One More Hold

Hi all! Since the World Championships are really close, I thoght now would be the perfect time to talk about mindset.

But…why tho?

Because mindset is half the battle when it comes to competitions, if not more! Being able to change your attitude when things in life don’t go as planned is a powerful skill.

Great, but what does that mean?

Here’s the thing: Mindset is half the battle. In the comp world, I’ve found myself saying things like, ‘I’ll probably only get three holds up’ or ‘There’s no way I can climb that’ Those were the comps that I had the most trouble with. The routes may have actually been fine, but I had gone in with a self-defeating attitude, and thus created a self-fullfilling prophecy. Going in with a self-defeating attitude gives you a reason to not try your hardest. If you believe you’re not going to get that far, or that a route is too hard, then you’re more likely to not get that high. And if/when that happens, you feel like you’ve been proven correct. This becomes a slippery slope really fast, and it can be hard to get yourself back on track.

But the same is true about training! A few weeks before a comp, I enter my power endurance phase. That means that I find a route that I either can’t flash but I can get close, or one that I can just barely do. I track the amount of time it takes me to either complete the route or fall off. Then I rest for some amount of time and get right back on. The goal is to climb until you literally can’t climb anymore. As in you literally have a hard time gripping the holds. The amount of time you take to rest varies. I’ve started doing a 1:1 ratio (resting for the same amount of time that it took me to climb), but I started with a 1:2 (resting for double the time it took me to climb).

Power endurance is hard, especially when you’re just getting back into it. The phase right afterwards is your ‘peak’ phase, so doing it before a comp usually means that you’ll be at your best in time for the actual competition. But the first session or two really suck. This is where mindset is important. Every time I start a power endurance phase, I have a hard time finding climbs that I can just barely do. Usually they’re too easy or too hard. The process of finding a route is the most frustrating part because the routes that are on the ‘too hard’ end make me feel like I just can’t climb. I often feel like I’ve lost the strength I’ve been building up. I know that’s not true, but I still have the feelings. When I do find the right climb, I still have a hard time because I haven’t built up the endurance to get up the climb cleanly yet. At that point it’s not that I can’t do the route or that it’s too hard, it’s that I pump out too soon.

The thing about power endurance though is that it comes back quickly. We found an 11a at Movement Gowanus that I could do for my power endurance sessions at that gym. The movement was fun but the climb was long and pumpy. In the first session on that route, I couldn’t finish it at all. I did three laps on it but only got as far as 3/4 of the way up. I was able to get the route at the very next session. I was able to finish it twice, and in the last lap I got about 3/4 of the way up.

Here, take a look! The first two falls are from the first day. The last one is from the top on the second day. []

The same thing happened at my gym in LIC. I’d been working on this 10c in the cave for a while but I couldn’t bring myself to do the roof part of it. I’d go on and then decide mid attempt that I didn’t want to try it because I didn’t want to take the fall. I couldn’t campus it because the holds were just bad enough (or at a bad enough angle) that I couldn’t. They were jugs only when they were used with the feet that were out to the right. At my last session, though, I was able to finally get it! Then I used it for power endurance. The route is long, has that hard roof section, and the holds are juggy, so I figured it’d be perfect for power endurance. I got a good 3.5 laps out of it in that session. If I rested longer I might have been able to do more because I went off and campused afterwards, but oh well.

Here’s a snippet of that cave route: []

In both of those situations, changing my minset is what helped. Since power endurance is frustrating, I had a bit where I was convinced that my climbing skill had left me, and that I had ruined my training somehow. I would say that my legs aren’t going to let me do this move or that, and so I would end up dropping off earlier on in the routes. I told myself that the cave move that I didn’t want to do would result in a bad fall, even though I’d taken that fall a few times and it had been fine, so I wasn’t commiting to the move. I was telling myself that I couldn’t do something, and then I really wasn’t able to do it.

This is what happens to people in competitions. When you get into the habit of bringing yourself down, or underestimating your abilities, you become less likely to push through your fears and try hard. The difference between my successes in the training and the fails wasn’t that I magically got stronger within a few sessions. It was that I went in with the intention of ‘just doing it.’ I told myself that I would go out on a plus if I had to, and take the weird falls if it came to it. I also told myself to treat each route like it was a comp route. The goal was to get as high as possible before falling. In a competition I would never just let go (unless I’m called off the wall because of timing out), so why am I doing so in my training? Deciding that I was going to do the moves or fall trying made all the difference. I was able to get up the two routes more than once in those sessions.

