Training and Rest

Training is an important component in excelling at your passions. And with training there comes recovery time. Currently, the group of friends I’m with are going at it too hard and are paying for it. Why? Because training requires recovery and there’s not a lot of that going on right now. I admit, I too am a victim of this. Surprise, surprise, folks get injured when you don’t take time off. Your mind says, Climb! But what about your body? When your body tells you to rest, you better listen. After all, it’s your body you rely on, your body is the tool and if you don’t take care of it… No one else will, unless, your Mom followed you out to the crag. Unlikely. So you get hurt, take more time off, and you’re frustrated. It is especially hard when everyone around you is psyched to climb. Psych is contagious. The mountains are calling, and there’s so many routes, so many new projects! When you see everyone having fun good luck not being pulled into the fun. The next thing you know, you’re no longer resting.

            When you figure out the perfect balance between playing, training, and resting, you master your sport. It can be hard to train and rest while on the road. Training might become inconsistent and resting is… boring. When you have a job or a house it might be easier to rest because you have other distractions, other things on the mind that require your focus outside of climbing. But when your life revolves around your passions with the kind of focus that wakes you up at 6 am in the morning, then come rest day you wake up, take a deep breath, put your shoes on and well, you end up feeling lost. When training is inconsistent it leads to injury. With that being said, I found ways to train for climbing on the road, for me switching up different climbing styles works well. Case in point, I love sport climbing, it’s definitely where my heart lies. But sometimes you hit a plateau and something has to change before you loose your psych. I thrive off this constant change, which keeps the psych going. This is the energy, the motivation that keeps me going and when I loose it I become a different person. So what I do is take time away from ropes, pull out the bouldering pads and fall my way up small, hard rocks. The climbing redirection from sport to bouldering redirects my focus to power training. Just as it would gym climbing when you untie your rope and walk over to the bouldering area. On the road, you may not be able to lift weights, work a campus board or hang board but I think you gain that sort of strength with all the climbing. For example, this winter, after I bouldered in Bishop CA and got back on ropes there was a short transition gaining back endurance, but in the long run when I did, all my hard work paid off. Instead of injured or bored I was unstoppable. And when I say unstoppable, I mean it was beautiful. Until then I was never good at ‘power’ always just dancing my way up the wall, I mean I still do that but now I feel a shift in my level of climbing. The difference my boulder training had on my contact strength, the way it shaped my ability to make moves when pumped allowed me to not only stick moves but continue to the next. I even experienced an increased mental strength! It was the coolest thing in the world. Well at least in my world. Long story short, master your passion.

Wake Up, Eat Food, Go Climb

Tracter Girl 5.13a Riggins ID
Photo: Dylan Vaughn Schweig

Today, I was asked a question and it stirred up an idea for this blog…. So here we are… “Sam, what is it like to be in a world that’s 100% about climbing, committing, and competition?” Well let me try and explain it to you in words that will help you imagine the world as I see it. Some folk’s say I’m crazy and obsessed with climbing, and I can tell you they are right. Climbing runs my life and I’m just in the passenger seat, going for a ride wherever it takes me. I sacrifice so many things in my life so I can commit to my life style, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I give up money, jobs, a house, and relationships all for the sake of my life. Guess what? It’s all worth it for the feeling it brings me. The energy, excitement, and happiness is why I do it, well, and of course the friends that become family to me. As simple as life can be for the dirt bag there are times, times when folks are unfamiliar with this life style where they may not understand, that this life without the house, without the money and the relationships is far from simple. The simplest thing can be the most stressful, confusing, and just plain frustrating. I talked about rest days being important in the past, but today I’m going to talk about the mental toll rest days have on me as focused and consumed climber. For me, my bubbly and often times annoying, excited personality comes from and is built up solely from climbing. So when I’m not climbing, I just don’t know what to do. Truly everything else sounds so boring. My attention span when it comes to a non-physical activity is quite short, some folks feel the need to diagnose me with ADD, and I’m sorry but that’s just a crock of shit. My imagination is a physical expression, one that isn’t stimulated by just a book, some coffee shop chitchat, and a walk. I MUST USE EVERY MUSCLE….To feel  accomplishment for the day. As I throw the stick for my dog I see similarities, or maybe I’m just full of shit, who knows, maybe I’m just a horrible writer and bad with words. The excitement he gets from something so simple is the same excitement I get from climbing. Climbing is something so simple and silly, still some people think its pointless and a waste of a good life. Why? Because I have no job, very little money, and really no vision of the future. But let’s get back to the similarities of my dog chasing something so silly and repetitive as a stick, when it comes to Cypress chasing the stick over and over again? He’s happy, some say he was bred for it…It’s in his blood. Well climbing? It makes me happy and when it really comes down to it? The demand, excitement, success, problem solving, and yes, even failure is what makes me so excited. It allows me to be me without being shunned from the outside world.

