In climbing and in life. But we can just talk about climbing.

We recently returned from a climbing trip/vacation in Switzerland. I was asked to go there and help as a setter for their lead national, and then Kaiya and I continued to Ticino for a few weeks of climbing. The trip overall was fun, we met lots of great people along the way and had some wonderful experiences. That sentence is perspective that is taken from hindsight, and in the moment, there were lots of days of frustration, negative self-talk, repeated “climbing fucking sucks”, “I fucking suck”, etc.

Rewind.

Comp was great. I had the opportunity to go to a gym in Europe and set a National Championship for lead and Para athletes in Switzerland. The gym, Kraftreaktor, check them out their Arlo location is one of the most aesthetic and nicest, cleanest, well designed gyms I’ve ever seen in my life. If I ever open a gym it will take it’s inspiration from this place for sure. Working in this gym with the setters was a great experience. There is a different way of doing things in Europe in the climbing gym industry from the design, membership structure, routesetting (not always better but on average yes) and this approach really seemed to suit my liking. The amount of coffees I drank in 4 days was staggering. More coffee than water that is for sure.

The competition itself was ok, I primarily worked on the mens routes, but climbed a lot on other things as well. Made some good decisions and some bad ones, nothing atypical from a normal event. In 20+ years of routesetting, I think I can say with pretty strong conviction that I’ve never made only the right decisions at an event where I have been a setter. You always miss something, and unfortunately a majority of the time the athletes and spectators suffer those consequences.

Blahbittyblahblahblah get to the point. Ok.

Reflection. Perspective. Both are very big words that as climbers carry a lot of preconceived ideas of what they are supposed to provide us. In general, and speaking without being emotionally (or in some cases actually financially) invested, reflection should lead us to perspective.

Have a shitty climbing day? Reflecting upon why, how, what can lead to gaining perspective and helping us to prevent the same things from happening in the future. Reality though, rears it’s ugly head and makes that simple sounding process quite hard at times. Example: A climber has a significant finger injury March 1. Unable to train and stay fit, climber continues to try and climb in a desperate attempt to hang on to some of the gains that were made over the winter in an effort to not fall behind their goals for the year. Over the next 7 months, climber finally allows finger time to heal, but not enough that they can get quite as fit as they want to before a trip. Climber also bounces back and forth from bouldering to lead in an effort to maintain some fitness for a number of routesetting work commitments they have made, leaving them in a place where they have some decent route fitness and some bouldering power but not a lot of each. Climber then leaves for a trip where they will be doing some lead climbing and then a significant amount of bouldering…a recipe for disaster.

This “climber” is me. And with some reflection after this trip, the perspective that I am able to gain is important. Was I able to see it then? Sure. But in the middle of a bouldering trip where I was struggling to do single moves on boulders of grades I’ve flashed before and usually climb in 15-30 minutes was infuriating.

This leads me to the next part of this. I recall telling my wife Kaiya at some point when I was telling myself that I sucked, and I was weak and couldn’t climb shit. She laughed and said “that’s great positive self talk…” knowing that I have never had that in my playbook for myself. Positive self talk and confidence is great, and I think it should be applied to climbing. Little does she know that I do it, but with an asterisk…if I know that I can’t do it, all the confidence and telling myself that I’m strong won’t change the fact that I can’t hold the hold. There’s a balance there, and it all comes back to perspective. Whether or not I’m telling myself that I’ve got it, and next go for sure, and inhale confidence exhale doubt, inhale belief exhale fear is all irrelevant if I haven’t prepared myself to be successful in the end. This is the part of the reflection that I was going through in the days and weeks after I returned. In a lot of cases, the concept of all this is lost when we refuse to give ourselves grace. I did that, and it took a lot of the trip to allow myself to be ok with trying easier things and feeling like it was success when the number attached to the thing was smaller.

I am very interested in the future and to see what happens when I try to apply this, for several reasons. Age is a real thing in climbing, and as you start to get older, I don’t think the level necessarily drops that much, but there are differences in approach, and I would imagine that there will be a lot more bad days than good ones. Mentally, that is going to be a huge challenge. It was just 4 weeks ago. Unable to climb grades in a “normal” feel, knowing that my body isn’t functioning the way it can, should, the way you want it to and expect it to is hard. Hard to allow grace for the situation. Adding to that the fact that climbers are generally quite hard on themselves is an awful combination.

More on this to come. Next one will be a bit more cheerful.