Tag Archives: insecurity

The Mental Side of Sports Injury Recovery; Finding Confidence in Training & Climbing Again (3)

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For better or worse, then, after the injury I turned 2012 into a year that would be more about attacking my greatest weakness (big-muscle strength and power) than anything else, including clipping the chains without falling. Physically, at this moment in time, I’m finally assured that this was the right choice for my body. However, mentally, coming on the heels of the injury, I would be lying if I didn’t admit how difficult it’s been to take this arduous path through this year. I have struggled a lot with it and I’ve wrestled with my confidence (in both my training decisions and my climbing choices) all year long. It’s tough and felt really scary, like I was stepping into a vast unchartered void, to just dedicate myself to the strength training for so long and to not allow myself to be distracted by the temptation of trying to send climbs.

This might not sound like fun or like it defeats the whole purpose of climbing, and I totally agree that it’s not for everyone. If clipping chains is the most important thing and the sole indicator of success and fun in climbing for a person, spending half the year strength training would be a terrible idea. But if (like me) you revel in getting on routes that once had hard moves for you and discovering that – thanks to training your weaknesses – the moves aren’t hard or as hard as they were before, it might be worth it to you. I’ll even go so far as to confess that it almost hasn’t been worth it for me; constantly “failing” even when I knew I was deliberately causing the failure (by putting the training ahead of the climbing performance) was way harder for me to take than I expected it to be. But only “almost,” because as of right now, I’m pretty happy and at peace with that choice I made back in May. I think it was the right one to make.

However, due to my strength-training decision, I arrived here with virtually no power endurance or endurance whatsoever. I felt psyched to be here and to be done with training (strength training, anyhow!) for the time being. But in all honesty, even though I aimed to consider the first month or so here to be the final segment of my training (i.e. the building up endurance/power-endurance levels closer to my strength/power levels), I have to admit that for me this season, those final touches proved a bit more brutal for me to take than they have in years past – probably because of the accumulation of mental garbage and self-doubt that has accrued throughout 2012. But I planned this – planned to arrive with zero power endurance/endurance for the Red. I just wanted to be stronger (in terms of strength and power) overall.

So, to make a long story short – as I think I’ve mentioned, I’ve spent the first month here mainly helping Kevin with his create-a-crag effort here, which is not at all how I expected or planned to spend my season here. But I just figured, “Why not?” especially after realizing the potential that the crag (an addition to the Chocolate Factory) had to offer in the mid- to upper-5.13 range, which the Red can definitely use more of and is the grade range I’m looking to get more solid at here right now. It’s been a great way to gain Red fitness sans pressure, too – just more focused on getting the routes in and cleaned up while building up my endurance and power endurance rather than trying to project something hard. That choice would come once these routes were done, and also, once I started feeling more capable and up to speed in terms of power endurance and endurance again – and those two components definitely needed some catching up to do when compared to my strength and power.

Yesterday’s experience, more than anything else this year(!), showed me that I am far stronger than I was last fall, which is all I care about and want – clear indications that training is working for me, that what I’m doing is right for me. I got on this climb Kevin bolted last year (he started this area last year), a cool, steep 13+. When I tried it once last year, the moves were too hard for me – I flailed and then I bailed. On that kind of a power-endurance route, like lots of the routes here, if each move by itself is at my limit or something I can barely do, I have no chance to link, and I know it. I was shocked this year to bolt-to-bolt the route pretty easily. Doesn’t mean that it won’t be extremely difficult for me to send (it’ll be a reach to do it this season), but does for sure mean that I’m way, way stronger in terms of actual strength and power than I was last fall here. And that is what I wanted to accomplish.

Maybe I’ll send this route and maybe not; if not, it will be just another reason to come back here in the spring season (again, taking the big-picture perspective). I totally fell in love with it, though – it’s an awesome route with cool, flowing and sustained movement on amazing features. It definitely won’t make me weaker to keep trying it; that’s for sure. And I still have most of the other routes around it to try to do, too – so plenty to keep me busy. But I really want to keep a big-mind perspective about this season and not get all wrapped up in the need to send; I just want to have fun and enjoy the process of getting stronger and working my weaknesses, however long it takes me.

