I have to confess; I climb at a gym. I could dress it up and say that I train at a gym, but that would not quite be true. I climb the routes sometimes.
At my last gym session, I was just about to indulge in that guilty pleasure when I overheard something which totally gasted my flabber. A woman had clipped into the autobelay on a steep section of wall and struggled up a few feet before auto-trundling*.
As she swung to the padded floor, her husband walked by with their toddler in his arms.
“Did you lose already?”, he asked.
“Lose?”, I thought, “You don’t lose at climbing.”
In the first place, climbing is never over.
In the second place, I can’t see what would constitute losing, short of just not trying at all. Everybody falls. Every steel-tendoned youngster runs up against something they can’t climb. Even the best can die in the mountains, and to think that even such an extreme endpoint defines losing at climbing is a subtle reversal.
Climbing is instrumental, and it is the finest instrument in my book. Think of it like a Stradivarius. A Strad. is worth a lot of money. Investors will bid on a Strad. and brag about owning one. But the violin still gets played, and the day that it gets locked in a vault as a chit is the first day of loss, because the violinist is the one who really possesses the instrument, while the investor is a mere parasite upon it.
There will be a gold medal for climbing soon. There are already prizes, sponsorships, grades and bragging rights for climbing. Some will take all those trappings seriously. However, we should not take those people, or their trappings seriously.
There is no loss in climbing.
- Auto-trundling – as opposed to cleanly popping off the route and subsequently orienting oneself in mid-air, to auto-trundle is to disengage from the holds in a disjointed fashion, resulting in a tumble which closely resembles a loose rock rolling down a hill.
Dedicated to the Game 