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After we tried it in Rutland, I mentioned it to a mate... who sent me this video of Dan Osman freeclimbing 400ft in 4mins! I'd never seen anything like it.

Manchester Climbing Centre may be worth a visit if anyone wants to go again.
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The Manchester Climbing Centre is quite good. Since we don't have any quality climbers to look after us I think they do a beginners rate where you get an instructor (who teaches you how to do the belaying etc) and hire of equipment etc! It would be good to do that is for sure.

The free soloing he does is phenomenal (well, that he did, seeing as he died fairly young): he's done it so many times he makes it look way too easy. You've got to love the jump about 300ft up.

More climbing would be a good thing, although I probably need some really easy climbs seeing as my wrists don't appear to be up to it...

You mean the jump where he literally flings himself upwards?! I think he did that two or three times, there was once where he flung his legs out sideways to get a better grip which was impressive. That man just had no fear! You could see the tiredness about 3/4 of the way up, he definitely started to go abit slower.

I would love to start climbing again. I used to climb a lot and even climed up to E3, which is pretty hard. I have got crabs, a full set of DMM walnuts, A harness, shoes, couple of slings and a bunch of quickdraws. So in order to be able to climb anywhere safely we need to aquire a rope, another harness or two, a couple more slings and a stitchplate or similar. I still remeber pretty much all the knots and the general safety but a refresher would be good. its been about 14yrs since I last set up a hanging belay.

John Knight wrote:I have got crabs

Well as long as you've seen a doctor about that...

I'd contemplate having another go at the old climbing lark...though I may try to remember to use my legs more this time!

Hell yeah, found it! This is the video of Dan Osman doing "controlled free-fall" jumps. The rope set-up is freakin' amazing in itself:

Dan Osman free-fall jumping [9.30]. That gives a fuller view of the set-up and goes a bit more in depth, plus has some other climbs in there. If you just want to see the cool jumps, watch this shorter Dan Osman video [1.47] instead. This is what he died doing.