The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

his feet and maintain balance by “patting” the wall as he slid to avoid scraping the skin off his hands.
    I didn’t learn these techniques until later, but right away I learned simply not thinking about the fall consequence is not a wise strategy. Falling is part of the climbing process and can happen on any route. The lesson became even more valuable when I realized the danger of the fall itself could have been greatly reduced with creative forethought and/or practice.
    The Third Part—the Climber
    Third, assess the climber, the skills and abilities you bring to the climb. Potentially dangerous situations are in some ways the simplest. You can determine the risk, assess it, and take responsibility for your choice. Accepting responsibility is more difficult when it involves the murky workings of the Ego, rather than real concern for life and limb.
    One of the Ego’s “1000 heads” arises when you examine your performance after the fact. Backing off a climb is a classic example. When you back down, even when you are sure you are making the appropriate choice, you may later begin to doubt yourself. Your Ego is still attached to the external reward of claiming a hard ascent. Even though you knew in your heart that you were showing respect for the gift of life by backing down from an overly dangerous, inappropriate risk, your Ego may not be convinced. It’s scheming, and wants a trophy climb to feed its inexhaustible appetite for glory, using your shame to obtain it. The Ego, however, has only as much power as you give it. By consciously acknowledging this second-guessing as a product of the Ego, you already drain it of force. To finish the job, simply look that dragon head in the eye and slice it off.
    Don’t waste attention on wishing you could have performed better with “shoulda-coulda-woulda” behavior. Once you’ve had a performance, it’s over. You can’t change it. Dodging the facts hinders real learning. Your performance, whatever it was, was the best it could have been at the time. Accept it. Physical strength, your technical skill, your ability to focus your mind, your level of motivation, and many other factors all contribute to performance. Saying, “I could have made it if only I had really gone for it,” is similar to saying, “I could have made it if I was a better climber.” Knowing how to commit to the climbing, jamming a difficult crack, being comfortable on small footholds—these are all skills which take training to refine, just as building strength does. You’re facing the facts more clearly when you say, “I think that moment of hesitation shut down my commitment.” Instead of wasting attention on regret or “could have” thinking, accept full responsibility for your performance, analyze and learn from your experience, and lay the groundwork for a stronger effort next time.

    Being a rock warrior is a solitary face-off with the “thousand-headed dragon” of the Ego. Chris Sharma dragonslaying in Tenere. Photo: Jim Thornburg
    The goal when assessing the climber is to see the skills and abilities as they are, without blowing them out of proportion, being overwhelmed by the lack of them, or allowing them to predetermine how you’ll perform. Different types of climbs will require different types of skills and abilities. For example, sport climbs at Rifle Mountain Park in Colorado will require endurance and face-climbing techniques, whereas trad climbs at Devils Tower in Wyoming will require endurance and crack-climbing skills. Find out what skills will be required and assess them objectively. For now, we simply want to clearly observe the skills and abilities that will impact our performance. Later, in the Giving process, we’ll focus on how to utilize those skills to create the best performance.
    The last step of assessing is fully accepting what you’ve found. Don’t lapse into wishing you’d found larger holds, more pro, safer falls, or stronger arms. Accept what you’ve found so you can collect the necessary information in order to see the situation as clearly as possible.
    We began this chapter by noting some common obstacles to objectivity: association, metaphor, and memory. Then, we detailed a simple objective risk assessment, noting several places where our objectivity might be suspect, and devoted some attention to the element of falling. Last, we noted how the Ego might come back after the fact and cloud the assessment we made while in the risk situation.