The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

One moment, you are firmly attached to the rock, doing everything possible to maintain that attachment, and the next moment you are free-falling through the air.
    When no significant danger exists, fear of falling is another manifestation of phantom fear. The Choices process addresses totally accepting the possible outcomes of your effort. One possible outcome is that you will fall. You don’t want to simply push this possibility out of your mind, since this will create an unconscious attention leak, perhaps a large one. You want to fully accept the falling outcome.
    One example of fear of falling, and how to manage it, took place on the first free ascent of the Salathé Wall on El Capitan in 1988. This was the hardest, longest, free climb yet done in the world, and the climbers were very skilled and experienced. On the Headwall pitches, over 2000 feet off the ground and fiercely exposed, Todd Skinner and Paul Piana were truly challenged. The difficulty of the climbing was so close to their limit that any bit of lost attention was enough to shut them down. They bivouacked on the wall for days while working on the Headwall cracks. During this time they noticed they were distracted by fear of falling, especially first thing in the morning. That’s not hard to imagine, considering their position. To deal with this leak of attention they began each day by purposely taking progressively longer falls: fifteen feet, twenty-five feet, and finally forty feet. After this practice session the jitters were gone. They fully accepted the fall consequence and could focus all their attention forward into the climbing process.
HAVE A SAFE FLIGHT
Falling is an important tool for the climber, but I do not mean to imply that it isn’t dangerous. Even a short fall can hurt you. Falling involves an unavoidable loss of control where many factors come into play. If your belayer is inattentive or inept, he can drop you or cause you to slam into an obstacle. If you haven’t been paying attention to your rope system, your rope may run over a sharp edge that could cut it in a fall.
When assessing the fall consequence, consider not just the distance from protection, but also how the climbing lines up with the pro, the angle of the rock, and the position of the pro relative to overhangs. If you are to the side of your protection you will swing during your fall, possibly hitting an obstacle unexpectedly in your path. Jumping in the direction of your last pro will reduce the swing and the possibility of hitting obstacles. If the route is overhanging, some extra slack in your belay rope may help you avoid hitting the rock as you swing inward. If your protection is placed under a roof that you then climb over, you have created a situation where a fall will tend to slap you back against the wall below. In this case the belayer can feed slack to lessen the impact against the wall. For detailed falling practice see the Exercises.
    How do you accept a fall? Realize that falling is a natural part of the climbing process. Modern ropes and gear provide great freedom to push your limits in climbing without taking undue risk. To take advantage of this freedom you need to become familiar with falling. If you haven’t fallen regularly then you will tend to resist it. Also, falling safely takes some practice. You can hurt yourself even on very short falls if you wrap the rope around your leg, hit a small ledge, or swing sideways into an obstacle. You need to learn how to respond to these hazards if you want to fall safely. I suggest making falling a part of your warm-up each time you climb. This way you embrace it, develop some proficiency at it, and see it as a tool and a skill you can comfortably apply to solve a climbing challenge. If you don’t develop this proficiency and familiarity, you will leak attention into fear of falling and have less to focus forward into climbing.
    Commit to What?
    Deciding to take a risk—what does this mean? What, exactly, is the form of your decision? It is crucial to choose an appropriate goal to commit to and to know exactly what that goal is. Otherwise, you may define your choice too rigidly, eliminating useful options, or too vaguely, opening yourself up to fear and second-guessing.
    Climbing involves constant testing and exploring. In earlier chapters we discussed in detail how to gather information on a route. In this chapter we’re focusing on the process of moving into action. You’ve sketched out the risk