The rise of the Wide Boyz
It was nine years ago that Tom Randall and myself were heading off to make a tour of American offwidth cracks. We’d been training hard for two years at home in Sheffield, UK, primarily in what would become Tom’s infamous crack cellar. This cellar is a maze of horizontal roof cracks constructed from boards bolted to the ceiling. The layout has evolved over the years with different projects, but those first cracks were an assortment of off widths and hand jams that allowed us to simulate a climbing style pretty foreign to the UK cliffs.
Knowing this was going to be a climbing trip for the record books, Tom and I were both keen on sharing our journey with the climbing community through a blog. I still remember sitting down at the computer together to build this blog and wondering what the heck we should call it, ‘Pony Shufflers’? Nah, that was no good. ‘Wide Boyz’? hmmm, close. ‘Wide Boyz’? That was it, that was the name of the blog, and it just stuck.
The Birth of Crack School
Since that initial offwidth trip, there has been an increasing awareness about crack climbing, and a growing thirst for technical information about it. Wild Country recognized that through our success of training on homemade cracks, we had tapped into a way to teach crack climbing skills to the general public in an accessible way. It was through this that the first Wild Country Crack School series was proposed to Tom and me.
The concept was to do several events at indoor locations, on specific crack climbing holds, and give guidance and tips. Season 1 sold out. Thus, we knew there was a demand for season 2. That sold out even faster, and the demand kept coming.
After the second season, Wild Country handed the crack school over to us to manage as the Wide Boyz. Now producing and incorporating our own crack holds, we carried on the tradition, reaching a point where between the two of us, we taught 60 classes across the UK in a single winter. We knew the crack love was spreading, and it was fun to interact with enthusiastic climbers of all levels at these events.
