Aaron's Status

4:34 pm

Chapter three was all about the motivations that drive people to climb and how that relates to climbing performance. A lot of the psychological and/or emotional ideas presented in this chapter (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, finding joy in what you do, etc.) was old hat for me, after my year of full-time coaching and all of my reading on management.

In fact, it’s worth noting that indeed there is nothing new under the sun, and most of the concepts related to performance in climbing are basically the same ideas as what is discussed in performance of teams, or performance in business. This book is simply presenting them within the context of climbing, using a lot of climbing jargon, and drawing the connections more explicitly among the experiences we have as climbers.

Not to say that the book isn’t useful, but I’ll wait till I finish it before I pretend to have an opinion here.

My take-away from chapter three is that climbers will ultimately perform at a higher level if they are motivated to climb for intrinsic reasons. I think this is true for performance in virtually everything, by the way.

Now, at some professional level, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations probably get muddy at best or warped at worst. Once you’re relying on sponsors to feed you, you’re going to be distracted by that, but I’m discounting this line of thinking entirely because I have no intention (nor desire) to climb for any reason other than pleasure.

So, where does the pleasure come from? The book prompts us to examine what drives our motivations. Do we climb to be outside, to move our bodies, to accomplish things, to be with friends, etc.?

The book prompts us to answer these questions to help us figure out where our motivations come from, so, I’ll try to answer them here and see what comes out of it.

What aspects of climbing or types of climbing do you enjoy most?

My favorite thing about climbing is discovering cool beta, and doing smooth, static movements. Obviously the send is icing on the cake, but a send that feels “desperate” is not as gratifying as a send that was executed with panache.

It feels really good to do a climb in a way that feels almost easy, to find a way to do it that centers my strengths.

What aspects of climbing do you enjoy least?

I don’t like feeling like a climb is “impossible” for me in a way that I wouldn’t be able to train for. It’s one thing to feel like a crimp is too small for my current capability, or a route is too long for me to finish without getting pumped (frustrating enough), but even worse is a climb where some necessary move is too “scrunchy” for my height, or requires some kind of flexibility that I lack.

Given the answers above, can you change climbing to be even more rewarding?

I do tend to walk away from the climbs that feel like the ones I dislike, so in that way I don’t think I need to change my climbing, but I can change how I frame that decision when I’m climbing with others who can do it.

I would not be climbing at my current level if I had not made many attempts on climbs that I could not send. Growth is proof positive of taking on challenges, but at the same time I can be more graceful about walking away from climbs that aren’t going to get me there or are a distraction from growth.

I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly have much better hip adductor flexibility; if that feels like a requirement of a problem or route, skip it.

Who are you? What is your identity—as a climber and beyond?

I do identify more as a climber now than any other type of athlete. I used to identify more as a weight training enthusiast and have always held my strength or other narrow areas of athleticism as part of my identity, but after the last couple of years of climbing as my primary type of exercise, I’d call myself a climber first.

I’m also an analytical and also creative person. I think my route reading is pretty good and getting better, and I like to imagine ways to solve problems or work on routes that others might not think of.

Who do you most enjoy climbing with? Why?

We have a pretty great circle of climbers at our gym. I would hesitate to essentially stack rank those people, but maybe I can sketch out some generalities that are useful here.

I like to climb with people who are equal parts persistent or tenacious but also measured. I’m at a point in my physical journey where I’m balancing growth with injury recovery/safety, and that makes it more challenging sometimes to thread the needle of getting encouragement without taking things further than my body is able to go in the moment.

The latter is improving over time and hopefully becomes a smaller piece of the puzzle in the next year.

So, who should you try to be like?

If we’re talking ways in which I want to change who I am as a climber, I think I want to be more encouraging but measured myself, as much as I’d want a climbing partner to be. I can work on finding (more) joy in my climbing partners' accomplishments and also being measured about what I’m able to commit to based on how I feel physically. This is sometimes hard for me in the moment so I may need to think about a mantra I can employ to remind myself.

I spent more time with this than I intended to. When it comes to finding the pleasure in climbing, for myself, what I’m seeing here is that I need to focus more on the beta and on the sequences and look for that visceral joy that I get from that aspect of the experience and less on the send.

This becomes challenging only in the sense that when climbing, especially with others, there is a lot of focus on the send, so I might consider how I can externally reframe what I’m doing and why I’m doing it so that I don’t accidentally internalize someone else’s goals.

Of course I want to send the route, we all want to send the route, but I’m climbing to have fun, and the fun is in the beta discovery and building a smooth, static sequence that feels awesome to execute. We get to the top when we get to the top.