The Mental Side of Sports Injury Recovery; Finding Confidence in Training & Climbing Again (1)

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I promised myself long ago that I would try to always stay positive in my writing here – why add to the negativity in a world saturated with so much of it, right? But honestly, this is one of the reasons I’ve been relatively quiet here for some time now. To put it mildly, 2012 has been quite a struggle for me and my relationship with climbing. It’s almost human, really – it’s like having a long-term relationship and having a year in which you’re just not sure you and your significant other are really compatible or going in the right direction together anymore. (Yes, I fully acknowledge that I tend toward the “take climbing way too seriously” side of the equation, much as I try not to!)

It started with the injury during my trip to Spain. Silly me, I thought that once I put that behind me and my hand seemed normal again that everything would be copacetic and I’d be back on track with training and improving my steep-climbing skills, and also, that despite my injury, I’d turn out to be Wonder Woman be able to magically crush the hard-for-me routes I wanted to do at home coming off the scariest injury I’ve ever had in my life – and that I would be able to do this while training to make up for all the lost training time of the spring season.

Well, it turns out that having your hand and arm be semi-paralyzed for a couple months isn’t an easy thing to forget or put behind you, not when you’ve had a lifetime of having faith in your body and understanding the “why” behind your previous, much more painful injuries. What I mean by this is that all the other injuries I’ve ever sustained from sports (and not just climbing, because before climbing, I played hard and hurt myself in sports starting as a small child) have made much more sense and been easier to handle in terms of recovery and trusting my body. This one, though, shook my faith to its very core – even after my hand/arm worked again, they still felt weaker for a long, long time (that’s what it feels like when your nerve isn’t working right; just a terrible sense of weakness). And, fearful of somehow inexplicably triggering a new injury, I’ve been living in a hypervigilant state of low-level anxiety since the injury, to tell the truth.

Starting training again in May-June was incredibly scary. A scary decision to make in lots of ways for me. First of all, it meant that I had to start testing and pushing the injured arm, because I knew that I’d never get over it if I didn’t start to work it again and build it back up. But it was also scary because it require an enormously vast leap of faith for me about what would be the most intelligent long-term decision I could make to reach my ultimate climbing goal (which is to spend the next decade or so trying to mold this body – the only one I get – into the best steep sport climber I can possibly be, armed with the training knowledge I’ve gained in the past few years).

The keyword in that last sentence is “long-term.” And long-term decisions like this always require a tremendous amount of faith, especially when you go into them knowing that a) you’re probably sabotaging your short-term, “I want it and I want it now” ego-boosting goals/achievements and b) you may not start to see tangible, real-world results for months or even years and c) because of a & b, you will likely be tested mentally and pushed to the brink in terms of how much “failure” you can handle while you work toward your long-term goal.

More on this tomorrow…

Go Small or Go Home: Thinking & Climbing Like a Shorter, Lighter, Smaller-Fingered Climber Yields Success

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Darn it all! I did it again. (Expletives directed at self here.)

I actually did a couple of “its” again that I’m not entirely psyched about, but such is life, right? All I can do is process them and move on, chalk them up to life learning and hope that I take the lessons more to heart and embrace them this time around.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop being all mysterious, and I’ll actually back up and start with something good — something really good, actually: I one-hung F’ed in the A for the first time this season a couple days ago. And, I was feeling really not so good and kind of stressed and depleted when I did so; I almost didn’t go climbing because of those feelings, but climbing (as it often can and does) offered me a brief escape from the external stressors of life that were whirling about in my world; nice. I like how climbing so often can create a little window of escape and clarity and provide respite at times like this, when you most need to hit the pause button and take a breather. I expected nothing from my day, though – so a one-hang, and not even a one-hang at the move of Alli’s ultimate doom, came as a lovely and welcome surprise. Progress — a little twinge of confidence emerges.

Day two, I struggled. I came into the day feeling emotionally drained and with a bad headache, and that’s never a good start for anyone, I suppose. But I shamefully have to admit that I let the big move on Bone Shredder get to me; I let the fact that I could sail through everything else on the route but this one move that wasn’t even the crux for everyone else just keep punching me off. I think my depleted emotional energy and pounding headache had a lot to do with this getting under my skin and frustrating me, along with the fact that right now, it always seems to be the same old story on virtually every climb I get on. It’s not that the moves are reachy, per se, but it IS that I simply am not strong enough for my height/weight (yet, anyhow). What I mean by this is that I know that even if taller folks with longer arms can do the moves using different footholds/beta, I also know and recognize 100 percent that people of my size and stature with enough strength wouldn’t struggle with such moves, either – even if the beta is different.

