Fighting Torque

Some time in the night, you are woken up by the seductively comforting patter of rain on the roof of the van - the sound that signifies to your dreaming consciousness: 'it's ok. You don't have to get up. You don't have to get up, stretch the aches and wince at the niggling pains, force down breakfast against the sick-making fear that today you need to try, again, as hard as you possibly can. It's ok - you don't need to do it today. You can just lie here, zip up the cosy sleeping bag a big more, and go back to sleep, and then lazily get up and go to the cafe.'

Some hours later, staring at the rain as it runs down the window of the van. In a way, the rain's probably our friend, in that it at least makes us rest as much as we probably should. And I'm certainly catching up on my reading. yr.no, which we have come to utterly depend on, (having come to the conclusion that the Norwegian met office are vastly, vastly better at predicting weather than the Brits) says it will stop at 3. The wind looks pretty strong, practically gale force. Should dry the crag off nicely, but my god it's going to be grim.

The route's wired now. The first, and most fun, creative part of the process - just trying the route, exploring the moves, seeing what will work and what won't - is behind me. I've carefully crafted a distillation of those few days - of persuading friends to try it, meeting new friends, excitedly sharing beta, minutely examining the rock for non-existent holds I might have missed, of relaxing in the sun with lunch and no particular pressure, no expectations, waiting for my route to come into the shade  - into a complex, intricate sequence, basically ten hand moves. It doesn't sound a lot but between those hand moves are desperate, tenuous foot stabs onto coin-edged size smears of flowstone and subtle shifts in body shape that either unlock the next move or make any further progress frustratingly impossible. But it starts to flow - it'll work.

No pressure - happy days. Setting up for the throw into the undercut.

Then comes the usual, hollow in the pit of the stomach feeling, where you start to believe that you can do it. The first stage of the redpoint process - making yourself believe that you can do it. I find this stage the hardest - the moves are really hard, I need to pull pretty much as hard as I can just to do them off the rope. How can I string them together? But somehow, after enough goes, they start to flow. I have a tentative redpoint go just to see how far I'll get before I fall off - I surprise myself by getting past the first crux (a desperately hard to co-ordinate pinch on the arete, then a drop knee out right to pull myself under the hold, and then a flick into undercuts above my head), gritting my teeth and making myself get my feet up and clip, and then be up into the crimping on broken flowstone, before my forearms fill with lead and I just can't make another move. Move 7 - pretty good. So then comes the dawning, slightly horrific, realisation that the following run out - the hardest moves of the sequence - getting my foot up above the clip and trying to ignore the next clip staring me in the face while I making the next sequence of slaps across broken flowstone, gurn wildly while I try to lock off and heave spasmodically to get my foot up, then push with enough tension to catapault me off if my foot blows, and hold the torque long enough to snatch the jug - I'm going to fall off it, a lot, before I tick the route - but I somehow need to make myself do it, because that redpoint go means I can do the route.

Latching the undercut

I have a theory that there are three crucial psychological stages to redpointing a route. Believing you can do it, believing you will do it, and believing you are going to do it. Getting from first base to second base means I need to somehow convince myself that I can make myself do the second half of the crux on redpoint, knowing each time that the overwhelmingly likely outcome is taking the ride. Our good old friend fear-of-falling. I spend a few days doing the link with the clip in, knowing that I can physically do the sequence, but blowing it each time on redpoint at move 8 as I hesitate slightly, anticipating the fall, and then either leave it too late to start the move, or start the move but fail to stick it, or not even try to stick it but just stop trying to catch it and start preparing for falling instead. I spend another day going back to working it, after a lot of fuss and gibbering managing to make myself do the second half of the crux without the clip in, and taking the worst-case-scenario lob from the jug. As per usual, the fall is totally anticlimactic. I man up a bit and do the second half of the crux without the clip in twice in a row, in an effort to show myself just who is boss around here. 

Move 8 - the crossover.

The next day of redpointing gets me closer each time - I am having to fight harder and harder for each extra move, and then half-move, of progress. I hold the cross over to the crimp but can't move. Then I hold the cross over to the crimp and start the rock up. Next go I hold the cross-over, start the rock up, and get my fingers on the sprag before peeling off. Which leaves me at the third stage, making myself believe each time I psyche up for a redpoint that I'm going to do it. This go. This time it will all be different. So I'm sat in a van, watching the rain. Waking up each morning with the sinking realisation that today I'm going to have to try harder than I've ever tried before. Fear-of-how-hard-you-are-going-to-have-to-try is a really distinct type of fear - it's not the crippling, paralysing, rabbit-in-headlights-I-can't-let-go-but-can't-make-another-move fear of falling, or even the sick-to-the-pit-of-your-stomach fear of failure that comes with putting too much pressure on yourself - it feels more like the heavy weariness before you go into an exam, when you know how hard you are going to have to try, and for how long, and you just desperately want to rest, to sleep, to be somewhere else.

