Best time to hit the bouldering gym? Anytime.

As per my last post, I've been (indoor) bouldering for about 2 months now. I can now say I'm pretty confident in topping the red-taped routes (V0-2), and able to finish almost half of the yellow-taped routes (V2-4). To my surprise, I was even able to finish a V4-6 the other day; well, not sure if counts since I asked for a Kevin for the beta.

I started bouldering on Feb 6 this year and noticed that there's a real-time person counter widget displayed on my gym's website. With this convenience, I realized that I could write a Python script to extract the webpage parse the person count, and record it in a fixed duration for each opening day. So I went ahead and wrote one, and let it run in the background via PM2 on my laptop (as I never turn it off, it naturally becomes the first choice, instead of running on a server). A few weeks later, after spring break, I've got about 1 month of data; now almost 2 months of data points. Visualizing them corresponding to each date on 7 different subplots on Jupyter, it looks like this:

As you can directly observe from these subplots, on weekdays, except for Wednesday, the trend for the opening hours is pretty much the same. It makes sense because during the low hours, most students and faculty who visit here are either in classrooms or offices. Wednesday nights are usually members' night, so you see that during those hours, the data points hit very high; while there are many people, I went there one day and it is surprisingly "not very crowded." In terms of the availability of the routes, people are just very nice, and, well, you have to take some rests between each climb.

I used to go to the gym based on this chart and scheduled to go there when there weren't many people ($\leq 20$). It does feel really great when you're one of the only few climbers in a certain area with walls of routes that you are free to climb and record a video about. However, after that Wednesday members' night I went to, I realized having people around isn't actually a bad thing; at least you have someone to talk to, potentially getting beta for some routes I've tried many times. Recording videos can be handy even if there are quite a few people as well; most climbers here are so nice, and whenever I asked them, they just helped me. So right, this visualization is now purely for fun.

I also had other plots; this one is a bit fancier, as it has some background colors indicating each time window, which provides some kind of intuitive insights on how many people are there.

I thought about using Markov chain or time-series models to potentially predict the possibility of a time range being rush hour or not. While this goal is somewhat undeterministic, as a person who has visited there quite often (now more than four times a week), I still want to give it a try and at least achieve some triumphs in modeling this problem. I had some observations when thinking about the possible relevant events that could cause the number of people to change significantly:

• Change of routes: Whenever the gym route setters make big changes to the routes, I notice a relative surge of some groups of intermediate/advanced climbers hitting the gym, discussing, and having fun.
• Some other events that could possibly have an impact include:
  • Bad weather, low temperatures: fewer people visiting
  • Special events on campus: fewer people visiting
  • Exam weeks: fewer people visiting
  • Spring/fall/winter/summer breaks, holidays: fewer or more people
  • Members' night: more people visiting

And that's it; these are my current thoughts about this little toy "project" I've had running in the background for a while. I'm still thinking about the computer vision side of bouldering tutoring, using NeRF to reconstruct the 3D scene, and allowing analysis of the boulderers' movement, as well as possibly recording which routes they have finished in an interactive way. It may just be for fun and not practical, but why not? It's a cool idea.

At this point, I'm glad that I started the bouldering journey in this relatively small place but with good routes and nice people around. It's a warm place to visit.

Here, I present to you some of my favorite routes recently:

So when is the best time to visit the bouldering gym? Anytime works, as long as the place is welcoming. Allez!