I worked with a client the other day who has come a long way in her climbing. She is now leading 5.10 sport but still having trouble falling. She has taken Arno’s Warriors Way clinics and said they helped but like anything that isn’t practiced, it fades into the peripheries of our mind. We have all experienced fear before a fall as well as the defeat after, or as Arno puts it “the learning!”
Paige also sent one of her hardest climbs in the last two days. It makes you proud as an instructor to see students send their projects and you get many of the same feelings you have yourself when completing a climb that was at one time improbable. Those feelings of success are overwhelming and put you at a momentary high that will last relative to the time put into the project.
Both sending and falling are very distinct moments in a climb that we go back in our memories and bring back to share around the campfire. What about the moments in between?
I have been finding great solitude in those moments lately. It is that moment of total focus, on the present as well as the very near future. The moment where I am really, really pumped; but I know that the very near future could hold the send or the fall, and I am in the adventure to find out which one. It is a great place to be, in this in between state. You can only get there by yourself and only be there by yourself. It is the place of no expectations and one of the very reasons we find our self engaged in this silly activity.