Slap, gurn, graunch, flail wildly

We walk in to the crag, struggling through gale force winds, but at least it's not actually raining. We huddle at the bottom of the crag in down jackets and debate going back to the van, drink more coffee in the warm, or whether to go for a cafe breakfast. But we know that today is probably the last best day of weather before we have to go back to London. Too much sun forecast Saturday morning, then rain starting Saturday afternoon and all the way through Sunday. It is pretty much now or never. I go through the now familiar warm up routine; do the polished awkward horror The Sod (5+) up the corner, clip up Mindmeld (7a+) on the way down, top rope up that. I try to ignore falling off Mindmeld repeatedly and the fact that they both feel utterly nails, as not being a very constructive thing to think.

First redpoint, I fall out of the move into the undercuts. I'm not really getting enough back at the rest, my forearms are still carrying a bit of pump from the start. Despite the wind, the conditions feel amazing. Next go I fall off the cross-over, hand not quite set on the thumb catch. I really need to believe it's going to be different. That it can be different - despite having tried as hard as I can for days worth of attempts, that I have not yet exceeded my physical limit and can still squeeze another three moves out. I take myself off to listen to psyche up music and try to visualise myself climbing the thing. To digress for a moment, since I went to the Dave Mac Long Hope lecture, I've been fascinated by how good he is at really pulling it out of the bag when it counts. It's surprising how often you get the route on the last day of a trip, on the last go of the day... as it starts to rain. The remarkable thing about Dave Mac is he seems to be able to use this effect more or less at will, to his advantage. Perhaps it will work. I put pressure on myself - come on, it needs to be this go - at best you can manage 3 goes in a day. This is it for the weather - it's now or never.

Suitably psyched up, I tie in. Next go up feels mediocre. I work my heels really hard in the rest to try to take a bit more pressure off my arms. Try to psyche up to fight, as hard as I can, one last time. The move up into the undercuts is easy, but getting my feet up feels desperate - I try to ignore the accumulated jabs of pains and shooting niggles in my wrist and shoulders as I get my feet up, trying to dig with tired toes into the rail, willing myself to stand up into it. Come on. Then something changes - the flash that goes through your head on successful redpoints. This time I'm going to do it. The next moves feel really, really easy. I catch the crossover, and the flowstone, so often slick or greasy, feels stickier than ever. Before I can really consciously process it, my body has rocked over, grabbed and latched the thumb sprag, and then the hardest move of the route for me - graunching my right foot on - somehow I feel higher and more solid on the sprag and the deep lock, and I watch myself pick my foot up and place it in control into the backstep, coil, and press out to the jug.

Eyeballing the fingerjug, the last hard move...

It's weird - the art of redpointing is making extremely difficult climbing feel really, really easy in the moment that you do it. It's an amazing moment and an amazing feeling, and is why I love redpointing as a discipline - but once you are back on the ground, after the elation fades, it is an enormous anti climax. Narrative archetypes demand that it is a climactic struggle, a fight to the death. Instead I have to check that I have actually climbed it and not suffered some bizarre lapse of consciousness. 

Then the sneaking sense that, really, I've let myself off the hook. I made a bargain that that last go, I would fight as hard as I could - and I didn't. It felt a bit too easy. I could perhaps try a little bit harder - fight for a little bit longer, if I really had to. Hmm. Pass the guidebook...

In Praise of Waiting.

He waits. It's what he does.

I'll tell you what - tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick.

Ahab says I don't care who you are, here's to your dream.

The old sailors returned to the bar, 'here's to you, Ahab!'

And the fat drummer hit the beat with all his heart.

Here's to waiting.

Another weekend at The Cuttings. It's not a very trendy crag, it's probably not even a very good crag, but I love it. It's almost always in condition, it's easy access, you can relax at the bottom and it's easy to spend time there. A lot of time. Notorious for it's sub-7a, and particularly sub-6a sandbags, it has a brilliant selection of 7's. All the routes there seem to take people ages - while Portland's west coast has lovely crimpy shelly rock, where there are always holds and you can always keep crimping upwards on progressively smaller and smaller shells, clawing your way up fossils and coral - The Cuttings doesn't let you get away with any of that - what there is, is what there is. All the routes seem to be technical, bouldery, and more often than not, hard for the grade - and they all seem to take ages to do. It's brilliant. It's like being at school - it's not about doing the most aesthetic routes, it's about applying yourself working out the technical tricks, getting stronger, and learning how to climb. You work your way through the 6's, then you get on the 7's, starting with the ones you can do and swearing and getting frustrated at the ones you can't. One by one, you tick them off - and you start to wonder what the climbing is like on the big lines that you have been staring up at for years.

