On gear-leads be prepared to make split-second decisions while juggling a multitude of equally important tasks. Your success will stem from confidence and intuition gained from experience and time on the rock. Most decisions you make as the leader will affect the safety of both you and your partner. In the beginning, the multitasking nature of trad leading will overwhelm you. You’ll wonder how to ever focus on the physical aspect of climbing itself. For awhile the trad lead will be all about gear and you’ll barely remember making moves between pieces. As your skills develop over time, though, your movements take on a natural flow—you’re able to focus on the climbing at hand while calmly addressing other tasks as they arise. When decision-making becomes second nature, situations that once were colossal are easily resolved.
Talking Yourself Through Fear & Suffering
To stay mentally focused during hard trad leads, I’ve had to cope effectively with two common stumbling blocks: fear and suffering. The techniques I use to negotiate both issues involve talking to myself. When I’m most successful negotiating with pain and suffering, I actually hear my voice inside my head—it’s that calculated.
Fear—If I’m really afraid, I try to moderate my breathing and concentrate on the nuts and bolts of safety. I run down a mental checklist in my head to make sure the basics are covered. Is my protection the best that it can possibly be? Is the rope positioned properly? Am I using all the best footholds and handholds? Sometimes when you’re really scared, you just can’t see—it’s as if you’ve become blinded by fear. So if you calm your mind long enough to bring these three basic things into focus, you will reinforce your feeling of being safe, which in turn makes you less afraid.
Suffering—Some climbs—long desert crack climbs spring to mind—are hard because the climbing actually hurts. The pitch may be quite safe but, as it drags on and the physical pain increases, deep down inside you begin to think of giving up—you lose interest in getting to the top. When I’m grinding through something like this, I remember that when it’s over I’ll be glad I persevered. As a waitress in Moab, my mantra for pushing through on Indian Creek pitches was would you like some more iced tea? When my muscles are screaming, my body is hurting, and I’m having a hard time finding motivation to keep going, I remind myself that I’d given up on law school, a Ph.D., and many other opportunities so that I could be doing this, so I damn well better give it my all!
—Steph Davis
Coping with Fear & Danger
For the traditional leader, ineffectively coping with fear threatens safety, let alone success. Yet fear can be healthy. By fostering your respect for (and attention to) the mountains and nature, it keeps you alive. But at its worst, it’s a liability morphing into terror, then panic and, soon, paralysis. To lead trad routes you must manage and channel fear into a useful energy that doesn’t undermine your goals.
Climber Marc Twight describes how to use self-discipline to harness fear and transform it into a source of strength:
To climb through fear, to point fear up instead of down, you need to maintain the desire and strength, the will and discipline, to go until the end of the pitch. If you are scared, reinforce your confidence by biting off what you know you can chew. Successfully swallowing it will encourage you to take another bite, another pitch…. Trust in your skill, and give yourself up to the action.4
Although Twight addresses extreme alpine climbing, his description of manipulating fear can apply in nearly any climbing scenario. If you are the type of person likely to respond to urgent situations with thoughtful action rather than immobilization, you’re probably capable of transforming fear into fuel to keep you safe and moving upward, a little at a time.
AMBITION
By providing the momentum needed to attain goals and gain confidence, ambition plays a positive role in your life, whether you express it by attending a job interview, giving a presentation at work, or running a marathon. In climbing, ambition lets you progress in skill level as you’re willing to tackle increasingly difficult routes. To advance safely in the trad leading sphere though, you must balance your ambition with a healthy dose of reason.
Honoring Personal Limitations
Problems develop when the excitement of achieving a climbing goal interferes with a clear appraisal of your capabilities. According to American Alpine Club (AAC) data for the past five years, climbers misjudging their abilities is one of the most common contributing causes of reported accidents in both the U.S. and Canada.
Sometimes the desire to say you’ve done one route or another, coupled with the satisfaction of checking it off your list, is more attractive than the immense effort and preparation necessary to actually do the route. During my first season in Yosemite, I found myself so enthralled by talk of big walls that I committed myself to a route high above the valley floor where I, unskilled and frightened, faced tasks I was completely unprepared for. A route that most climbers at that time completed in a day and a half took my partner and me three days. My overzealous will to “have done” a big wall, together with my misappraised abilities, endangered us. I became so flustered while attempting to follow a traversing aid pitch that I panicked and froze, requiring my partner to rappel down to help me. After our ropes became a tangled macramé, we spent our last daylight hour disentangling the mess. We discovered at one point to our horror that we had both untied from the rope and clipped off the same, single, fixed piton, circa 1950, no doubt.
A few days later, after miraculously summiting unharmed, we were safely back down on the valley floor. When an experienced local climber commented that I “had no business going up there,” I recall being miffed. Years later I realized this person had been right. Being accepted by my peers for having done a big wall at the time completely overshadowed my awareness that I didn’t have adequate experience or skills. A year later I returned to the valley with many more skills and experience on the rock, and safely completed two additional walls in decent time and with no major epics.
Questioning Motives
Thinking your climbing goals through requires rigorous awareness of your motives, as well as your skill level. Had I taken the time to think through my first big wall adventure, I would have recognized I had more work to do before taking on that challenge. I would have recognized that my ego was convincing me that I could do whatever made me look cool. Some very dangerous intentions can be veiled by ambition. Tilted heavily toward desire, they are often light on reason and humility.
Leading allows you the opportunity to work in a balanced way with all of the elements of your humanness: emotion, judgment, ability, ego. It’s an unbelievable teacher and educator. That’s the beauty of bothering yourself to put on a rack and climb up a rock really—all this potential human development. The way you are on lead is a direct reflection of your approach to everyday life. Are you organized? Are you respectful toward the natural world? Are you hurried? Flexible? Humble? Are you trying to prove something to someone else? Egos are very tricky. They can sneak up on you and play games with your mind. Just when you’re convinced you are operating without ego is often the time when it’s bigger than ever, simply because you believe this. It’s nuts! If you become egotistical about your achievements and believe you are superior because you have something more than everyone else, you’re in trouble. You miss the point, and any positive aspect of your experience will backfire. You could actually become arrogant enough that your ego will walk you right off the side of a cliff. As a new leader, follow your own experience and avoid comparing yourself to anyone else. Your true strength will shine in your ability to humble yourself and connect with the natural world with balance and respect. We’re all equal whether you believe it or not.
—Ron Kauk
When you find yourself at the base of a challenging route desiring to climb it because so and so is at the crags and you want to show off, because everyone else you know has led it, or simply because you’d like to tick it off your list,