Monday, July 15, 2019

Climbing: working on the body vs. working on the nerves

The last few weeks, I have been working on getting used to lead climbing, which, as a reminder, works by bring a rope with me up the wall and clipping it to a metal draw located at evenly spaced out sections all the way up to the top of the wall. The pile of 40-60 m long rope lays on the ground, and your belay partner slowly gives out rope to the climber on the wall through a belaying device, so that when a fall occurs, the climber hangs off of the draw he/she last clipped. Such fall could happen any time, but a likely position when a fall happens would be when the climber attempts to slip the rope in a draw and fails to do so, in which case he/she falls all the way to below the previous metal draw where the rope was clipped on. This is quite a large fall that is quite scary for the climber, and the belayer also gets dragged some distance up and into the wall (the belayer should stick his/her foot out towards the wall to help control the fall). Here is a video of what this process looks like. The whole process is supposed to be relatively safe for the climber and the belayer.

So despite practice having practiced falling in a controlled manner, at this current stage of my climbing journey, my heart rate still goes way up even as soon as I don't have at least one secure footing and at least one secure handhold. This is why I am currently only climbing very easy routes, over gripping my handholds, and "cheating" -- ie. grab or stand on a handhold or foothold that do not belong to the designated route I am working on. On these easier routes, the handholds and footholds are pretty large and non-tricky, so simply climbing them isn't a work out for me. Well, I mean, they still tire me out since I am gripping them too hard, but it doesn't work my hands and my body the same way that a higher level route does.

My boyfriend, having stronger grips, better endurance, and less fear of heights, is on a different game. He is able to attempt routes that are way closer in difficult to what he normally climbs on top rope. He also hates falling, but he is able to overgrip trickier handholds for longer than I can. He likes to work on minimizing the number of hanging rests on a hard route so he can eventually "onsight" such routes, or get through an entire route upon first try without hang-resting or falling, having never watched another person climbing that same route.

To be strict, you should rather fall than to use holds that do not belong on your route, because on an outdoor wall of labelled level X, there are no additional holds other than all the ones available to you on that wall. However, currently I cannot play that game, because I have to first get over my psychological roadblocks. Otherwise the falls would not be fun (will be fall of tension), and I would lose my desire to continue climbing.

So anyways, my boyfriend and I had a conflict over the fact I sometimes place a foot or a hand between the rope and the wall. You should have your body parts over the rope, otherwise when you fall, your leg or hand can be jammed up by the rope and the resulting fall could be messy. I understand that intellectually, but I was so focused on not falling that when he yelled out at me from the below when I had a hand under the rope, I totally panicked and could not climb any more. His warnings were out for safety concerns, but the problem was that I reacted over the fact that I did something wrong and I didn't know how to fix it immediately.

The main thing is, what I did was dangerous if I fall. My main focus was not to fall. I would have grabbed all the things I was not supposed to grab (the rope, the draws, the bolt etc) in order to stay on the wall. So we were playing totally different games with totally different rules. This was why it was impossible to solve the conflict. I understand his game is how climbing should be. You are supposed to practice using the appropriate body movement to get up a route, falling as many times as necessary until you get the movement to work. But I needed to just get comfortable on the wall holding my body in uncomfortable positions until I feel comfortable enough to work on falling and then work on following the rules as well as more advanced climbing movements.

Being on the wall, standing on your toes and hanging by a rope, there are a million things to think about. One has totally different perspectives being on the wall than the person maintaining your safety from the bottom of the wall watching you climb. There are a lot of parallels between this activity and real life. I think I might have been failing certain things in life because while I know the rules of the game for career advancement, due to my own psychological shortcomings, I want to be given a break and be on my own terms, while being attached to other people. But the administrators, the boss, the colleagues do not see my perspective and are not willing to give me a break. If I really want to play my own games, then I need to be independent, belaying myself. Otherwise I have to play their games. It's something for me to contemplate further for sure. 

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