Climb like a girl; Grace, Grace, and Finesse

Climbing with boys is really fun. While everyone knows ‘girls just want to have fun’ the boys of climbing want fun… but they want it now, by any means. Let me explain, from my experience, especially given the testosterone fog that sweeps in and settles over climbing destinations, boys have the hardest time when it comes to the delicacies of climbing. And when I say delicacies, I’m talking strategy, I’m talking the patience to sit and map out positions, slight of hand, a turn of a hip. And the boys? They see the rock and I can only imagine their thoughts, ‘I want it. I want it now’. Generally, I see a lot of thugging their way through moves. Too much power and not enough grace is detrimental, it’s a strength often overlooked. Let’s be honest, in a world full of ‘ATZZZZ’s!’, ‘Roar’s!’ and ‘ZATT’s! ‘, Where’s the grace? Like a Queen in chess, sometimes grace is the powerful player in the game of Climbing. A technical climber is a stronger climber; they may struggle with thugging their way through moves, but in the end their form? Well, it’s better, and ultimately, they’re on the path of becoming the stronger climber. Take for example, my friend, the other night we working on a very difficult move. I watched as he tried it, observing body position and muscles, actually I was observing the body positions and muscles he wasn’t engaging.  I noticed right away he mostly just threw himself on it, yet for this particular problem, it was not a move you just throw to if you want to stick it. I tried to explain he needed to look at the hold he was reaching for; it will help you twist into it. As you twist into the arm and pull with your heal you’ll be able to stay into the wall. He tries, he fails, and he looks at me confused. My response to his attempt: ‘climb like a girl’, less power sometimes means more power, and when done well translates into grace, finesse, fluidity and delicacy… it’s the kind of style that makes impossible moves look easy, we’ve all seen it, and we all watch these climbers float like feathers, weightless… graceful. The key word is it ‘looks’ weightless, when in actuality ‘Every. Single. Muscle’ is active, engaged, concentrated. Think of how connected your mind and body become when you’re that physically aware.  He laughs.  I point my finger at him, ‘Like a GIRL!’ Ladylike damn it. Even with all the falling and flailing, we all still laugh and keep trying. All of us hitting the pad, girl, boy, girl, boys, grace, thug, grace, and a lot of ‘ooph’s’. After all, climbing is about trial and error. Trying, falling and trying hard again. Luckily, this endless pursuit in trying hard is inherit in climbers, and no more or less in gals or guys.  Still, figuring out how to try something different when it’s not working, as uncomfortable as it is, is the mental aspect of climbing. Dealing with failure, dealing with falling, dealing with the… fear. Everyone has it, that damn pre-frontal cortex of reason; the rational side us climbers prefer to defy like disobedient children to our own inherit adult minds. Adapting to our surroundings, movements, rock, weather and lets not forget our skin; these are the sense that when we’re in tune with make for those epic sends. Keeping the formula just right, dissipating the fear, boosting the confidence, muscle awareness, and when to roar and when to cue the inner grace… and for God’s sake don’t’ forget to climb like a girl!

