Find What You Love

This is a bit of a stream of consciousness post because it has been so long since I published anything on the blog. I have had ideas – most notably the concept that, to paraphrase Steve Bechtel, “being average gives average results.” Bechtel fans will recognise this as a bastardisation of “random training produces random results.” But that is a topic worthy, at least in my mind, of fleshing out a bit more completely than this post has room for.

It is not that I have been doing too little to have anything to write about, more that I have been doing too much and have not had sufficient spare time to sit down and pen a long essay. Crazily, at almost 60, I still have the psych of a 26 year old when it comes to rock climbing so I have been exploring new bouldering areas and last Monday we ticked off another new climbing project and started the next one. That was also the day I looked down while I was belaying Doug and saw a one metre long snake on the rope bag about 4 centimetres from my bare foot. I am pretty sure humans have “snake recognition” wired into our evolutionary genes because I leapt up and back in under a second. Doug, who was working a hard sequence at the time, kept his cool remarkably well; reason number 76 for using a Gri-Gri or similar device to belay when your buddy is projecting.

Paddling is back on too. We've done a couple of surf days, during which I have surprised myself by NOT capsizing. I am almost starting to think I am improving but that might just be hubris. I'm sure another surf capsize is coming right along. I went out yesterday to do some surfing at one of our local beaches and within not very long broke a foot pedal which left me with a tedious paddle back home with no foot pegs to brace on and no rudder. It turns out that without foot pegs, you lose all torque (drive) and you end up “arm paddling.” It was tiring, inefficient and ineffective and gave me a good deal of insight into the speed and fatigue level of many of the people I paddle with who “arm paddle.”

Talking about broken gear, I finally got to Sydney last week to see my Mum who, thanks to Covid restrictions I have not seen since June. While there I managed to replace my worn out approach shoes and pick up a couple of other climbing items not available locally. “Not available locally” actually covers a lot of ground down here.

I am a shop assistants dream – I knew exactly what I wanted before I went in the store, so, apart from fetching the shoes from the back, I served myself and was in and out in a short time. There was an older guy there trying on every climbing helmet in the store for a canyoning trip he was going on. It was one of those situations where I thought, “yeah, you'll do this once, maybe twice.” Those sorts of things aren't hard to guess because the reality is most people do things a few times and then quit. I would love to have a single Bitcoin for the number of people I know who started rock climbing and gave it up within a year. I'd be as rich as Elon Musk, on the proviso that I could actually use Bitcoin for anything.

There was a bouldering route I really wanted to try in Jannali while I was in Sydney. I had been on it a few years ago but felt stronger and thought I might do way better, but the rain moved in on the afternoon I had set aside for bouldering and so I drove home instead.

Before heading up to Sydney I was getting pretty fatigued from another heavy training cycle combined with a lot of climbing and too many sprint kayak days. Sydney is always a good time to reset and take a deload week. I find being in the city, staying at other people's houses, living in a food desert, stressful enough without layering on heavy training. The noise, congestion, pollution are all a bit much when you are happiest deep in the bush.

But, the day after we got back, we were off paddling with Sprint A Lot (aka Splash A Lot or Speed A Lot) on a 25 kilometre paddle day. Sure, that does not sound like much but it was 12 or so kilometres into a 14 knot wind and building sea and then a serious sprint session to catch runners on the way back. Even Sprint A Lot was tired at the end. It was a super fun day out, with “interesting conditions” and we had a close encounter with a calf and mother Humpback Whale; but, when we pulled into the beach at the end I thought “so much for the deload week.”

One of my young relatives (by marriage) has signed up for another 70.3 (aka Half Ironman) with some mates. I asked if they were “competitive.” A reasonable question as for many people just finishing a race is the goal not placing in any sort of time category. Apparently, the youth are all competitive but as we were chatting about that I thought that we all assume that a concept such as “competitive” has a fixed definition. However, like most words, this is fallacy. The classic example of this is, of course, moderation.

What is competitive? To me, competitive means you will do lots of difficult and uncomfortable things to achieve your goal. More than just run, bike, swim training, I mean things like giving up alcohol and packaged food, eating more protein, cooking all your own meals, strength training, getting to bed early, correcting movement abnormalities, missing parties and social events to get your training in and on the list goes. Some of these are “add-ins” and some are “take aways.” Both are of equal difficulty and without a plan to succeed (that focuses on habit change), failure is more likely than success. As Dan John likes to point out, the root origin of passion is “to suffer.” If you are passionate about being competitive you will have to do things you don't want to do and stop doing things you do want to do.

As a fairly useless athlete, I've never really had the cojones to be competitive. Goal oriented absolutely, often to the exclusion of almost anything else, but not competitive. Strangely enough some of the people I know who are competitive perform strikingly worse than the people who aren't because although they want to compete, they don't seem to want to lose at competition and failure is the ultimate teacher.

Winston Churchill said “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” which brings me full circle back to being stoked about every climbing session even though I have been pursuing the sport for decades. 

Find what you love and let it kill you. Charles Bukowski