Every three weeks, Brook Crest Path closes its doors an hour early on a Sunday night and the gym quietly changes shape. By the time the first climbers arrive Monday morning, somewhere between forty and sixty problems have been stripped and replaced — new footholds, new movement puzzles, new reasons to return. The work is mostly invisible to members, which is precisely the point. Behind it sits a process that Aya Mitsuhara and Tomoki Reyes have been refining together since they began co-setting at Brook Crest Path in early 2022: a cycle of analysis, argument, physical building, and methodical testing that starts long before a single hold is unbolted. This piece follows one full reset — the one they ran across the third week of October — to make that process visible.
Week one begins on a Tuesday, with a spreadsheet and a disagreement ¶
Aya keeps a living document that tracks every problem on the floor: its grade, its dominant movement type (compression, pinch-heavy, dynamic, slab), the wall angle it sits on, and a rough age in days. By Tuesday of week one she has already flagged the candidates for removal. The criteria are less romantic than most members imagine. A problem comes down if it has been on the wall longer than 21 days, if fewer than a certain number of people have logged a completion in the gym's tracking app, or — and this is where Tomoki tends to push back — if Aya thinks the movement is redundant given what else is on the wall. Redundancy is the word they return to most often. Two overhang problems that both reward the same hip-drop sequence at the crux are not twice as good as one; they are diluted. The Tuesday meeting, held at the small table near the front desk with coffee and the spreadsheet open on a laptop, is where the reset's shape is really decided.
Reading the floor: what the data does and doesn't tell them ¶
The tracking app gives Aya and Tomoki a blunt kind of evidence. They can see which problems are being attempted repeatedly without completions — a sign of something either compelling or frustrating, and the distinction matters. A V4 that fifty people have tried and twelve have sent over three weeks is doing its job. A V4 that the same twelve people have all sent in the first four days and hasn't been touched since is coasting. But the data has a well-known blind spot: it captures nothing about how a problem feels to climb. Tomoki, who came to setting after several years competing on the regional circuit in the Kansai region of Japan before moving to London, talks about this in terms of what he calls 'movement texture.' A problem can be technically sound — correct grade, clear sequence, appropriate hold selection — and still feel thin, like a sentence that is grammatically correct but has nothing to say. The reset meeting is partly an exercise in identifying which problems have texture and which ones are just correct.
Choosing a theme: how movement concepts shape an entire cycle ¶
Going into the October reset, Aya and Tomoki agreed that the gym had skewed too far toward dynamic movement over the previous two cycles. The boulders that had generated the most energy — the ones members were filming and sharing — had all involved big moves: deadpoints, dynos, long reaches off compression. That success had quietly caused both setters to keep reaching for the same toolkit. So for October they committed to a quieter theme: precision footwork and weight transfer on lower-angle terrain. This does not mean the whole gym goes slab. It means that even on the 30-degree overhang, problems are designed so that the climber who ignores their feet will fail. Tomoki sketched four problems on paper before touching a single hold — rough diagrams indicating start, key intermediate, and top, with notes on which foot positions he wanted to force. Aya does the same exercise independently, then they compare. Where their sketches converge, they tend to build first.
The build: sequencing the physical work across four days ¶
The actual setting happens across four days in week two, typically Wednesday through Saturday, working in two-hour blocks before the gym opens and again in the final hour after it closes. Aya and Tomoki split the walls between them but review each other's work in progress — a second pair of eyes during construction, not only at the end. Hold selection at Brook Crest Path draws from three main suppliers, and both setters have strong opinions about when a given shape is appropriate. Tomoki has a well-documented preference for wooden volumes on compression problems; Aya tends to reach for textured resin on friction-dependent slabs. During the October reset they introduced a set of new two-finger pockets from a small batch ordered in September, and integrating an unfamiliar hold shape into several problems added time to the build. Tomoki spent an additional forty minutes on one V5 in the cave section alone, repositioning a pocket three times before the sequence felt honest.
Testing before the doors open: who climbs it and what they're looking for ¶
On the Sunday morning before a reset goes live, Brook Crest Path brings in four to six guest testers — climbers whose abilities span the gym's full grade range, recruited from regulars who have agreed to give feedback. This is not a focus group. There is no survey. Aya and Tomoki watch. They are looking for specific failure points: a climber who reaches for the wrong hold because the intended sequence is not visually legible, a V3 that a strong V5 climber breezes through in a way that suggests the grade is too low, a movement that requires a body proportion the hold placement did not account for. After the session, problems are adjusted — sometimes a single hold rotated by fifteen degrees is enough. Two problems from the October reset were pulled entirely before the gym opened on Monday: one because three testers of different heights all found a different sequence than the one Aya had intended, and one because Tomoki, watching a shorter climber attempt it, realised the problem had an unintentional height restriction baked into its third move.
The conversation that doesn't end when the reset goes live ¶
Once the new problems are open to members, Aya and Tomoki continue gathering information through the week. They both climb in the gym during open hours on rotation, which means they are present when members encounter problems fresh and without instruction. They listen to the language climbers use around a hard problem — whether frustration sounds productive or like the kind that makes people walk away. Minor adjustments are made during the first week if a problem reveals a flaw that testing missed. The October reset produced one such correction: a foothold on a V6 near the main 45-degree wall had been set too far out of the natural line, and by Thursday three experienced members had independently commented on it. Aya moved it four centimetres to the right on Friday morning before the gym opened. No announcement was made. This is considered routine.
What three years of shared cycles has built between them ¶
Aya and Tomoki do not always agree — on grades, on when a problem is finished, on whether a particular movement theme has been explored long enough to move on. They disagree often enough that Brook Crest Path's reset process has, over time, become partly a record of that ongoing negotiation. What they share is a commitment to movement that is specific rather than general: problems that ask a climber to do something particular, rather than problems that can be solved any number of ways by anyone strong enough. After nearly three years of shared cycles, both setters describe their collaboration in terms of efficiency rather than harmony. They have learned where the other's instincts run, which makes the Tuesday meetings faster and the building phase more focused. The result, cycle by cycle, is a gym floor that argues a case about what climbing can feel like — even if most members never know that argument is being made.
The next reset at Brook Crest Path runs the third week of November. Aya has already flagged eleven problems for removal. Tomoki disagrees with four of the choices. The Tuesday meeting has not happened yet.