A few years back I sent in a news report to a climbing magazine congratulating myself on doing an ascent of a moderately difficult climb. It was nonsense. Let me explain. It’s quite true that I did indeed tie into the rope at the bottom of the route, and I climbed up to the top without falling off. It’s also true that it was hardest climb I had done for a while. There were plenty of reasons for this. For example, I spent some years doing an imitation of being a husband. Once I realised that I had made a total balls up of that, I perfected being a father instead. Some time later I decided that I needed to become an expert in designing microwave treatment systems. That took quite a bit of effort, but in the end I got there. And so, after all these and other distractions spanning several years, I looked in the mirror, only to find that my reflection occupied its entire width. Further, when I tried to find my belly button, I found that it appeared to have receded several centimetres into my body. I knew enough about physiology to realise that this couldn’t really happen, and was therefore was forced to accept that I had finally become a slob and probably couldn’t climb for shit.
So far, of course, this was just a hypothesis. Now, I am a scientist, and scientists like to test their hypotheses. Accordingly, I arranged for just such a test. It was to be a simple test, and the results had to be unequivocal. The test – I would go out for a day’s climbing. And so I did the test, and now let us have no argument here: at a confidence level of close to 100% I established that I was indeed really, really crap. As a result I swore that I was going to throw my gear into my wheelie bin that very night. It was at this point that I was saved from a monumental folly by one of my many personality disorders – my inability to get rid of stuff. Any kind of stuff really – old love letters, tatty ropes and my climbing gear. I just couldn’t bear to chuck it in the bin.
There was another interesting insight I gained from my little science experiment – I had publicly humiliated myself, and I didn’t like it. While being lowered from a climb on which I had failed to toprope a single move I had been asked if I didn’t used to be Steve Bradshaw. The shame of it...
Clearly there were now only two options at this point, as Warren Harding pointed out many years ago. Either I had to climb a whole lot more or a whole lot less. I chose the former. And in a round about way this brings me to the point where I came in – my magazine news report and the actual nature of my ascent. The thing is this – there are very many aspects to doing a climb that pushes one’s personal limits. And there were very many of those things that I actually couldn’t do at all. So I got someone to do the climb with me.
I chose to do the easy things. There wasn’t much to it really – I had to figure out how to do some underclings, use a bit of body tension, that sort of thing. Not too tricky really, particularly as I had been doing this sport all my adult life. I had to do some training too – but that was fairly straightforward as well. Some running to lose weight, some pull ups and dead hangs, a bit of campus board stuff and lock offs. On the other hand, my friend had to do all the hard things that I couldn’t do.
She had to provide support when I went out to try the climb. She had to give up her afternoons to hold my rope and stand way back under the big roof not able to see what was going on and pay out rope at the right time and lower me down when I was tired. And when I wanted to climb back up the rope to work on the crux moves one more time she had take tight so I could do the rock princess walk up the rope to my high point. She had to listen when I complained that my finger was sore and that my joints were aching. She had to check through the scientific literature on climbing injuries and see why I had funny nodules growing on my fingers and whether climbing had caused them. And every time I thought I was putting on weight she had to listen patiently and then point out that in the morning, I would weigh just the same as I had the day before. She had to provide all the words of encouragement when I kept on messing up the hard move on the lip, and had to tell me what I was doing wrong. She had to put up with my obsession and ramblings and whims. She had to sit patiently with me in between attempts and listen to me prattle on about the pain in my finger from the slot on the lip. She had to do all the things that I couldn’t do myself; all the things that made the difference between success and failure.
So,I really didn’t do the climb. My friend and I climbed did it.
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