Four days off from climbing now, but it feels so worth it. After eight months of waiting and seemingly interminable paperwork, it all came to the crux moment yesterday when, after waiting for nearly three hours, we stepped up to the counter for Kevin’s visa interview. My stomach had been in knots all day long, so when the people at the consulate suggested that we go out to lunch in between taking all of our papers from us and the interview, we opted to just sit there in the windowless, clockless waiting room and wait. And then, amazingly, the officer interviewing us proved to be kind and human, instead of gruff and unhelpful and terse, as I’d expected. At the end of the chat, he approved the visa, saying we could come back on Monday to get it.

At last…at last. I’ve waited so long, my entire year this year has been dictated by this process. It’s a strange and unwieldy thing to carry with you everywhere you go, especially for someone like me, who has created a personal world and lifestyle in which I make my own choices and do exactly what I want to do nearly every day of my life, all of the time. I love my work, love my life…love writing articles, love coaching climbers, and of course, love rock climbing. And I love sharing this world and life with Kevin, and have so anticipated and looked forward to the potential of him being able to be a part of it all of the time. But to do this, he had to change his visa status from a visitor who could only stay for certain portions of each year to a permanent resident, and this, it turns out, takes months—nearly a year—along with the most insanely complicated reams of paperwork I’ve ever dealt with in my life.

And so, this year, I’ve had a great year, yes, and I’ve learned how well I do being alone much of the time, as I spent most of my winter in total solitude holed up in my house in Ten Sleep with Jedi, training my butt off and writing. I actually was happy, and I did enjoy that time for self reflection and just pushing myself, solo, to train harder and get stronger (of course Jody’s presence at many of the bouldering sessions provided great inspiration as well). Summer brought with it tons of guests, which was awesome because I most certainly needed climbing partners and appreciated the good energy, but the hollowness in my heart echoed throughout my world every day as I wished over and over again that Kev could at least be there to experience a portion of the fun, as he had in the couple years past.

My entire year, then, has been filled with choices made because of this process, this waiting, this game of proper hoop jumping and just trying to do everything right and provide all of the correct information at the right time. The choices I’ve made have been because of this process, from my spring trip to Skaha to my continued presence in Canada at the moment, as we have to wait through the weekend to pick up the visa on Monday.

But now, finally, I feel an incredible sense of lightness approaching, a knowledge that within a week, I will return to my real chosen way of being, the one in which I share my life with Kevin and we go where we want to go and climb what we want to climb as partners, so I’m no longer a thumpity-thwacking third wheel bouncing along behind another climbing-partner team, nor am I driving to some place I don’t really want to be to spend time with who I do want to spend time with. What joy, and I suppose the bright side of all this waiting is that I appreciate it way more than I would have sans the wait. At last, I can climb and laugh and be joyful again without that empty feeling inside, truly embracing and loving my life and world in a way that I feel has been lacking within me all year long.

Yesterday passed by at a weird sort of stop-‘n’-go blur pace, as I awoke at 10 to 5 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. Oh, well. We’d decided to get up at 6 anyhow to depart. Since I’d climbed eight pitches and then trained on Sunday, this lack of enough rest didn’t really agree with my body, and even after my morning coffee, I found myself with my head lolling back into the seat of the go-cart (a.k.a. a little Honda) that we borrowed to drive here, crushing my neck awkwardly as I grabbed a couple of 20-minute catnaps in between watching the scenery rush (or should that be crawl? The speed limits here are so slow!) by as we traversed British Columbia.

Upon arriving in Whistler, where we spent last night, we decided to watch a little television to relax after the drive. I ate some more food and then promptly slept through two episodes of something—T.V. seems to be the ultimate sedative for me when I’m exhausted. Just put on a show I really want to watch, and the harder I try to stay awake, the faster I fall asleep. It’s a great talent, especially for someone like me who tends to be a light sleeper. This was followed by a much-needed solid night of sleep, which included several dreams of strong climbing, especially the one I woke up to, which was quite vivid. Cool holds on smooth gray rock, a horizontal pinch that I was reaching up to with power when I woke up. I look forward to climbing that route, if I ever happen upon it in the future…but for now, I have to do some writing before we venture into the big city.

Kevin Climbing at Lakit, BC

I woke up at 4:30 this morning cold again, though I fell asleep too warm. I pulled the comforter over my body and commanded, “Go back to sleep until 6,” and it worked. Yes…a good start. I got up, made my coffee, and got Kevin to get up about half an hour later, so we made it out to the crag around 7:30 or so. Today was supposed to be cloudy and cooler with a chance of rain, but the ambiance at the crag at first was stifling, still, hotter than it’s been, and humid. Hmph. I decided to warm up on a 5.10 instead of jumping straight on my project, as I had been on the other days. The problem is that I can’t do the pulls on the proj when I’m not warmed up…not sure why I hadn’t done the warm up before. Impatient, I guess.

