|| Cooler but not staying dry || Dust off the down jacket ||

Bamford Edge in autumn || Climber: Ned Feehally

|| Focus On... ||

Avoiding The (Barrel) Scrapers

With such a rapid drop in temps and hence skyrocketing of gritstone conditions this weekend just gone I found myself suffering from Running Out Of Things To Try Syndrome. It’s stupid but I’ll dig into this a bit, because I imagine I’ll not be the only one encountering this. How is it possible to Run Out Of Things To Try, you might well ask? Well, it isn’t possible. However, the perception that it is possible, however momentarily it might hit you, it very real. It's not really got anything to do with past successes, grades, performance, or how much stuff you've ticked off either. "Alex Of Macedonia cried salt tears as there were no more worlds to conquer" etc etc.

This is in fact a symptom of stasis in climbing in one form or another - location, ability, time, circumstances etc etc. It will be alien to some of you though (if so, great!), because some element of fluidity inoculates you from it, to the extent that you might not be aware that it’s even a thing…..yet.

When you first start out in climbing you improve pretty fast. So your available universe of Things To Do expands away from you at an exponential rate. Every time you go climbing you get better and better, and the almost infinite possibilities offered by the world of climbing await you, like one of those big kids’ play mats with all the roads and houses and shops printed onto it being unrolled in front of a toddler with a box full of new toy cars. Every guidebook you open is like unfolding the menu of your local takeaway having just discovered that Indian food exists. A kaleidoscope of possibilities which will take you three lifetimes to devour.

Halcyon days indeed, but it doesn’t last forever. As everyone knows youth is wasted on the young and before most of us have really made the most of that fleetingly awesome state of being a beginner paddling on a rising tide, things change. Improvement slows down eventually, to the point where it’s almost imperceptible, and requires an unsustainably intense effort to achieve a diminishing return. So what now? Maybe the next frontier to exploit is travel. Climb up and down the country (pun intended), climb abroad, climb on different continents, in different cultures. Again, this is rich pickings for a while. As anyone enjoying their responsibility-free years in the early noughties will testify to, environmentally negligent cheap flights, small mortgages, and a strong pound made for a heady mix for the climbing globetrotter. But very few of us manage to pull off the endless nomad trick, and plenty of us were never inclined to try. Either way, eventually something will nail you down. Maybe finances, family, jobs, pandemics, wars, partners, or even just a nagging need to establish a sense of place. Whatever it is there’s a chance that roots are put down somewhere.

No problem though, because one of the great things about climbing is a basic skillset allows you to access a lot of different types of experiences. Sport, trad, sea cliffs, bouldering, scrambling, mountains, multi pitch, aid climbing, ice and snow, the list goes on. Most of us rapidly gravitate to a handful of those sub-genres and end up singling out one or two specific disciplines that we either enjoy the most, or which fit in best with our lives and those of our climbing partners. Or simply in the clamour to maintain the illusion of progress which was so intoxicating as a beginner, we just stick to the one we think we’re best at - or even worse - the one we thing we can attain the highest grades at. We can narrow this down even further if we want - only climb cracks, avoid everything that isn’t a compression prow, just do traverses, become a bold-slab-route-with-no-gear aficionado, or plough the fruitful and well trodden tall-person-becomes-dyno-specialist route.

Ben Bransby || Close But No Stanage Completionism Cigar

So, to cut to the chase, a lot of us find ourselves in the situation where we settle down and live in the same place for an extend period of time. Improvement stagnates, preferences for specific types of climbing solidify around the general routines of domestic life and before you know it you’re stuck in a rut of some sort. But hang on a minute, given the amount of climbing on offer in, say, the Peak District, the idea that anyone has Run Out Of Things To Try, or indeed things to do, is clearly a ludicrous suggestion. Even if you only drive 15 minutes from Sheffield you cannot Run Out Of Things To Do. Even Ben Bransby hasn’t done every route on Stanage yet, so the rest of us have no excuse. And the same goes for anywhere in West or North Yorks, or for that matter the Lakes or Wales. You simply cannot exhaust all climbing possibilities. It’s nonsense to even suggest this, yet it’s a thought pattern that’s easy to slip into if you’re not careful.

Hence why I’m even writing all this - to try and make sure it doesn’t happen to me, or you too. A problem shared is a problem halved. So how do you get yourself out of a rut? Some possibilities:

Get dramatically better/stronger at climbing; hence opening up all sorts of things that would have been a waste of time to attempt before. Nice idea in theory but the older you get the less likely this is. And actually beyond a certain point, the stronger you get, there's actually fewer and fewer pieces of climbing that will sit in your trying-quite-hard sweet spot.

Get dramatically weaker/injured/worse at climbing; hence opening up all sorts of things you might have previously dismissed as too trivially easy to bother with or gain fulfilment from. This is actually fairly achievable, although I suggest that unless your hand is forced (by, say, age, injury, illness etc) it’s probably going to be quite an unsatisfactory process. However, just learning to enjoy easier climbing, not insisting on always operating at your limit, CAN be a genius move to open up loads of climbing experienced you’ve missed out on.

Change your preferences; this is actually more doable that it seems at first. In fact people do this all the time. You might only go bouldering, but if you and a mate decided to put some time into trad climbing, you could do it. You’ve already got the basic skillset. Always done long pumpy sport routes but avoided rounded slopey technical grit bouldering? You can switch it up, you just have to go into anything new with no massive expectations of immediate success, leave your ego at home and get stuck in. Has the added bonus of channeling a bit of that wonder of being a beginner again.

Part of shifting preferences is maybe also to willingness to reappraise things you’ve previously written off. This could be as simple and fundamental a shift as changing what you allow your internal self-image to be. It’s hard to become, say, a crack specialist, if you fundamentally just believe that that’s-the-sort-of-route-other-people-are-good-at-but-not-me. Sometimes the biggest limitations we face in climbing aren’t physical, but psychological. The barriers are quite often, for most of us, in here [taps temples] not out there [points to window]. And actually some of the most rewarding moments in climbing can be linked to doing something you never really thought was a realistic prospect for you, something you’d written off, those can be the best moments.

Rather than sign off with that life-affirming feel-good vibe I’ll end on saying that maybe we also need to reappraise the need for constant novelty in climbing, to always and only be interested in doing something new. We’re good at highly valuing ‘achievement’, whatever that term actually means, and increasingly so if things are achieved in a success-at-all-costs narrative that’s seen as a win. Goal driven, embrace the training suffering, make the sacrifices etc etc. We’re good at the consumerist approach to climbing, the acquisitional side of things, which is now baked so deeply into mainstream climbing culture that it’s almost impossible imagine it being any other way. But if we can move away from this then if someone’s struggling to think of a guaranteed 7c tick that suits them this weekend then it’s not the end of the world, because they might actually enjoy getting out and trying twice as hard on something that doesn’t suit them, many grades lower, or some nemesis line previously written off, and probably have a great time of it.