I’m sitting here in an airport bar, drinking a beer and waiting to board a flight to Mexico. Lately I’ve been thinking about a questions that comes to my mind every so often, namely why do we as climbers have noticeable peaks and valleys in our climbing abilities? I’m not concerned about day to day fluctuations that could be attributed to many different factors such as what you ate that day, how much sleep you got the night before, stress at work or home, etc. Instead, I want to examine what occurs over the course of a climbing season or longer. My thoughts are centered on sport climbers as that’s primarily what I do but I imagine some of my conclusions will apply to boulderers and even trad climbers who push themselves to climb at their limit.
To try to answer this query, let’s look at my personal performances this past fall. In relative terms, I climbed very well, probably the best that I ever have for an extended period of time. The beginning of the season marked the best combination of concurrent endurance and power that I’ve managed to put together. As a result, throughout the season many routes in the grade range that are difficult for me were completed, all in one to four tries. Fast forward to Thanksgiving weekend and guess what happened. I climbed terribly, feeling weak physically and mentally. This is not the first time that this has happened to me. It seems every year or sometimes every season I have a nice peak followed by the inevitably valley. Talking with other climbers who enjoy pushing themselves and climbing at their limits and it seems that I’m not alone. Most climbers relate experiencing highs and lows, some more often than others, but almost universally the difference between the highs and lows are dramatic
These periodic occurrences lead to the obvious glaring question of why? What do we do in a positive sense to climb so well and what happens to end the string of successes? To answer this questions I’ll again return to my own climbing life, mining my recent climbing experiences in an attempt to find some clues to my personal climbing success and to identify some nasty pitfalls so that I and others might avoid them in the future.
First off, let’s talk success. What happened to allow me to climb as well or better than ever before? The standard answer: I got stronger. While this is probably true, it’s really a useless statement for this discussion as “getting stronger” in climbing terms is incredibly vague. So what really happened? After returning from Spain in early July I was relatively heavy, weak from climbing on too many juggy tufas, and burned out mentally. The weather was super hot, I was tired of being away from Theresa and the girls, basically I needed a vacation from my vacation. So I moved indoors, spending a lot of time at Stone Summit, Atlanta’s new mega-gym. Climbing indoors, in the air conditioning with friends who were also hiding from the heat, was just what I needed. While we had fun pulling on plastic, we also climbed hard with 6 hour or longer gym sessions the norm. These long sessions, working to failure of both skin and muscles, were commonplace this Summer as there was no need to leave anything in the tank. Over time I saw my endurance rise as well as my steep, positive hold power.
The steep, endurance-oriented routes at Stone Summit also improved an aspect of sport climbing with both physical and mental factors, namely the ability to climb while very pumped. The physical aspects are physiological adaptations that allow muscles to deal with lactic acid, both in the ability to better remove it from the muscles being stressed (flush it out) as well as improving muscles’ tolerance to perform in the presence of lactic acid. These physical adaptations occurred from a repeated stressing of the forearms by getting crazy pumped over and over.
The mental side of climbing while pumped (different than pump management) is quite simple in principle: A climber can usually continue climbing a lot longer while pumped than he or she wants to. One of the aspects that separates elite sport climbers from those getting their feet wet is the mental fortitude to push on while pumped. I’ve seen the term “dangerously pumped” used many times when describing this situation but I for one greatly dislike it. In the realm of sport climbing, not only is falling an option, it’s a fairly common occurrence that, under most circumstance, is quite safe. The “dangerous” part is actually just hyperbole, an attempt to exaggerate what we’re doing. For many climbers continuing on while pumped, pushing higher instead of hanging or yelling take, involves getting out of one’s comfort zone and overcoming some (usually) irrational fears. Arno Ilgner’s excellent Warrior’s Way books and courses are a valuable source of information on this topic and are highly recommended. While training this Summer, by repeatedly getting pumped and learning to push on, my mental fortitude in dealing with being pumped (and sometimes failing) greatly increased. This aspect of sport climbing is something I’ve rarely been able to work on in a gym (do to the size limitations of most gyms) and is perhaps the area I made the largest strides in while training this Summer. As it has carried over into climbing outside I’ve been learned to put it succinctly, “I’m pumped, so what”.
I also worked on my cardio fitness, losing a little weight and adjusting back to my usual diet here in America. I find it much easier to plan and control my diet here versus Europe as I know more about the food here (and I’m less psyched to eat everything like I am in Europe). Getting my weight down and my strength to weight ratio up made steep climbing much easier and more enjoyable.