After a couple laps on that (fun!), I got on the project. I felt a little disheartened, because I haven’t had a two-day rest period since I got here, and I felt achy on the warm up. I felt better on the project, though—better than usual for my first go, anyhow, though I still felt like I wasn’t going to have the juice to send it today. I just felt so tired and flamed.

My next go, I climbed up the 5.11 entry pitch to the ledge (you could sleep about 10 people on this ledge), and I was pleasantly cooled by the breeziness and clouds that had come up to dry the air and banish the sun from shining in my eyes and melting my hands from the slopers. I climbed up to the crux, and fell, as usual. Did the move right, climbed a couple bolts more, stopped, and lowered back to the ledge. Clipped in, pulled the rope, and repeated this again—climb up, try for the deadpoint off the sh#$ foot to the crux hold, get it wrong, not be able to move, hang, do it right, climb up. Ugh! Back down to the ledge. Pull rope again. Retie.

At this point, I thought to myself, “I’m feeling kind of thirsty and like I need a break from this, but I guess I’ll try one more time.” I started repeating my bizarre new mantra that seems to help me relax and climb more swingy and ape-like, which is, “Who cares? Who cares?” It helps me remember that it doesn’t matter if I do a route or not; it’s not important, and that relaxed state cultivates more fluid movement for me. Weird, but it’s working, so whatever. So with my “who gives a f#$*” attitude, I climbed up to the crux, and nailed the hold in sequence correctly for the first time ever. I pulled my foot up, reached up through the move that’s the crux if you can reach the move I just deadpointed to without deadpointing, and grabbed the next crimper.

Here, if you’re me and you’re so stretched out that you can’t really step up to the next footholds comfortably, you simply clamp down on these two small holds and do a pull-up to move your foot up. That felt pretty hard after the power output I’d just done (I always have these eye-opening moments the first time I string through a powerful sequence—as in, “wow, that feels WAY harder when you actually DO all the moves before it”). Pull-up completed and foot moved up, I felt delighted, and moved into another one of my mental tactics that’s a bit odd but that has worked well for me all year. I told myself that it was totally okay to fail now, because I’d already at least accomplished something for the day. I basically just gave myself mental permission to fail and be okay with that outcome, but (key point), I didn’t set an expectation of failure—I just accepted the possibility as an outcome and let it be fine however it happened. This, too, helps me relax and climb more fluidly and less tensely and hesitantly.

I rested for few shakes, and then climbed up through the next holds—slopers, a real fist jam, big reaches, another pull-up, a rest, and then the redpoint crux for me—the long moves to the slopers that would be nearly impossible for super-shorties. I went with hybrid beta, not heel hooking but sort of blending the footwork of Kevin with my higher feet, and got both slopers. Finally—to the end of the route, which features the only move that’s easier if you’re short, and I guess is where the tall folks experience their redpoint crux. But I’d climbed through it every day, and I told myself, “You’ve never fallen off here.” Supremely confident, I climbed through, got my foot up, and clipped the anchors—YES!

Not really much of a hard route by grade for me, but an achievement personally that speaks more than maybe anything I’ve done since I started training this power thing so seriously for the last two years, and with exceptional focus now for the last year, I’d say. I got on this route for a single attempt the first time in November of 2008, and I literally could not pull between the holds for the first three or four bolts worth of climbing (and it’s only seven bolts long). Then, this spring (the next time on it since 2008), I did better on the couple days I got to try it, but I still couldn’t do the pulls from the normal handholds and footholds. Now, to be able to not only send this route, but to send it “the right way,” means so much, and illustrates to me so clearly that affirmation all of us who train need to have—that yes, the training is working. I am stronger than I used to be. Today, I climbed something I couldn’t climb at all less than two years ago. What an awesome feeling!

To top it off, I popped around the corner and did a couple of 12s to finish my day, and they were really fun, even though that thirsty dehydration that I’d felt when starting up the last go on the project had left me in a weird physical state of incredible shakiness, which I don’t normally have to deal with. Oh, well. I did those, and then we came back, and I put in a super solid training session including some new exercises. I anticipate being severely sore tomorrow, but that’s okay, because this week could end up being a four or five-day rest period, though a day of climbing in Squamish isn’t entirely out of the question. Just depends on how all of the “real-life” obligations play out.

