Brute strength

A few years ago I took up climbing (on walls, with chalky hands and coloured grips and ropes and stuff)  - took a safety class, got the permit and then my interest sort of dwindled, so I never really evolved much as a climber. I'd go take a whack at it with friends once in a blue moon, usually just getting halfway up the walls, falling and not really caring.

But thanks to an increasing number of friends who've taken to the noble sport recently, I go more often, and honestly I can feel that I'm getting slightly better each time.

Today I went with a friend and we did some fairly challenging walls (for our level, that is). I tried one tilted wall (which makes gravity work against you) where the grips were pretty far apart, which set my limited stature against me. I managed to get partway up the wall doing some unreasonable manouvering with my legs (involving ballet technique that you shouldn't need when you climb...) to get up. I'm a think-too-much climber who prefers using my legs because I have feeble arm strength, so I'm prone to standing around thinking which leads to fatigue and not much risk-taking. But I only got halfway up, to a point where both my hands were clasping the same grip, and as they got sweatier and sweatier I teetered with one foot on a tiny, feeble excuse for a foothold that stuck out of the wall about one centimetre. I couldn't see what was in reach next and my arms were starting to shake from the fatigue. I'd already asked to rest once and felt a bit dumb about either doing that again or falling.

Suddenly I remembered that maybe I didn't have to rely on what I was used to, and that fatigue to the point of losing my grip would make me fall anyway.

I pulled with both my arms and my foot lighted from the grip. I dragged myself up by the arms just high enough for my foot to reach a grip that had been by my hip before, impossibly out of reach to step up to.

And from that foothold I was able to push even further up, and I was finally past the 'impossible' bit. Need I say that I went "wooo me!" inside my head?

The point was that suddenly I could trust the modest brute strength in my arms. I found a smidge of potential I didn't think I had. Now that it has shown itself, maybe my acknowledging it will make me want to put more trust in it, and in the long run trust my entire body more as a whole, capable entity.

Suddenly I realize that push-ups and such are just preparation, not punishment.