Marginal Gains or How I learned to stop worrying and love the process.

Project (noun): An individual enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

Success (noun): The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

Climbing isn't always easy. Sometimes when climbing stops being easy, and further progress seems just out of reach, a project is born.

A project is a climb or problem, that one is working but has not finished yet. The often overlooked side of finding a project is the admission to oneself that this has happened. This decision is important. Climbers often try problems and move on without ever succeeding. Sometimes a problem grabs you and becomes the object of one's desires. When this desire coincides with a belief that a climb can be climbed a project is born.

Many climbers struggle with projecting. I used to believe you either were or were not a "projector". Some people are willing deal with the repeated failure knowing it is in the pursuit of something greater, and others can't. It's that simple. This year I have tried to get better at projecting and no longer do I think it is as black and white. The difference between projectors and non-projectors is mindset.

With climbing like every sport, it is easy to measure your success. You clipped the chains, topped out or matched the top hold. The obvious conclusion to jump to is that not doing these things counts as failure - You didn't finish the climb, so you must have failed. This isn't the case. The definition of success above states that it is the accomplishment of an aim. While the main aim may not have been achieved, that does not mean secondary ones were not. Maybe it is the furthest you have ever got on a slab, you may have made a toe hook work when previously you couldn't, or it may just be an achievement to pull onto your first E1 because before now you have always been scared. 

It is these other sorts of successes, the marginal gains, that separate the projector from the not. When you are able to see the positive in the small wins then you can project. Full sessions falling off become worthwhile if you made one small move, discovered a new foothold, or even just feel less pumped getting to the same point as before.

Ultimately the key to becoming a projector is finding the positives where others would find the negatives. So, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and when they both fall off keep looking on the bright side until they don't fall off anymore.

Why is it so hard not to climb?

It was the end of 2016 when I injured my middle fingers. I had been training on the boards at my local wall and, having seen the gains I was making, had been ignoring the swelling that was starting to trouble my middle digits. There were no "pops", but through overuse and heavy strain, something changed in my fingers and suddenly after every session they became swollen and painful - It took a large amount of effort for the joints to hurt during training and I think this is part of why I continued to train, when the post-workout swelling had reduced.

All climbers get injured - I cannot think of one climber I've met who hasn't had a twinge or a tweak in a finger, elbow or shoulder. Others take a bad fall and break ankles, blow knees or throw out their backs. Every climber also keeps on climbing and training through injuries. We have all seen a climber with a pot on his or her ankle on the pull up bar. Half of all climbers have one or more fingers taped, most gyms seem to have a guy with KT tape on an elbow or shoulder. The climbing community is unlike the rest of the sporting world; you are far more likely to meet an injured climber than an uninjured one.

Objectively the high rate of injury makes sense. Finger tips didn't evolve to have our entire weight dangling off them. Elbows make for an incredibly efficient way to move our arms, but are not built for high, constant strain. The shoulder joint has the greatest range of movement of any joint, but this mobility comes at the expense of stability. You can see why climbing leads so commonly to injury.

Climbing isn't alone in putting untold strains on it's participants bodies though. So why does it seem climbers are more injured than other hobbyists? The answer I think is three-fold:

1. Climbing is developing at an alarming pace. If you go to many indoor walls now you can climb grades on plastic that didn't exist 30 years ago anywhere. It is incredibly difficult for conditioning and training to keep up with the advancement at the top end of the sport.
2. Strength is seen as a quick way to improve, rather than the slow progress of technique. With easy access to training videos and information it is very easy for anyone to learn about campus boards etc. We all know these are dangerous and can lead to injury but the risk of injury vs. the reward of improvement is very difficult to balance.
3. Climbing is a community. With many climbers socialising with other climbers, gyms and crags become a place you go to socialise as well as climb - blurring the lines between social and sporting lead to people climbing when they shouldn't.

Point 1 & 2 above will change more with time, and in some ways we have already started to see this change in recent years. Cafe Kraft have brought out conditioning guides to help with exercises not directly related to climbing, with the aim to reduce injuries. Dave MacLeod has also brought out a book on climbing injuries and treating them - though the main emphasis is on prevention - Make or Break is a really good book and one every climber should read.

Point 3 however I doubt will change.  Unlike more established sports, practitioners of climbing at every level call themselves "climbers". It is not very often that a player of five-a-side calls themselves a footballer. Climbing unlike many sports is more holistic than the physical activity itself. Climbers climb, but they also socialise with other climbers and go on holidays specifically to climb. Climbers spend hours going over guide books looking for routes, and go walking to look for undiscovered rocks and routes.

It's this all-encompassing nature of climbing, that it permeates all corners of your life, that makes recurring injuries hard to avoid. When you go to the crag or the gym to socialise, you end up climbing more often than you should. You decide you will have an "easy session" just so you can chat to friends on the mats or you've walked all the way to the crag now, so you might as well put your shoes on, even though you have aches and pains. Twinges turn to tweaks, tweaks to pulls, and pulls to tears. It's the communal nature of climbing that makes it hard to recover, because when all your friends are climbing how can you sit out just because your middle fingers hurt? 

Northern Sardinia Bouldering and the Issues of Grading

As I write this, I have been back from Sardinia for a full week and have had time to reflect on what a week it was. Whilst my time in Sardinia was specifically a non-climbing holiday, I knew that there was a plethora of rocks and as such a huge opportunity for climbing. It was this that pushed me to pack my clothes in my pad and try and grab a few hours bouldering (in between the beaches and fine dining).

Capo Testa 

For anyone interested in untouched rock the north of Sardinia seems to have plenty. I could find very little record of bouldering in and around Capo Testa or the town of Santa Teresa Gallura. I managed to sneak two afternoons and one evening session into my holiday and that resulted in some 20 unrecorded lines (which are now all recorded on 27crags for anyone to use). I was very happy with my little addition to the island and thought it would be an easy process to update people on my return.

The true problem I found was with grading my new climbs. It was 30-36 degrees when I was climbing. A temperature range which is blatantly not conducive to good friction, which made everything feel hard on a rock type I really wasn't used to climbing on. This lead to many questions:

1. Do I grade for how hard the climb felt then, in that moment?
2. Do I grade for how hard the climb would feel in optimal conditions?
3. Do I grade for how hard I found the climb?
4. Do I grade for how hard a granite expert would find the climb?

Not to mention the unanswered question of:

• Do you grade for how hard a problem is to flash?

Or

• Do you Grade for how hard a problem is to Red point?

All of these questions are hard to answer, and I understand grading is subjective and there are no hard or fast rules, but I actually thought it raised some interesting points.
My opinion is this, grade for optimal conditions and, if you can, for how a local expert would grade a problem. It is always better to fight for a grade than to have one handed to you, and this is how I proceeded.

Charlie Evans on the pristine granite

However the Redpoint/Flash grading is very difficult. How much of a grade comes down to figuring out the right beta? (Especially in a time where you can load a video at the crag and watch how others have climbed it).
It makes sense that a problem will be harder if you do not know how to do it. But also it is different for every climber how long a problem takes to figure out, the you add in fatigue from attempting a problem and is it fair to grade a problem based on solving a problem.

The same goes for the physicality of a problem, we are all built differently and as such all find different problems suit our strengths. We all know a burly roof climber who struggles on slabs, and a delicate slab climber who struggles on roof's. So how can one grade suit all?

The answer I feel lies somewhere in between and how we grade problems will be a discussion that continues as long as climbing does.
What a long winded way to tell you all i did some climbs and made some topo's.

 Happy Climbing.