5.10

What do you want to be good at? What do you want to succeed in? And more importantly, how are you getting there?

If you want to be famous, go play in traffic. You’ll make the news. Better yet, film yourself doing it. Youtube will eat it up …for a few days.

But if you want to do something great or to be a better person, it won’t happen tomorrow. Or next week. It takes time and push to get anywhere. If you’re lucky enough to be handed something “successful,” you still aren’t “successful” until you’ve tackled adversity and dealt with bad times.

Tuesday, at the climbing gym, my girlfriend climbed a 5.10 on her first try. A few months ago she was too afraid of heights to climb the whole way up the wall. To put it in perspective, there are 8 different “colored” routes at the gym, white through black. She started at white. This was a green, with only blue and black above it.

To get to that point took a lot of hard work. To start, she was afraid of heights. For most fears, the best way to deal with them is to face them. Climb a 35 foot wall enough, and suddenly 35 feet isn’t so high. Maybe you’re still afraid of heights, but you’re not afraid of 35 feet.

Beyond that, a 5.10 is pretty nuts. It takes a lot of skill development and strength; skills and strength that you only get through constantly being challenged. On easy climbs you have huge jugs to hold on to. It’s essentially like climbing a ladder; one hand after the other and one foot after the other. As you move up, the holds get smaller. Suddenly, you’ve got small pockets, pinches, and crimps. Your holds go from being 6 inches off the wall to being half an inch or smaller. And instead of a logical hand-over-hand progression, you’ve got places where you match a foot on a hold your hand is on and other places where you’re laying back with your shoulder into the wall. You have to not only learn these techniques, but you also have to learn when to use them and how to use them effectively.

And if you can’t constantly be looking ahead, you’re going to get stuck. I push pretty hard with climbing. Generally, I slow down when I feel like I’m risking injury and become reckless. If you’re not pushing towards that, then you’re not being challenged enough. You don’t want to push past that point, but you want to go right up to it and stare it in the face.

It’s a progression. We all start out playing individual notes or chords in whatever we do. It’s a slow process, note by note. Then you start to learn skills and technique. You practice endlessly until it hurts. Then you practice more and it hurts more, but it’s a good hurt because you understand it. Finally, you work on developing those skills and being innovative. That last step is a life-long work. It involves few of those days where your fingers are raw because you’ve already built up the calluses. But you can’t ever be comfortable with where you’re at. To be great, you don’t stop at 5.10, because there is 5.11.

It’s really great to see Kelly progress how she has. And it’s encouraging to know that my moderately aggressive teaching style gets results. But she’s far from done. We’re both taking December off, but come January, we’ll be picking back up, moving back up to the 5.10s and looking ahead.