Something to note, though, is that mindset alone isn’t enough. Being positive about your chosen routes doesn’t mean that you’ll magically be able to send said routes. I was trying a route at Metrorock Bushwick the other day that had decent pinch holds but weird and demanding moves. I got a few feet up the first time, and was annoyed when I came down. I decided to go back up after a short rest, and I was able to get higher! Ultimately, though, I ended up only getting about a quarter of the way up the route. I was upset at first. I had done the mindset thing where you come down and reassess your route. I reread the route and planned out different beta. I thought that I’d at least get about halfway up or more, but nope! Mindset didn’t change the fact that the route I’d chosen was too hard for me at that time. I decided to move on to a different route after that. The route looked easier, it sure wasn’t a walk in the park. The holds were much better than the ones on the first route, and all of the moves were within my ability. But I still couldn’t finish it. I was beyond annoyed. I was actually near tears. I’d felt like I had done the right things and that falling off wasn’t fair.

But that’s the thing! Feeling sad, nervous, discouraged, annoyed, etc. is just part of the process. But that’s different from having a defeatist attitude. “I’m upset because I slipped/missed a hold” is different from “I slipped/missed a hold, which means I’m not a good climber.” That distinction is very important. Not being able to finish a route doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly a bad climber. We’re not guarenteed to send any given route just because we trained hard. That would be boring. Good mindset means not giving up when routes are too hard, or when you slip off a route you think you should be able to do. When you fall off a route you didn’t ‘fail.’ You learned! “Why am I falling off?” “What just happened?” “I did the route, but why do I feel so drained?” “What did I learn from this last climb?” These are all questions that find their way into almost every training session that I have.

What did I learn in my last few training sessions? The last route I was on at Metrorock showed me what it feels like to do a route made almost entirely of limit moves. It also showed me how many I could get away with even while not being completely fresh. The route before that (the one that I couldn’t get all that far on) had moves that were just outside my reach. There were high feet and the hands were all pinches. I learned that day that I can pull back enough to smear on pinches, which is great because I’d previously thought that I could only do that on jugs or good crimps. The cave route at Movement Gowanus showed me that when I want to do movement on a wall that seems risky, I can either decide that the risk is too much and bail or I can decide that I’ll be fine even if I fall and just do the move and see what happens. I’d taken the risk and it worked out in my favor. The cave route at Movement LIC taught me that all the work I’d been putting into my core strength and body stability was really paying off. Until that day, I’d never used my feet on the roof of the cave. This was over the span of three training sessions, and you can see that I’d learned a lot.

This should carry over to competition climbing as well. I learned a few years ago that thinking that I ‘have to win’ was ruining my competitions. I now think ‘One more hold.’ This helped me refocus my attention from my performance to the routes themselves. Just like with normal training sessions, competitions give you opportunities to learn something about your climbing. When I would fall off a route, I would try to think about what caused that fall. Every competition gives me one new thing to train. It’s important to remember that you didn’t fail because you fell off a route, or because you didn’t come in first place. Instead you learned something. You learned what moves you have a hard time with. You learned that while you might be able to do a lot of hard or weird movement at the gym, you might have a harder time replicating said movements when you’re under pressure. Maybe you its your first competition and you’re more nervous than you thought you’d be. If you walked away having learned something, then the competition was a success.

Mindset training is an ongoing process. It helps to have goals that are not mainly performance based. It’s nice to want to win, but what else do you want to get out of the competition? One of my goals at my competitions is to top my routes. If I fall off before I can top any of them, I want it to be because I encountered a move I’ve never done before, or one I don’t do very often. That to me means that I trained well but hadn’t thought to train that particular move. I still have yet to top my routes, but every so often I get pretty close. Sometimes I fall off because I’m not used to a move or two and it takes me too long to figure it out so I time out. Sometimes that unfamiliar move tires me out so much that I get it but fall off right afterwards. Sometimes I get past it a ways and then fall right before the top because I spent so much energy on the moves beforehand and end up pumping out. Whatever the case though, I learn from every fall. The ultimate goal is always to do better than the last time. Complete a move you had a hard time completing before. Get higher on that weird overhang than you did last time. Do the move that scared you too much the last time.

Remember that you can’t control what other people do, and how those other people train. You do, however, have control over the way you train and the attitude you bring to these comps. When you train hard, you set yourself up for success. I’ll be competing in the paraclimbing World Championship in a few days. I’m very excited, but also very nervous. But I know I’ve trained hard, and that I’ve prepared to the best of my ability, so I know that it will ultimately be okay.

Anyway, happy climbing!

If you want to keep track of the progress of the competition, you can visit [this] site. If you want to watch finals live, I’ll post the link as soon as I get it.