Beyond Limits by McClure Steve

Author:McClure, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2014-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

– Chapter Eighteen –

Have No Fear

Fear is the single factor holding most climbers back from reaching their potential. Fear will prevent them from climbing even the easiest of moves on a route, moves that, close to the ground, they’d cruise blindfolded wearing roller-skates. In many cases the fear is irrational. The skill is differentiating between rational and irrational fear. Standing on a chair you’re obviously not scared; there’s absolutely no chance of falling off. Stand on a 50-metre high chair and you’ll instantly panic, start wobbling and need to sit down and cling on. To a certain extent this fear is irrational, though there is, of course, still a slight chance that you could simply topple over and fall to your death. This is the realm of mind control, to know that so long as you stay in control and simply stand up you’ll be fine, just as you would be on a normal chair close to the ground. The irrational fear is when we’re standing there 50 metres up on our chair, but with the total safety of a rope safeguarding us from falling, and still bricking it.

How to go about curing ‘the fear’? Sport climbing can make a big difference and be very good for your trad climbing – and almost every trad climber who’s got into sport has found their performance on traditional routes went through the roof. Why? Because trad routes aren’t very hard in comparison to sport routes, not in relation to how hard you could climb. They just feel hard because you’re scared, your wires look dodgy, and they took so long to place that you’ve become utterly pumped. In fact, you’ve got so pumped that the hardest move you can actually manage is English 2b. But hang on a minute. Perhaps you aren’t even that pumped, you just thought you were. Now, after you’ve scared yourself stupid and turned your arms into concrete, you realise that there’s actually a huge ledge right next to you, somehow invisible until you’d stuffed in a load of protection while hanging onto an apparently tiny edge.

There are a lot of strengths a climber needs. Make a list, it’s surprising. It isn’t just power and endurance. Something fun to do on your rest days on a trip is to make a list and score yourself, relative to your current standard. Then, without letting your mates see the results, get them to score you. This is a good way to see if you have any hidden weaknesses, or if you’ve just been avoiding the obvious.

Here is my table below, with a mate’s score first (out of five, just in case you wondered if it was out of ten). As it turns out there were few surprises, I knew I was weak and feeble and so did everyone else. (Apparently I managed to disguise my shoddy footwork from them.)

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