Via Ferrâtà

It's hard to explain via ferrâtà. Taken literally it's Italian for iron path, and the original ones date back to the First World War in the Dolomites. But in recent years they've exploded across all mountain regions as an adventure tourism activity. I'd conservatively guess I've done 120+

A route is made across, up, down and every variation there of on big cliffs, gorges, even to mountain summits. On the better ones (climber bias here) natural features are used, but on many now novelty items like wire bridges, steel nets and ladder walks are used. They nearly always give access to locations and a micro environment it would be impossible to reach otherwise.
Participants keep themselves safe with lanyards that are connected to specially stitched tapes that unravel if they are subjected to the sorts of forces a fall on steel cables will generate. My best guess is that they'd definitely keep you alive, but it would hurt a huge amount. Worse some people think they know what they're doing and try to do it with small lengths of dynamic rope. That has proven fatal on many occasions as the huge fall factors generated pass into the body with the wrong system. On a practical note I and friends have often theorised that in the event of a fall on your own you'd simply be left dangling. The tapes under full load will unravel to around 4ft.
As we're about to find out, knowing all this can affect your head game. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Today I went to do the via ferrâtà in the gorge. I've done stage one before. There were going to be two of us, but my mate bailed after a heavy night.
It was very busy.
I'm quite sociable so that didn't bother me.... Until I got onto stage two and it got A LOT harder. Now to be clear in my mind, compared to climbing, all VF's are easy. Until it turns out, you have to stop where you are as the people ahead, à lot of people ahead, start to struggle. Especially if where you are is overhanging and out of balance.
It's imperative that you're never on the same cable as the people ahead, as if they fall they'll take you with them, so stop I had to. Eventually I constructed a static rest, and was able to hang from short length of rope I use for clipping to belays on big mountains routes, which is fortunately always on my harness. And that's when I noticed that one of the German chaps immediately ahead of me had a homemade VF kit... Made out of two short lengths of rope. Great to hang on (as I was) probably lethal if he fell whilst moving.
Now to be clear, there's totally no fix for this mid route, and I figured he didn't need to know as he was clearly struggling. But suddenly my arms felt heavy, easy somehow got a lot harder, sweat stung my eyes.
He moved from hold to hold needing a rest on each one, the poor guy was clearly running on empty. Fortunately he decided to bail at the end of stage two, where there's an escape. Having been on the route two hours (I'd figured 45mins max) I did too. I tried to explain on the walk off, but he had no English and my technical German is rusty, hopefully my sign language wasn't too gruesome.

Back at the apartment I tried to do some writing, but I could feel an itch, it rankled that I'd struggled today. After realising I wasn't going to settle to anything I kitted up and went back and did stage 2 of the VF again. Still tough which is fair enough , but a lot more enjoyable second time round with a worry free head.
That means I've still got stage 3 to do lol.