My climbing has become an almost comical real-life enactment of the saying “fall seven times, stand up eight.”
The first of many burns on Dances With Cows
I started a new project a week or so ago — Dances With Cows (13a). I’ll cut to the chase, and shamefully admit that as of today, I have failed on this climb 17 times. This is more than I’ve ever been on any climb before. The thing is, it wouldn’t be the hardest climb I’ve ever done. I expected to send in about 5 attempts, even after giving it a few tries. The combination of high expectations and lack of results feels pretty crappy, and any serious climber has experienced this. Here are some questions I recently asked myself:
Do I think that sending this climb is important? No.
Will I be overjoyed if/when I send? Not really.
So then the most important question becomes, “Why do I keep doing it?” The answer is simply, “Because it’s my project.” I chose it, and I can’t give up.
What I realized today on the long slog back to the parking lot is that projecting is about failure, or more specifically, responding to failure. I won’t learn all there is to learn on this climb if I don’t keep trying. And I don’t intend to start the bad habit of cutting my losses.
... and the first of many falls.
This is where climbing is most applicable to other areas of life. If you want to grow, it’s important to get outside of your comfort zone and try something new and difficult. And if you want to do anything well, whether it’s learning to play an instrument, learning math, playing a sport, or even losing weight, you have to fail. And then you have to keep trying.
I think that many of us quit when faced with our most difficult challenges. It’s easier to say that we didn’t reach our goal because we didn’t try very hard, because we weren’t interested enough, because circumstances got in the way, or for some reason that we invented to rationalize away our failing. I’m not going to do that with this climb.
My story with this route isn’t finished. But my success won’t be defined by sending. Success is never quitting.