But if there’s one thing about me, I am one stubborn gal, for better or for worse, meaning I do not give up. I also have a flexible mind about changing beta midstream, always have and always will. So instead of spending my day climbing up and falling off the big throw, getting back on and doing it and climbing the rest of the route, on my first go, I hung there and studied the move with a new, clear intention: I aimed to figure out how I’d do this move if I was a short, light climbing kid with smaller fingers who weighs half as much as I do. Since I wasn’t succeeding the way taller folks do on the move, I figured I should take the opposite approach and see where that got me. I realized that I’d take the left hand pocket with probably four fingers, but I could only fit three. Instead of the nice-fitting pinky-ring-middle way that I was taking it, I instead took the time to stuff and wedge my ring-middle-pointer in there; a tighter fit, for sure, but a stronger set to pull with. I then searched around for a terrible feature to hold onto with my right hand, allowing me to move it off of the launching hold and to replace it with my right foot. This made sense, since it’s the only other true foothold available for the move, which turned it from a huge dynamic toss for me into a ridiculous one-arm high-step lock-off with my right hand on a joke of a hold, but once I rocked over that right foot, voila! The next hold came into range, no throw required.

It took me three more tries to send the route with this new beta (yup, sent it on my fourth attempt of the day, because the rest of the moves didn’t really tax me – I just had to master and move through the weirdness described above). But by thinking like a shorter, lighter, smaller-fingered climber than I actually am, I did myself a real service and simultaneously, realized that I do myself and my performance a serious disservice when I get ahead of my own strength and abilities. What I mean is that I should always continue to work my weaknesses (like long, powerful throws), but I should also always look for the shorter/lighter-person, stronger-fingered, more endurance-oriented solutions to situations like this. If I’d looked for that sooner, I would’ve sent that route way more quickly. The truth is that I will still (probably always) have a better chance of sending if I climb to and fully utilize my strengths even on routes that exploit my weaknesses, so doing more moves on bad holds, such as taking the time to stuff and cram my fingers into that pocket for better purchase, using a fake right-hand hold, and getting my foot high to rock over made way more sense for me, given my current ability level, than making one quick, large move. I have endurance for days – so why not take the time to set up the entire sequence into a less powerful, shorter movement, right?

It’s a bit annoying to me that I still have to resort to such tactics, but maybe it shouldn’t be; I think I perhaps need to work toward thinking such solutions are cool rather than silly, and I need to work even harder at not getting frustrated about my continued lack of strength/power levels for someone of my size. After all, I’m working on it, and that’s all I can do; my body will improve at the pace it can and there’s nothing I can do to change that so long as I’m working at it smartly and efficiently. And I have improved those strength/power levels tremendously – I just want more, as always, want the bigger-move solutions to start working for me sometimes, you know? Seeing as I’m an in-between-sized climber, I should be able to go big sometimes, I think.

Anyhow. I got way too frustrated by the situation, and then I get frustrated with myself for being frustrated about something so not worth the frustration (it’s just rock climbing) and today, I can laugh at myself for it while at the same time recognizing that I need to let go of those feelings better in the moment and just let them pass, because they’re useless and don’t help anything whatsoever. Climbing should always be fun, not frustrating, and I know this to my very core — and yet still, there are those times. Guess I’m human and I should be okay with it, but I don’t need to like it that I let it get to me, regardless.

Interestingly, I closed out the day with my first venture onto old-Alli-style territory since summer of 2010, meaning near-vertical, technical face climbing on small crimpers. Funny to realize that even after a two-year hiatus off of this style of climbing completely, it felt so utterly familiar and natural to me that it was a wild and truly eye-opening experience. My body knows how to climb this type of terrain without me having to do much of anything in terms of effort or even conscious piloting. It’s ingrained in me for life, I suppose, this sort of oozing method of vert-tech climbing, the careful balancing act of moving up tiny features. I know exactly where to look for footholds and how to weight them; I know exactly how much to put into handholds. It made me realize again what a newbie to thuggier stuff I am (read: most sport climbing!), and what a specialist I had become (read: unpopular tweaky face climbs). It was funny; the guys thought this route and another (steeper) route I’d tried were the same grade, but in all honesty, for me, they still feel about three letter grades apart in terms of personal difficulty – meaning I still have a ways to go in this department, obviously! If and when the grades of two such dissimilar rock climbs feel the same to me, I’ll know I’ve finally arrived at the destination I set out to reach when I started my journey to steeplandia back in 2008. Wouldn’t that be cool?