Life's one big competition

In order to be great you have to look at life as one big competition, always trying to be better than the one next to you. Being too competitive can make it hard to gain friendships; most don’t appreciate the mental and physical ‘one up-menship’. Then again, life is full of sacrifices, and you must be willing to ‘five up’ some things in life in order to excel towards your goals or for that matter your potential. This has always been a fault of mine, but my fault has also been my strength. It allows me to out climb the average climber in just a few years. Coincidentally, it’s also allowed me to see my true friends. After all, true friends stick around for the edgy sides of your strengths, not just the polite and acceptable. I mean, this is rock climbing not a tea party for God’s sake. In the last year I learned, well lets just say I’m beginning to learn, you can’t take life too seriously and sometimes when you just stop caring whether you send the climb, is when your really climbing. You must be able to focus and still have fun. It’s a fine line walking between focus and fun, too much of either and you might F* up. Before I get on a climb I always go through every movement, even the easy ones, I imagine each movement, each muscle, and I mentally engage with each movement. I go through the climb in my head as if I was running through one of my routines from gymnastics before I saluted the judges in a competition. When I’m still unsure of how I might be able to make a move I run through all the alternatives, and I mean ALL of them (whether I may be strong enough at the time to do it), each hand placements, each foot placement. I may not even touch the rock before I mentally climbed a route twenty different ways. Most importantly when I execute every movement, I may feel scared, but there is an important and vital disconnect between feeling and doing because up there, up there in my mind? There is nothing but silence. Just focus on climbing, there isn’t much room for anything more. After I reach the top then I can feel the fear. Case in point, when I’m bouldering. I am the most uncomfortable with this style of climbing. Take away the confidence of my rope, leave me with a free fall, you’re your crazy if you don’t feel a little fear.  When I am unable to drown out the fear and doubts I don’t get to the top. I can see now when the tables are turned, no longer the active role and instead the teacher, I see the fear manifested in someone else. Being the teacher, something I am not very good at mostly because I get too excited and forget I’m teaching and the focus turns from the climb to the person I’m instructing, I guess this is where my gymnastics training really comes into play. Seeing the newer climbers I teach struggle with the mental preparedness that comes so naturally to me I find myself unsure of how to really teach; to let them into my world where they drown out all surroundings and just climb. Focus on feet, hands, body positions, and each muscle engaging with each movement. I don’t know if this is something you teach or if it’s just something you learn to do. But I am trying to find ways to share this skill and pass it on. Who knows, maybe play leads to creativity, creativity to innovation and my new little climbers mind’s will start ‘seeing’ the way I see . Or maybe they’ll just keep hitting the pad two moves in with me rolling my eyes thinking, ‘really?’. The lesson for today is: drown out external surroundings and focus on the internal momentum of what ever your passion.

Thin Skin

Well I'm battling with skin agai. I can only blame my stubbornness to not walk away, or to excited to wait till temps cooled later in the day. It's hard to walk away when you want to excel, and reach your goals. Life of an athlete is a constant battle and one I wouldn't change for the world.

Day to Da:y life of a Climber

A life of a climber on the road can be tuff. Weather, skin, psych, and money can be with you most of the time but sometimes it’s not, and we have to want it that much more. We have been battling with not so ideal temps in bishop this winter and it has been challenging. Having to wake up early and get in a session while the rocks still cold from the night, or late at night with lanterns and headlights has taken its toll. But life of a rock climber can’t always be easy and that is what makes it fun. Keep the stoke levels high through the hard times and it will pay off in the end. Getting after it while having fun is what counts. If you can’t have fun then why do it? When your skin hurts, and your bleeding through your tape, don’t let that stop you…

A week in Joes Valley UT

So I have hit the road again, first stop Joes Valley UT. Well I rolled in Tuesday morning, it was so nice to see blue sky and feel the sun, it had been raining since I left Michigan. I had the day to myself until some friends got there, so I decided to go check out some smaller boulders for my solo day. So Cypress (my dog) and I hiked up to this problem called “Powder Toast Man” and started playing around on it. I figured out all the moves but didn’t want to top it out without anyone up there. So we decided to call it a day and head back to camp and make some food. Upon pulling into camp I saw some folks playing on some problems close by, I walked over to see that an old friend Steven was there. It is always fun catching up with folks that you haven't seen in a few years. So I put off making some food and climbed a little more.

Well the next morning some friends showed up and it was game on for the next week.

 Sometimes no matter how hard you try you just can't stick a move, you have to always believe you can do it or you'll never get there.

 We all ticked off some projects and left with stuff to come back too. This was the go that I happily stuck the crux move on “Stir The Pie” for the send

We would climb all day and all night, with swimming brakes during the hottest part of the day, or ice cream eating.