Climbing is Adapting: Case Study of a Recent Climb When Things Did Not Go Perfectly
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Making a how-to video has, at its heart, an interesting dilemma. To make a good how-to video, of course we want to show how to perform the technique smoothly and in the cleanest, safest way possible. Basically, its an implied, “here’s the idealized way of doing this, what we should strive towards.” But the reality of climbing in the field - on a real climb - is that we are confronted with circumstances that pre-empt our practiced ideal. It can be anything from small issues, like being confronted with a different anchor setup than we are used to or practiced with, to large issues like having entirely different equipment with you than you think you need for your procedure. But showing a “less than ideal, but functional” solution can be very confusing to someone who is learning the procedure for the first time.
It’s the notion that you need to ‘know the rules before you can break them.’
This is just a very real, very practical example of a larger human condition. In many circumstances, we need to know what we are aiming for - what does great look like - for us to move towards that ideal. However, we are then left with needing to accept the reality that we very rarely will achieve the ideal. What is you’re idealized version of you as a friend, or a partner, or a parent? Do you ever achieve it?
So, here is a first stab at a video of a different sort. Here, I’m ‘braking some of the rules.’ I call out those decision points and the rationale behind them. In this video, I’m embracing the imperfection. In many ways, then, I am asking a lot of the viewers of this video. We are embracing nuance. We are needing to hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts in our head as the same time: that we will never achieve the perfect climb, full of idealized safety procedures done without fault; and we should strive for that idealized climb, anyway.
I firmly believe that the catalyst that is not just helpful but is required for us to hold those contradictory thoughts is a certain amount of grace and self-forgiveness: grace in accepting that everyone around use will climb using techniques that are imperfect and self-forgiveness for being similarly situated and flawed.
As I get into during the video, a lot of the particular choices on this particular climb stem from me simply forgetting my harness. We have an entire video on how I made my improvised harness, that you can find, here. But if you do want to have the materials with you to make such a thing, here they are: