and pressure of the toes in the shoe aggravated the injured toe in precisely the most painful spot, so much so that it became impossible to use that foot. So Plan A seemed to have failed so I resorted to Plan B. This involved a considerable length of finger tape (it works just as well on toes, don’t you know) which I used to bind the injured toe tightly around its neighbours. The shoe was painfully refitted and taken for a road test. This was just as painful as before and so can be considered an unsuccessful exercise.

Now the crueller of the readers may consider the loss of use of a foot as irrelevant to me as it has often been remarked that I have the footwork of Douglas Bader on rollerskates coming back from a stag do. Now I will be the first to admit that my footwork could improve but even for me the reduction to a mono-jambiste was hard to take.

So having exhausted plans A & B I resorted to plan C. This involved taking the shoe of completely and climbing with a bare foot. This obviously made climbing a lot harder than normal as the injured foot could only be used on relatively large holds and without using the toes at all. Most of the time it was in contact with any holds but used for flagging. Initially I tried some traverse circuits with an inelegant hopping style but gradually I found that the limited use of the injured foot helped significantly.

After a little while though I realised that my style of climbing had changed completely and I was forced into far more technical and elegant moves than would be necessary with two good feet. Because there was an element of hopping involved this put a lot more stress on the hand holds so I was getting pumped out a lot quicker than usual. In order to alleviate this it was necessary to make much better use of any footholds I could use and also to take rests where possible. Of course this also gave your hands a much better workout than usual. Also with only one good foot you have to make any footholds work for you really well so you become a lot more precise and technical with it.

The most subtle effect though is the use of you core strength. Core strength (or body tension) is hugely important in climbing but also hugely undervalued. With only 1 ½ feet in play it was necessary to stretch, swing and twist the body to its maximum in order to get the good foot from hold to hold. A friend of mine was also reduced to climbing with one foot after a broken ankle and I suddenly remembered how he said that bouldering with one foot had really improved his core strength (though to put it in perspective he always seemed to climb harder with one foot than I could climb with two).

Eventually I found that on certain types of climb (slabs were definitely out) the loss of a foot had only reduced my technical grade by about one notch so I had got my £10.50 worth out of the experience. So if you find yourself partially injured for whatever reason, don’t despair, you may find that forcing yourself to do things in a different manner can be a very enlightening experience. It certainly was in my case!