Pro-Sports

It was another one of those leisure climbing sessions at Camp-5 but an extremely insightful one.

I arrived at the gym and C was belaying her cousin so I went to “warm-up” on the auto-belay routes in the middle section. “Warm-up” was a bit of an understatement. It was a TKO for me before I had even completed the third lap.

I rejoined C and her cousin at the top-rope section where she had eagerly picked up my gear bag and said with a glint of delight in her eyes, “Lead climb?”

With sweat pouring down my face, I held out my forearms and replied, “Feel this.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

Oh dear, indeed.

Since her newbie cousin was also out for the count, she suggested we “rest” by the lead wall while I contemplated what I wanted to climb. I ended up on the gray route in the corner of an open book and took a Sunday stroll. My excuse to myself for slacking being that her cousin was a newbie so it would be wiser not frighten him off by throwing him into the deep-end.

As I watched C’s cousin climbing, a rather devious thought popped into my mind. It is a common observation that male climbers naturally seek to challenge themselves more quickly than female climbers. They were more willing to try new things and push their boundaries, such as leading. If we succeeded in getting C’s cousin hooked on climbing, we could get him to lead all our routes for us. However did I come to be so Machiavellian?

I re-lead the gray route for C to climb next and decided that this was going to be another one of those leisure weekends.

C cleaned the route with a panache that was a repeating occurrence ever since she signed up for her three month membership and started hitting the gym more often.

She felt a little guilty that I wasn’t pushing myself, though why I cannot begin to guess. I assured her that to lead a route in itself, regardless of whether the route was easy or hard, was already a training session for the mind. Giving my typical mental “bail outs” of late, it seemed my mind needed the training more than my body.

As I was leading the gray route for the second time, I started the route continuing a conversation I was having with C. After a while, I found I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying, or even if I did hear her, I couldn’t formulate my own replies.

A memory from the past resurfaced as I recalled what my driving instructor had said during one of my lessons. It was an incident where I was driving and he was talking incessantly. His voice was starting to irritate me because I couldn’t concentrate on the road ahead and I think he noticed. That’s when he said, “When you can talk and drive at the same time, you are ready to sit for the test.”

If that were the case, I obviously needed a lot more improvement on leading. In which case, practice was just what the doctor ordered for me. Practice involves repeating a process so often that it becomes as natural as blinking or breathing. To practice lead, therefore, meant that I needed to lead climb more often. That was where I hit a snag. I felt an uncomfortable reluctance to push myself to practice leading.

That was probably my biggest failing as a climber, and part of the reason why I never performed well in a competition. I had always rehearsed a route on top-rope until I had it wired before I would lead it. I knew all my moves by heart before I even tied into the rope. That made me inflexible when it came to attempting new routes because I had to practice a new set of moves all over again.

A common problem in the past was that I had often climbed with climbers who were more adept and more willing to push themselves. It made it easier for me excel because all I had to do was to follow in their wake. Now that I had no one to lead the tougher routes for me to practice on, it was left to me to take the lead and blaze a trail for myself.

Since I had nailed the issues, what could I do about the problem? The problem was that I became afraid on a lead wall the moment my arms were tired, so my solution meant I needed to train my stamina.

Recalling the pump generated from climbing the middle auto-belay route, I realized that my practice wall was already set up for me. All I have to do is make it a habit to stop by the gym and tank myself on that route every time I came within an arm’s length of the gym.

And that, my friends, was the resolution I came to after today.

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