The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

the climb or back on the ground basking in glory.
    One of the most obvious symptoms of destination thinking is nervousness before and during a redpoint effort. You’re very motivated to have done the climb, and the thought of the effort and uncertainty separating you from your goal stresses you out. Some climbers also experience a strange loss of motivation once they’ve worked out the moves on a climb and made a few redpoint efforts. This too is caused by the destination mentality. The climb is “as good as done.” You “know” you can do it. Yet the real challenge and gut-level learning still waits. With a “good as done” attitude, the actual performance becomes an obligation rather than a chance to enter the risk zone and hunt for power. Thus, motivation wanes.
    Success and failure do not exist in the present, only effort and action exist. You reach for a hold, step out over an overhang, surge up into a hand jam, and fall free through the air. These exist in the present. Success and failure are later constructions, phantoms created by the Ego. The Ego has no use for learning and it does not like chaos. It wants a trophy list of destinations with which to validate itself. The Ego will try to escape from the chaos of the risk zone to a comfortable destination even though it sabotages your effort by doing so.
    Paul Piana, an expert climber with many first ascents to his credit, related a story that shows the power of a journey mindset. In 1996 he had been working on redpointing a project climb, Atomic Cow , at Wild Iris, a sport-climbing area near his home in Lander, Wyoming. One day at the crag an out-of-town friend showed up. “I told him about a really nice 5.13 that I had been working on that had really nice moves on it,” Paul told me. “I hadn’t been able to redpoint it but wanted to show him the moves. I got on it without any expectations other than to show him how sweet the moves were.” To Paul’s great surprise, he floated through the moves and made the redpoint. With his focus on the great moves rather than the red-point, he found just the “relaxed concentration” he needed to maximize his performance. By not thinking of his destination, he reached it.
    A student of mine, Jeff Jenkins, had a similar experience while climbing in the Obed River area of northeastern Tennessee. He had been working on a well-known 5.12 called Tierrany , a very steep route that climbs out multiple tiered roofs. He had made several redpoint efforts over several days and returned on the last day before he and his partner were moving on to another climbing area. “I had pretty much accepted the fact that Tierrany wasn’t going to go that day,” related Jeff, “but I wanted to take one more lap just to see whether I had finally figured out the crux.” Jeff had accepted that the redpoint could wait for another trip and had become more interested in simply testing his knowledge of the route. As a consequence, his attention was completely on the climbing rather than on success or failure. He went up the route in a very relaxed, curious frame of mind. “Lo and behold, next thing I knew I was through the crux and shaking out before pushing to the anchors!” exclaimed Jeff. A minute later he finished the redpoint, one of his most satisfying to date.

    The author practices “relaxed concentration” on his route Volunteer Wall , Whitesides, North Carolina. Photo: Jeff Achey
    Destination thinking causes a disjointed mindset that hinders performance. The physical body always operates in the present, but the conscious, thinking mind always dwells in the past or the future. You cannot have a thought about the present moment; in the time it takes to form the thought, the moment is already gone. When you are in the risk you need direct, immediate perception, not the lagging commentary of the conscious mind thinking about what is happening. When the conscious mind is engaged in thinking, a gap is created between your body and your mind. Fear enters through that gap, and attention leaks out.
    In the Journey mindset, in contrast, there is no room for fear. Failure does not exist in the present, nor does the intellectual baggage that comes with it. Success, too, is irrelevant. The Journey mindset rests on learning and expanding personal power and doesn’t rely on the subordinate goal of making it up a specific climb. You may really want to do a certain climb. That’s natural. The Rock Warrior’s Way, however, teaches