This weekend was about Hall of Mirrors. To my mind it is the best line of all the big Cuttings routes - the line of the crag really. It follows a steep prow which turns into an inset square-cut pillar in the crag, with two hanging grooves on either side - the route goes easily up to under the roof, where you shake out on a jug, to make difficult moves to get a foot on the jug on the lip, at which point it all goes a bit freestyle - I've never seen any two people do it quite the same way - but you end up having to make a brilliant sequence of funky palming, bridging, heel-hooking, fridge-hugging moves and eventually wobbling your way up on a big pinchy sidepull and shit smears to get into a precarious knee-scum/knock-kneed bridge in the groove, at which point it should be in the bag provided you don't shake yourself off the holds (which, given how core-y and full-body the moves thus far seem to be, is far from an impossibility)

I spent a few days, maybe 5 or 6, back on it in 2010 - I got quite close to doing it, but I wasn't strong enough to do it the strong way and needed to use a bit of a whack sequence involving getting my heel on at around shoulder height, and using that to flick up into the undercuts. I was trying to make a super strenuous clip mid-crux, which always screwed me up for going into the smearing up the groove. It was faffy, and strenuous, and the prospect of skipping the clip was utterly terrifying (I alternated between convincing myself that it would be ok, and it really wouldn't be that bad, to being stood looking down from the next clip at the end of the runout thinking - that last clip is MILES away, there's no fucking WAY I'm skipping this clip). I got quite close to doing it, but could never really link it (I couldn't get enough back at the rest, and the moves to get stood on the jug were perhaps a bit too close to my limit, and the whole time the prospect of having to skip the clip was hanging over me...) Eventually, the thing that broke the impasse was we went to Turkey, where I did my first 7c (which, number-chaser that I am, seemed to take the urgency out of doing it), and then it was a while before we got back to the crag - at which point I felt I'd lost fitness, etc. etc. etc. Then over last summer I had an incredibly frustrating time grappling with Sign of the Vulcan and generally feeling not up to the challenge of the bigger route looming over me.

Anyway. This year was going to be different. First go up it a couple of weekends ago, it all felt a bit hard - disappointingly so, as hard (harder?) than  I remembered. But slowly it came together. Bits and pieces of remembered micro-beta, an amazing moment when I realised I had got strong enough to unlock a stronger, but much faster, sequence to get stood on the jug - eventually I was linking it from the ground into the crux. The clip was the last real mental barrier - a couple of goes on it on Saturday established if I could get into the groove I could make the clip at waist height, not strenuously clipping mid-crux as I was trying to do in 2010 - and actually with 2 more years spent gibbering and girly squealing (aka. 'falling practice') I could manage to make myself resist clipping until I got bridged in the groove, at which point I could flag under and make the crux clip at waist height.

A couple of false starts, and then I was suddenly finding myself on redpoint - hugging the fridge, gurning and trying to get a heel on - and then making the moves up into the groove, shaking my way into the knock-kneed bridge, my hands cramping furiously - flagging under and being totally sure I was going to drop it while clipping - but somehow managing to both clip and stay on - and then trying to hold it together - repeating the mantra of 'don't fuck it up, don't fuck it up, don't fuck it up' all the way to the jugs on the pigeon ledge. 

Finishing a project is kind of an ambivalent feeling. It feels awesome to have done it, obviously, but Hall of Mirrors had been such a big part of my identity as a climber - sure, I only spent around 10 days on it, which is basically fuck all in the world of big projects. And I didn't think about it remotely close to *all* the time -  I hardly thought about doing it at all in 2011, for example. But looking back, the idea of one day doing Hall of Mirrors seems to have partly defined me as a climber for what seems like an age, in a way that having done Hall of Mirrors never will. It's been a companion in a way - something to give meaning to endlessly trogging round laps of the boulder wall; picturing myself on the crux with the clip below my feet always enough to get a cheap buzz of fear and clammy palms. I feel thrilled to have done it, and glad to be free of it - but there's emptiness there as well.

Keen to keep the momentum going, and with a spare day at The Cuttings in hand, I spent Sunday flailing on Under Duress, a new 7c+ put up by Bob Hickish around a year ago. I remember when I started climbing on Portland, when I was on 5's and 6's - I would look up at the seemingly blank sheets of rock in the 7's and thought, 'my god that must just be impossibly thin'. Of course, as it turns out, most of the 7s I've tried are not like that at all, they are covered in holds, you just can't see them from below. But Under Duress pretty much feels like I imagined Portland 7s would - the crux seems to involve really long powerful reaches and big spans off desperately, desperately thin crimps, and it feels disappointingly hard. The Cuttings was absolutely roasting, which won't have been helping, for sure - but I suspect I could really do with a bit more strength in reserve for holding and moving off those minging flowstone quarter-pad crimps.

One part of my mind has written the route off for the time being - there are other routes I could try with my current level of strength and fitness; the cold crisp winter season on the East coast seems to be drawing to a close; and I can't wait to year's Malham campaign started. 

But over the last few days since Sunday, another part of my mind is already busy churning out thoughts, isolated and disorganised, but with a discernible theme... Perhaps with a bit more time on the fingerboard... (the other day I managed to tick another project - deadhanging, fully crimped, both pairs of crimps on the Moon board) perhaps if I were to add some weight to that or maybe drop it down to half crimps... maybe if I spent a bit more time on the esoteric looking selection of fingerboards at the biscuit factory (one of which ('Karma') has some appropriately grim edges...) maybe try to project offset pull ups on that, or the small campus rungs...

The early spring season seems to be drawing to a close, but it's always going to be there - and I have no doubt we'll be back...