PRG Rope Burn

This past weekend, Kelly and I went to the Philly Rock Gym Oaks and competed in their Rope Burn competition. It was actually her idea. The comp was open to all skill levels, so we went in as novice, expecting there to be tons and tons of competition. After all, neither of us had ever competed before and when the guys ahead of us said they climbed 5.10s and 5.11s, they were only placed in as intermediates. We may have climbed a few 5.10s, but not more than a handful and definitely no 5.11s.

I’ll get right to the punch with this one – we both won first in our level and were told we should try intermediate next time. Kelly would have placed in intermediate with her score, but I would have fallen short by a few hundred points… It’s something to work towards, but not too bad all the same.

It was a great experience and definitely a new view of climbing. One thing that really stood out, though, was the number of young climbers there. We’re used to Reading Rocks where the kids there are either with boy/girl scouts or birthday parties. The regulars are college aged and older. Naturally, we figured there’d be tons of adults in the comp. Instead, we were outnumbered by the youth – and those were only the youth that had made it to the final round. We later found the score sheet from the youth comp, which was 2 pages of names in about 8 point font; probably about 150 kids or thereabout.

I think it shows an interesting shift. When I was a youth, kids played team sports. Unless you were practicing with your team, you really weren’t able to practice the sport. Sure, you could practice juggling a soccer ball, but without others, you couldn’t practice playing soccer. It’s not quite the same.

With things like cross country it’s a bit different. You can run on your own and, ultimately, no one cares about your team’s performance. And maybe that’s a good comparison because I think that these kids were also on teams, where there was a team score, but you worked for your own individual score. The team performance is a great measure of the caliber of your training, but that’s all.

What it seems like is that we have this changing definition of what a team is. We now have climbing teams in the way that we have snowboarding teams. You’re no longer reliant on the rest of the members of a team to be successful.

And that’s what we’ve seen in music in the past decade. You no longer need ANYONE. Whether you’re a band or a solo act, you no longer need a “team” to succeed. As technology has advanced, more and more is able to be DIY. You can record in your bedroom, do your own publishing, book your own shows, and publicize your own material. It’s a full time job, but it’s the full time job of an individual, not of some corporate entity.

This aligns well with the ever fleeting need for a label. It used to be that that was the only way, but now it’s common knowledge that you don’t need them. They can enable a lot of neat things – organizing tours, collaborations, etc – but are not necessary. You can succeed without them.

But to succeed, you have to dedicate your life to it. While we were there, we talked to the one kid’s dad about the youth programs. They were from North Jersey, but would travel all over the place to compete. The previous weekends, they had been up in Massachusetts for competitions. For climbing competitions?! On top of an almost certainly grueling training schedule, this kid is traveling up and down the east coast. And all of the kids there were pretty much like that from what I could gather.

These kids are competing. So are you. You may not be lined up next to your competitors, but know that you’ve got every other musician out there vying to flood peoples’ airwaves. And there will always be someone who will do it for cheaper or for free. You have to be the best. And that takes no team.

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.