reflections on climbing again after two months of not doing it very much

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Climbing is a huge part of my identity. I've been climbing 3x a week for something like three years now, and the longest break I took during that time was only a couple of weeks long. The break was due to a serious illness — yes, there was an ER visit involved, story for another time — and even still, I was climbing through the illness right up until that ER visit. (Doctors have told me that I should probably stop doing that.)

But recent months have been filled with a blogging residency and international travel, which led to a huge drop in my climbing frequency. I think I was averaging something like once a week during April, and I climbed exactly once in the month of May. As of yesterday, I hadn't climbed for three weeks straight. I'd barely done any other exercise, either.

…but, as of today, I'm officially back to climbing!

The first thing I noticed was wow, I am so washed. I'm talking "could be on r/powerwashingporn" washed. I was shaking on climbs I used to warm up on, and my fingers couldn't handle crimps that used to be comfortable. I noticed that I was reaching for power that just wasn't there. I guess it makes sense. I lost 10lbs over the course of the past two months, and I'm willing to bet that was 10lbs of pure muscle.

But I don't think being weaker was even the main problem. Climbing requires raw power, yes, but it's much more about positioning your body so that you can make effective use of that power. Because I lost some strength, I had this weird proprioception miscalibration that made the positioning part so much harder. I'd pull on a hold and my body wouldn't respond with the force that I was expecting, which led to this whole cascade of it's harder to get into the right position → moving is harder → it's harder to get into the right position → …

It was like coming back to your childhood home as an adult. Nothing about the physical place is different, but the sizes are all weirdly different from what you remember and you keep bumping into things because you expect them to be further away.

When I first started climbing, I promised myself that the climbing gym would be a place to have fun, not a place to get better at climbing. I knew my tendency to optimize would kill all the fun I was having, and man, I was having so much fun. I didn't want to lose it.

I kept this promise for a while. Very very very carefully. I refused to fingerboard or otherwise "train" for climbing. I was fully willing to give up on any move that I didn't want to do, whether that was because it was boring or I wasn't good at it or it was just plain scary. I literally thought about this every time I entered the gym.

Eventually, I got pretty good at climbing, which was great! But I also started identifying as being good at climbing, which was less great. I felt a need to live up to the fact that I was good at climbing, which made me worse at climbing while I was doing it, which made me want to try harder to be good at climbing…all of which was not very fun.

I thought that the break would have helped, but alas, the same "need to be good" snuck back in today. I caught myself setting a grade-based goal for the session, trying to prove to myself that I hadn't lost my touch.

Ah, this all makes it sound like I was sad to be climbing, which could not be further from the truth!

Returning to climbing was invigorating. I got to rediscover all the ways you move when climbing, and I also got to relive the unique satisfaction of sending a climb. I didn't realize how much I had been missing it…something about it scratches an itch in my monkey brain. (Well, maybe it's the climbing that does it…)

After the session, I got to bask in the post-exercise contentness that I had been missing. The stress of constant plane rides and rough sleeping setups melted off my body, and I felt myself physically relax in a way I hadn't done in months.

Man, I love climbing.