It is of course true that climbing does satisfy all the simple needs being put forward in those quick answers, however, those answers do not seem to be reason enough to sit under a boulder, surrounded by snow, obsessing about moving your right hand a few inches. It may be fun and social to climb with friends on a Tuesday evening, but it is questionable whether that is the motivation that causes a person to throw themselves at their hardest project for months or years in a row.
So why do we climb? Or perhaps an easier way to approach this is to look at why we fail to finish climbs. Something that is easily broken down into one of two categories: physical or mental. We fail because we can’t solve the physical movement puzzle, or because we can’t solve the internal problem. When you flip that over to look at it from the direction of motivation, climbing becomes an avenue for exploration. One of physical and mental limits.
There is a lot of material out there about training for climbing. Podcasts discuss the topic, books offer up countless approaches to improving power and endurance. As if enough raw physicality will allow people to brute force delicate movement puzzles, and enough physical stamina will best self doubt. These are things I know well, as they are extremely descriptive of my own early experiences of climbing. Ego motivated, grade chasing, where raw physical power allowed me to bulldoze my way through problems that would be better unlocked with better movement.
What is more, I have for years, trained athletes to be stronger, to have more endurance, so they can push back those mental barriers through pure physical prowess. You can, with enough beta sprayed at you, and enough raw physicality, bludgeon your way well into some very impressive grades while climbing.
The issue is that nobody cares. We are all too narcissistic, obsessed with our own objectives to really take much time to notice the accomplishments of our friends. At most we are mildly inspired, or a little jealous, but beyond that, we don’t actually care that our friend sent their first 13, or climbed a new v6. So if nobody is really paying attention, then we have to ask whether a new grade climbed is a hollow victory if it doesn’t actually challenge us.
It is perhaps an odd topic to bring to the fore, as one who trains climbers. Yet I think it is important to point out that the most satisfying climbs are the ones where we spent a decent amount of time unlocking some new piece of beta, or where we pushed past some mental barrier, either of fear, of belief in our own capacities. Those moments that allowed us to push into a new space. The greatest climbs are those that allow us to explore, alone or with others, new spaces both in the world around us, but also within our own psyches. I of course have no interest in pushing my own interests on to all climbers everywhere, but it does seem safe to assume that the majority of climbers exist somewhere on the spectrum of physical movement problem to mental edge chasing. For those that want to push mental limits, physical preparedness allows them to leave the only barrier an internal one. Mark Twight famously commented on the fact that alpine climbing was never a place to test physical limits, but rather mental ones. On the other end of the spectrum, projecting a sport climb is almost all about solving a complex movement problem, and far less about chasing a mental limit.
I think climbing offers up a chance to fail, to discover an unknown, to be tested, and to be pushed to our limits. These are all things that are offered up when you step off the ground and start moving. What is more, I think that most climbers, if they sit with the question of ‘Why am I doing this thing?’, might discover it has to do with mental/psychic limits far more than it does physical boundaries. The limits of physicality simply get in the way of chasing an edge of not knowing. In a sense, the goal of the climb is to go and be somewhere where we aren’t ‘safe’, to step beyond being perfectly comfortable. We are looking for a place we can suffer in a society that has become far too predictable.
So, if that is the case. I can only say that I am confused that people seem to avoid embracing that space. People say they are scared to fall, and they back off from doing so. Or they want to dial in all the moves on a climb before putting in a real effort. To these comments I stand screaming in the dark, that a bit of reflection might reveal that these actions take us further away from a big part of what climbing offers us. An edge.
Who knows, maybe I am crazy. Yet the more climbers I ask this question to, the more I get a similar response. Climbing is about mental edges. So lets start more conversations about mental toughness. About finding the edges of what is no longer comfortable, and sitting there. This might not be a flow sport for me, but it is certainly one that lets you go and sit in uncomfortable spaces.