Ok, the training season is over and climbing outside is back at the forefront. What happened? Initially I felt slightly out of my element, taking a little time adjusting to the smaller footholds and less giant jugs found on outside routes. However, I quickly overcame this and saw rapid and marked success on routes both new and old. In short, I felt strong and I felt fit. I also felt like a better climber technically, using more subtle footwork to overcome obstacles instead of resorting to brute force. I feel that this was due to a conscious focus on footwork while training this summer.
The season progressed with even better results than I had hoped. I was able to climb many routes in one to four tries and repeated some old routes quite easily. I worked quickly down my list of goals for the season with growing confidence. I even tried two 13c routes, a grade that, even as recently as a couple of months prior, I had thought a season or two away. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it was over. I felt weak and unmotivated, I was irritable at the crag because “I was climbing like S$!t”. So what really happened? There’s no simple answer, no magic bullet or piece of kryptonite, but I think I’ve pieced together a couple of factors, both mental and physical, that combined for the performance decline.
Let’s look at a psychological factor first. As the season transitioned from Summer to Fall, my mental focus shifted into “send mode”. With this came a change in the direction of my mental concentration and training focus from training to redpointing outside. This wasn’t a conscious decision but a subtle shift that was unnoticed at the time but obvious as I look back. What was the impact of this mental shift in my climbing both indoors and outside? I was still going to the gym, training and trying to improve but my primary focus was climbing hard outside. As I have a somewhat normal job, I was focusing on climbing well on the weekends. This meant that I didn’t want to climb to failure during my late week gym sessions (see earlier comment about leaving something in the tank). My weekend climbing, previously hard training sessions inside, became outside climbing trips. These trips were initially very successful with many good sends both onsight and project oriented. However, the amount of hard, resistive climbing that I did on an average weekend day outside was less than what I was doing previously on weekend training days indoors.
What were the implications of these subtle changes? On the positive side, my ability to read and move over real rock (subtly different than indoors on plastic) improved. My ability to use bad footholds and recover on awkward rest spots improved as the season progressed. With success my confidence both in onsighting and redpointing routes improved. I think that a positive mental focus, something that is neglected by many climbers, is key to climbing at your limit. As the season progressed my belief that I could do hard routes and do them quickly solidified and increased with success.
So those are the positive changes, what about the negative trends, both physical and mental that occurred during the season? Let’s look at the physical side of things first. In terms of max recruitment (power), my strength decreased as the season progressed. This is often the case during a sport climbing season as routes rarely have “at your limit” individual moves. What may come as a surprise to some is that I feel that my endurance either remained at the same level or decreased throughout the season. The reason behind both of these is simply a decrease in hard training. Consider a day where you’re trying to send your project outside. You warm up on a couple of routes that aren’t too difficult and then give your project two or three goes. At this point it’s probably getting late, you may do one or two more routes at most but rarely are you doing the same volume of taxing climbing that you would do during a training session. The result is a slow decrease in endurance or perhaps maintaining a given level. The coupling of a constant or diminishing endurance level with a decrease in power will always lead to a decline in physical climbing ability.
On the psychological side, there are also changes that occur during a season. Climbing at one’s limit is hard physically as well as mentally and emotionally. Mentally one has to be motivated to give a maximum effort on every attempt which can be very difficult to sustain week in and week out. On an emotional basis, hard climbing inherently means dealing with failure, sometimes a great deal of it. Dealing with defeat, staying psyched and avoiding burnout can also be difficult to accept and build upon throughout the season.
There can also be mental challenges dealing with success. You put in the work, train hard, suffer mentally and physically, invest your time, money, emotions and then, low and behold, you send. Success is sweet but oh so fleeting. You move on to the next route but are you as hungry for this one as you were the last? One can find his motivation to climb hard flagging as the season progresses even when success is encountered. A sneaky hazard to success can also be weight gain. You send and rightly reward yourself, cake, maybe ice cream, or both. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this but too much success can lead to your weight inching slowly up.
What happened this past season in climbing for me? I think all of these changes, some more than others, contributed to my decline in performance this past season. My strength slowly decreased due to a lack of bouldering, my endurance stayed about constant, my technique improved a bit. My confidence increased but over time I lost a little bit of the hunger, the desire to push myself. In short, I burned out a bit. With some burnout coupled with slightly decreased physical attributes, my performance decreased a bit. With that my confidence eroded slightly and my burnout increased.
So what’s the bottom line? For me personally there’s always going to be peaks and valleys. The goal is to sustain the peaks as long as possible and as high as possible while keeping the valleys shallow and brief. The key here is to stay psyched, whether by taking breaks, climbing easier routes, changing styles (ie bouldering), whatever you need so that you can have fun while climbing hard. If you stay motivated the training and the sacrifices won’t seem so bad and the successes will taste so sweet.
Climb safe, climb hard, and have fun!
