Yesterday was cold and windy and cloudy, but at least it wasn’t raining, so we headed out to climb despite the unpleasant conditions. I hadn’t climbed in a week, and I was feeling it, for sure. Not that I hadn’t trained, mind you; I’d had two great, hard, high-intensity training sessions since my last day on the rocks, and I definitely had benefited from the resting time after those. But they weren’t climbing, and I was missing it.

Me and cold conditions don’t go well together, but all things considered, I made the best of the day. I warmed up and numbed out on the warm up, as I knew I would. I then got on a route I’ve tried a few times before. It starts with an easy opening section on big jugs to the first anchors, which I could manage in the cold conditions. Then it instantly transitions to the hardest part of the route for me, using a small crimp – not a chance that I could do this with numb hands, so I took and stuffed my hands in my armpits and whined for a bit about being cold. Little did I know that my real whiny-baby episode of the day was just starting…

The smartest way for me to do this sequence got into my head and rendered me a head case yesterday on this go, for some reason. I don’t know if it was the cold wind whipping through my shirt and making me feel unsettled and chilled on top of my relative unfamiliarity and insecurity about the actual movements themselves, but I just was having the hardest time dealing with the fact that to do this sequence in the most intelligent and balanced way for a person of my stature, I had to purposefully kind of wrap the rope around my right ankle so that when I committed to the sequence, I wouldn’t end up with the rope behind my leg and experience the dreaded upside-down fall.

The sequence itself involves crossing my right hand wa-a-ay under my left hand, which is gastoning a crimp locked off, with only my right foot on a hold, backstepping and with my right hip turned in as hard as possible, left foot off the rock and just out for balance. It feels cool, but there’s this fraction of a second when I let go with my left hand and my right hand isn’t really weighting the hold I’m crossing through to yet (a sidepull facing right, so I kind of gently fall into it) – it’s a real leap of faith. Add the cold and wind and the having to step out and up and deliberately wrap the rope around my ankle so when I stepped up it wouldn’t be behind my leg, and I was just balking and whining. The other way to do the sequence is just plain dumb (thrutchy and low-percentage) for someone my height, though, even though it feels safer (no weird rope management issues); it’s not safer, though. It’s fine to fall in the more balanced but somehow scarier position, as I proved to myself by jumping off on purpose in the middle of the movement.

After wrestling with trying to find any other way to do this for a while and honestly just acting like a big baby, I finally did the sequence correctly (with the next draw clipped, mind you), a couple times, and then lowered off, kind of (okay, really) disgusted with myself. I had to regroup and get myself together, had to master this mental demon that was taking away my climbing fun. I spent my time on the ground visualizing the movement, complete with the strange-feeling rope-wrap beta, and I also “used” my friend Christine to vocalize my fears; sometimes just saying it out loud and getting some empathy for my silliness helps.

In any case, back up the second time, I took at those first anchors to warm up my totally numbed hands, and I took that opportunity to give myself one more stern talking to about how I wanted this sequence to play out. I gathered my courage, and floated right through it like it was nothing! (what was all the fuss about?), and then continued on up through the true crux of the route, and then all the way up to the very end of the route, one move from where you’d never fall – and I fell there, mostly because I was just using Kevin’s beta up there and hadn’t taken a closer look at it, seeing as I didn’t think I was close to doing this route yet and had never gotten to this point in sequence. I finished the route with Kev’s beta, but then took the time (cold days are great for this!) to really look for other options, and I found something better that works for me and my strengths at this point in the route.

I think this can be so key – when you’re tired near the end of a climb that you’re trying to redpoint, you want to find the sequence that plays to your strengths at that point. For me, this means shortening the moves, because when I get tired climbing, moves that aren’t even really that big start to look huge (power failure strikes again). So if I can make moves shorter and do more of them, this can really help me. Plus, I can cop a shake with my new beta, too, which always helps me. Not that my beta would be right/better for someone else; it really depends on the climber’s strengths and weaknesses, these types of choices.

I was psyched after this go, of course – two hangs, one due to numbness, and one real fall. Buoyed up, I wanted to climb more, but I also realized that it was cold (meaning no chance of a better go next time, most likely), and that I had put in a LOT of work on hard sequences for me already, climbing them over and over and over again. This is a ton of work to put in, even if I’d “only” climbed three times. Also, I know from experience that every time I string together a bunch of moves that I’ve only done in pieces on other go’s on a climb, I am far more worked from the effort.

I came away from the day having learned a ton. I’m psyched to have dispelled my fear of the weird rope-wrap situation so quickly; that stuff infuriates me to no end and I get frustrated that I still deal with it at times (I swear it’s tied to my ridiculous fear of heights), but it’s always a point in the “win” column when I manage to turn off those irrational voices so quickly and focus on the climbing instead. Embarrassing to admit, for sure, that I struggle with that, but whatever; it’s the reality and I have to deal with it. Such is life. At least it was over quickly this time.

I also realized that this route challenges something that’s really hard for me, which is an abrupt change of pace from really easy climbing to a really hard, throw-down, technical and powerful sequence – even without the strangeness of the rope in this movement, mustering up this pace change is always really difficult for me. I do better with rising difficulty, more consistent difficulty and pump management before cruxes, not sudden changes from really easy climbing to really powerful movements. I need to get better at this, both mentally and physically. And this leads to the final revelation from the day, which is that I somehow need to warm up better for this, to prime my muscles and mind more adequately.

My warm-up route (which was a project a little more than a year ago – so crazy!) isn’t enough anymore. I have to find some other way to prep my body for this type of power delivery. I believe that yesterday, my first go on the route (the flail-‘n’-whine fest) WAS my warm-up, which was why I did so well on go number two. But I’d like to not do that every day, so that I could have two good go’s on it instead…so I may experiment with doing a secondary warm-up pitch on another previous project next time. And if that doesn’t work, perhaps the good ol’ pull-up and finger-roll routine will come into play again. This remains to be seen, but I feel that it’s so important, to find a warm-up routine at every crag that works for my body, and also, to be willing to change that routine as needed – and I need to change this one, for sure.