Rock on

Over the past several months I've been spending a lot of time rock climbing, and if I’m not actually climbing chances are pretty good I’m thinking about it. Climbing happened to come back into my life when I seemed to have needed it most. I’d started climbing when I was much younger but because of location, convenience, and lack of climbing buddies it never stuck… until now.

I’ve always had an affinity for any body of water, particularly the ocean, because it’s safe to me. I’d learned a lot from it about the confusions of life and the ocean has come to be a place I am comfortably wary of.

It turns out that rock has had just as many lessons to teach me about myself.

I thought I would share a few thoughts about this healing process climbing has taken me on. To start, I should give a little bit of background information for those who aren’t familiar with any of the terminology (as I was personally clueless when I picked it back up). I won’t go into much detail, but bouldering is a type of climbing that you don’t wear a harness and you aren’t attached to anything while climbing. When you fall you simply drop to the ground. Top roping is when the rope is anchored around something at the top of the route, and you have a harness and you tie into the rope at the bottom and climb the route to the top. At this point you lean back and your belayer on the ground lowers you down. If you slip off the rock at any point during this type of climb chances are you will be able to cling to the rock again and keep climbing and attempting the route as long as your belayer doesn’t get too tired. I won’t get into much else, other than to explain that routes for bouldering and top roping each have different types of rating systems and routes are set up in gyms based on difficulty. Essentially, you follow a color of tape up the rock and only certain holds will be a part of the route based on how hard it is.

The first weekend I got back into climbing I went with some friends who had invited me to go outside on real rock. I’d never climbed outside of a gym, but I had always wanted to. And that little taste of the feel of the rock underneath my hands was about all it took for me to be hooked. After that I spent time back in the gym working on one particular route and I remember being particularly frustrated and absolutely loving it. My brain hurt from trying to figure out how to arrange my body to finish the route, and my pride hurt from realizing how terrified I was of committing to performing some moves at the risk of falling. It was for this reason that I quickly took to bouldering. I found that I needed to learn to trust myself again before I could learn to trust others. It wasn’t until one friend was watching me as I climbed and he simply said that I needed to commit to going for the next hold, at which point it clicked for me and I distinctly remember tearing my attention away from the rock long enough to say, “Yeah, well I have commitment issues.” Without missing a beat he said, “Then this is a good place to work that out.” It was only in the following months that I realized how true this statement was and I realized that for the time being the rock was going to teach me more about myself than I was going to learn anywhere else.

I quickly discovered something as I was bouldering. I was inside my own head and people could point out things and give me advice about hand and foot placements, but until I worked it out with myself it just wasn’t going to happen. Of course much of my inability when I first started was a lack of upper body strength. My hands weren’t used to the roughness of the holds, my fingers weren’t used to being tightly curled around rough objects, my arms were demanding to know why I was demanding so much from them, and my legs were quietly whimpering as they realized they were going to take a bit of a backseat for a while.

I am weak. And I don’t just mean this in the physical sense. I have gotten physically stronger, but I remain weak and incapable. Without the constant presence of Christ the best I can do on one of my most put together days is a synchronized flailing of my arms. Along this journey I found that something I had told myself for months was actually true. As much as I know I am weak on my own, I discovered that I’m also stronger than I thought when I actually step aside and let Christ in. It's even better when I stop fighting and I become an active participant in choosing which route I’m going to tackle and what hand holds I’ll try for. When I would be hanging on a bouldering route I would get stuck with my hands on a couple of holds looking toward the next handhold that I had to reach for and after judging the distance to be too great I would freeze in thought. And fear. I would attempt the route again and again and found I kept getting stuck in one part and was having trouble making the move to the next hold. Eventually, after much struggling on my part I realized that the longer I stayed in one place staring at the next move the more tired I became and therefore the less likely I would be able to pull off the move when I finally convinced myself to lunge for it. Exasperated, I finally resorted to what I know best. I decided to approach this dilemma reasonably. It was time to start trusting myself, reaching for the next hold, and accepting that the more I committed to the move the more likely I was to succeed. Sometimes it is simply of no use to commit half-way. What's more, to hang on and wait for the perfect timing just made me weaker. I learned that not only could I start to trust myself again, but that if I fell it didn’t mean I should question whether I'd made the right decision in moving forward.

And then I started to start to enjoy top roping again. My first attempt at a route climbing outside I had someone belaying me that I trusted without hesitation. I was terribly out of shape and yet the supportive group of friends encouraged me as I faced the rock. And this was the end result

The first time I finished climbing again I remember being physically and emotionally exhausted, my hands were raw, and I was grinning… uncontrollably. And this is how it’s gone ever since.

The rock continues to beckon me and I continue to answer.

It's been fun to go climbing with friends who watched me as I first started climbing and haven't seen me climb since. They comment about how much stronger I've gotten. And I smile simply because the improvement of physical strength is only part of a much larger story. I've become a stronger person. I have again started to trust myself, and I know with work the rest will come. It's a journey. After all, there's no sense in worrying about the next hold before I've even started the route...