In reply to tobyfk: what an extremely interesting observation toby.
anyway, my take, while it might lack the same clarity :
A good tale.
First three paragraphs seemed to say the same thing three times.
I found the style - ie the parallel stories and alternating paragraphs - a bit dominating, in as much as it seemed more important than the story. There were many times, eg, the paragraph containing the idea that having a baby or doing a route made you a man, when the need to contain the idea in a single paragraph restricted the scope of the idea, meaning there was not enough space for it. This meant that you had to just state the fact, rather than illustrating it. A bit of the 'telling not showing' thing. This is the sort of thing much better handled by a bit of dialogue or an oblique observation, leaving the intellegent reader to infer those facts. In fact I think a lot of the piece suffered from this.
Also it prevented me from getting in to the climbing story, making it too stop/start. Also, it rapidly became very predictable causing me to tail off a bit at the end of each paragraph getting ready for the change.
Re: style again. If you cut out both bits and put them together seperately would you have two strong stories. I suspect with the climbing one you mighht, less so about the baby one. I think both need to be strong.
You go from refering to Mandy's baby to referring to 'our' baby. This is surely one of the most crucial points of the story. Yet I didn't find the event that caused this change in emotion. If it was there, it wasn't strong enough.
I tghink in many ways this might be good enough as an article, but as it is, wouldn't survive as a chapter in a book. It hasn't risen yet. I feel a chapter has to be much much tighter. Eg, some of the stories about Jim and the dancer seemed to be extraneous to the direction of the story. Surely everything should be forcing it along.
Also, I think litereature (as opposed to an article) should be able to exist purely by itself. I think that with saying what the objective was etc relied a bit much on the reader knowing that that was a gnarly thing to be doing. A bit like Nick's use of grades in his story.
Anyway, that's just a few things off the top of me head, and all purely a matter of opinion. Although all 'criticisms', I hope they don't come across negatively. After all I'm sure you don't need me to tell you you're a good writer.
niall grimes