I’m good either way, feeling thoroughly satisfied with this progress indication and yet even more motivated to continue getting stronger. I try to get stronger because the stronger I am, the more fun rock climbing is, and that for me is the only reason to do all of this training—because being stronger makes climbing feel so much better, opening up entirely new realms of movement and potential for me as a human being. I find rock climbing to be the ultimate mental-physical-emotional, in-the-moment experience of being human in the most totally demanding way possible. And to top it off, it’s still just plain fun.

Gord Climbing at Lakit

 

I managed to make it out the door to go climbing today at 6:30 in the morning, a new record for me here. This after a whirlwind trip over to Canmore, during which we hiked to both Planet X and to Acephale and climbed a teeny bit, just so I could say I’d been there and seen that, I guess, more than anything. Honestly, I’m in a really strange place with climbing right now. I want to climb and get stronger, but the bigger life picture is making that picture seem really small and unimportant right now, to the point that I’m not even really all that interested in climbing for a day at a new place—I just want this waiting period to be over and for Kevin and I to be able to spend time together climbing where we want to be. It’s been the ultimate test of patience, and like every long drive, the closer we get to the finish, the longer those last few miles seem to stretch out, on and on and on into the horizon.

And so, yes, it was nice to go over there and see those lovely crags and hike around, and I did get the supreme experience of perfect weather and no bugs, but I felt my heart just not into it. I suppose at least at Lakit I have a route that I’ve tried enough to go out and sink my teeth into for the day, and one that is really showing me the progress I’ve made in the other patience game I’ve been playing for so long—the gaining power patience game. I’ve gone from being a 5.12a or maybe even worse power climber who had redpointed 5.13+ routes of “girly style” climbing to one who can now at least do the moves on most powerful and/or reachy 5.13as that I try…but this buildup has brought with it an unexpected consequence that isn’t that cool at the moment…but it will be soon, I think (hope!).

Before, when I’d get on a route with a series of long powerful pulls between obvious holds (not necessarily the crux, but a serious challenge for me in addition to the crux), I would put my body in the suggested position with the “approved beta,” and I would feel even single moves to be impossible. The farther apart my hands were, the more impossible the move seemed (i.e. I had no ability to pull hard with one isolated arm). So I would spend lots and lots and lots of time and effort and attempts dumbing the route down into my style as much as possible, with dinky little foot moves and intermediate hand moves and such, never even contemplating the big move(s), and never thinking that it would be cooler to do them that way. I took a weird sort of pride in my technical ability to trick my way through this stuff.

However, with more power now, it’s become entirely apparent to me that this sort of techy b.s. feels like an inane waste of time and effort, as well as not nearly as cool as being just strong enough to pull and flow through moves in the more obvious way, the way that “everyone does it.” And what happens all too often now is that I can almost do the moves that way, or I can do them, but not a bunch of them in a row, and I can sense viscerally what it would feel like to climb the route the right way, and so I’ve lost my desire to climb it all Alli-style the way that I used to climb everything. I just don’t want to bother with that tedium any longer—I want to pull with one arm easily and climb from hold to spaced out hold with lightness and springiness, and I am so damnably close to it and teetering on the brink, but not quite there yet on most powerful ‘n’ thuggy routes.

And, honestly, it’s infuriating, and it actually has taken some of the fun out of climbing for me at the moment, especially on powerful routes. I just feel so antsy to do the moves “right” and to feel what that feels like, and so thoroughly disgusted and over doing the moves “wrong” and knowing already that I’m done with that style of climbing, that I just find myself forcing myself to try the moves the “right” way, stubbornly, instead of trying anymore to force weird tiptoe-y intermediate-laden b.s. movement to trick my way through stuff that should just involve simply and fluid pulling. What will that teach me, anyhow, but to continue not getting strong enough to do the moves the way they flow best, if a person possesses the strength and power to climb the route in top style?

At the same time, this situation is motivating, motivating me to train more, train harder, to get that extra edge of power I need to push myself over the brink into more and more experiences of doing the moves the way they’re seemingly “meant” to be done instead of ticky-tacking up everything I can, and failing when this isn’t possible. Today I had a great experience of this, discovering that I could finally do the sequence on this route at Lakit close enough to the tall folks, even with a terrible replacement foothold for the undoable-no-matter-how-strong-I-ever-get reach, to have it feel correct and look like what everyone else does. And it was so rewarding, because just like I expected and have come to expect and keep having reinforced, when I do moves like this, they almost always DO feel better, more right, more fluid, and more pleasurable—even if they’re more powerful.

Must. Get. Stronger.