The Lifecycle

I’ve been hanging out with climbers since I was a little kid. What I’m about to say is born from my silent observations as a shy 12-year-old, to deep conversations murmured over campfires in the wilderness, to the stories my students share with me weekly.

This is the lifecycle of a passionate human climber and it has proven true across abilities and genders.

one: FALLING IN LOVE

Shot through the heart, you find yourself completely blindsided by how much you love climbing. Climbing solves a variety of problems in your life. It helps you make friends, fill all your free time, get fit, and let you know exactly what you’ve accomplished in a day.

But even in the beginning, you might wonder if being a good climber means you have to risk your life. You watch beautiful, inspiring videos of huge whippers, highballs or free soloing and yearn for that kind of freedom and expression. The videos offer an equal dose of inspiration and heebie-jeebies, but it’s impossible to discern if the movie stars are actually putting their life on the line. Your new love comes with a little seed of fear right from the start, especially in an American frame of mind. Does strength, freedom and beauty equal being will to die?

two: OBSESSION

When you first fall in love with climbing, you climb as much as possible with literally anyone who is available. You test the limits of permission and flexibility in your job, finances, relationship expectations…and sense of safety.

At this stage you have a genuine lack of knowledge and experience, so there’s no way of knowing if your knot, gear, belayer, even your own belay skills, are solid. So climbing is consistently horrifying and not necessarily safe. Your partner may reassure you, but you still don’t even know how to double-check their systems. With pressure to play it cool with the dude offering to teach you, you hesitate to ask questions that would help you learn a bit more. This deference creates a void of tangible skills.

Of course, it makes sense to wonder, how much fear and uncertainty is normal? Are all the best climbers simply born fearless? What are normal people going through? Since no one is admitting their fears, most people attempt to squash feelings in order to show up, fit in and hopefully makes some improvement.

three: GAINS

But let’s celebrate, you’ve actually improved quite a bit by simply showing up. At last you’ve established a comfort zone where you feel pretty good about yourself and don’t get to freaked out. From within the comfort zone, you know how to avoid inconvenient, unpredictable emotions.

Terrifyingly, a beat lies lurking. This fearsome beast is called Ambition and it won’t be kept down. When you make the effort to disregard Ambition, you feel small. When you obey Ambition and try a little harder, you embarrass yourself by revealing your genuine lack of skills and muscles.

four: THE HONEYMOON IS OVER

Squashing down embarrassment and uncertainty when you’re flailing on a climb demands a lot of strength and self-control. Fortunately, most of us have been trained to hide our emotions our entire lives by our culture and families. Suck it up, Buttercup. Boys don’t cry.

Do your partners witness your struggle with kindness or competition? Do they have patience for your process? Maybe you actually don’t know how they will respond at all. That’s a lonely question.

Attempting to impress your partners, and yourself, you start dragging yourself to the gym every day after work and you’re researching a hang boarding program.

Your fingers and joints are starting to speak to you—is that a tweak or is that how it’s supposed to feel? Am I getting stronger or am I just store all the time? You are rushing to improve with just one strategy: more.

five: BURNOUT

Grasping for a solution you turn to the internet. The algorithm feeds you all the online coaches. Some you resonate with, some seem truly wacky. One thing they all have in common is an orientation toward success, accomplishment and higher grades. Get stronger, climb harder. Leave your fears on the ground!

It’s true, blind faith in instructions and the discipline to follow through has worked in every other area of your life, from career to dating, since elementary school. Having experienced success with this style of self-discipline, it only makes sense when climbers try to manage their bodies and performance with the same amount of control.

This approach works on some level, yet I know you can sense its hollowness, too. Getting stronger and climbing harder will never answer the questions: Have I arrived? Do I belong? What am I fighting for?

Bodies always ultimately rebel with pathetic fatigue and debilitating injury. You believe lack of strict-enough authority is the only explanation for this mutinous betrayal. The solution: punish the body. The bigger the rebellion, the bigger the punishment. You force yourself to climb through injury. You are no longer experiencing the emotional high that once rewarded your time spent on the wall. You are forced to take a break and subsequently lose some fitness and gains.

six: PLATEAU OF RESIGNATION

You convince yourself you’ve learned a lot, you’re pretty “happy” with the grade you’re at now and maybe you should just play it safe for a little while and not get injured again.

By this point in your career, you’ve layered many bandaids on top of countless fears, emotions and injuries that came up naturally along the climbing journey. Each chapter of growth, from leading and falling to highballs and trad, required more bandaids in order to keep up the momentum and progress. Without meaningful solutions, climbing stops making sense, but because of the muscles and accomplishments you’ve stacked along the way, stopping climbing makes even less sense.

seven: THE NIGHTMARE

And here comes the existential fear paralysis spiral. Doubts and questions plague you, and you don’t know what to do. “Maybe my mom was right and this sport is too crazy. Do I have any friends or are they all just climbing partners? How will I find a mate? What if all I am is a climber — but if I can’t do my sport any more, how will I know I’ve achieved anything in life without the grade based structure of climbing? What do I do on the weekends?” 

The Nightmare may coincide with starting a family or the pressure to finally make some money in a real job. Some people meet The Nightmare after an accident or a friend dies climbing. While there are tangible, meaningful rewards to making the decision to move on from climbing, safety may never soothe the spiritual sacrifice you’ve made by stuffing climbing into the past, and awakens the potential for deep, upending regret.

THIS IS THE NIGHTMARE. You’ve haven’t faced the micro nightmares building up along the way and now you’re stuck with some real horrors to face.

The Nightmare exists because of a fear-phobic culture whose attitudes urge us to press on and on, head down, blinders on towards accomplishment, overriding the valuable guideposts of emotion that crop up along the way. There were many opportunities and other fates that beckoned, but the promise of performance and achievement pulled harder.

Even if you were immune to the other options at the time, it isn’t too late to walk the path again, this time with a Saint here to guide you.