A healthy fear of falling
or... respecting your head
I've got a healthy fear fo falling. Yes, I love rock climbing, but I still get a bit freaked out sometimes. Every once in a while the fact that I'm climbing way off the ground and attached to a rope... it kinda gets to me. I think a fear of falling is essential to climbing. It keeps you safe, it makes you respect the sport, it makes you double check all of your safety gear and it keeps you alive. Climbing is dangerous. Climbing accidents happen.
All that being said... I don't plan on stopping climbing.
I was lead climbing with Ejeon a while back. There was a new pink 5.9 route on the left of the red lead wall, and onto the yellow arch. Its a really nice route, with some great moves on it. But I kept taking a lot of rests on the wall. I knew my arms were getting tired, and rather than finding a spot to rest one arm at a time, or risk falling a few feet -- I asked Ejeon to "take" ("take" is what a climber says when they want their belayer to take in the slack on the rope so the climber can rest on the wall). Truth be told, I was afraid of falling those few feet. It'd been a while since I'd taken a "whipper" (a "whipper" is a sizeable fall that you take while lead climbing. It's got that name cause it makes a whipping kind of sound), and somehow that fear of falling had gotten in my head to the point that it was preventing me to push myself...
So a fear of falling is good when it keeps you safe, but it's a HUGE problem when that fear is preventing you from pushing yourself, from increasing your endurance, and from improving your climbing. As I've written before, there's 3 parts to climbing: mental, physical and technical. I'm always trying to hone my technical skills: being conscious of how I'm placing my feet, keeping my arms straight when I'm hanging, not over-gripping a hold... all of that stuff, and the Strength Series is working on addressing the physical and mental sides of my climbing. I see a pretty obvious path for the physical stuff: push-ups, pull-ups, climb, climb climb. The mental stuff is harder for me to work on.
Last month, Michael Reardon came to Philadelphia as part of his Soloquest tour. It was really neat to hear his talk and hang out with him a bit. His mental strength is really impressive. I certainly don't have the urge to go free solo, or even work on any high-ball bouldering problems. But listening to his talk and peppering him with a zillion questions really helped me see things differently. He'll tell you himself, he's walked away from climbs that joe-blow could do blind-folded and in heals. Some days, he's just not feeling it. You've gotta respect your head when its not in it. For him, his life depends on that awareness. I need to hone that. I need to understand my head, understand when my head's not in it, and realize when actually I'm just not willing to push myself and I'm letting myself giveup. Its a tough thing... understanding what your own mind and body is telling you. But I'm working on it.
