Try Hard, Don't Sag

You don’t have to be a rock climber to enjoy this video from the Wide Boyz. The thing I most like about it is how fffffing hard Tom tries. The effort is written in every straining sinew. Trying hard is a real and under-appreciated skill. It’s so much easier just to give 50% or 70% effort and comfort yourself by saying “Yeah, I tried hard.” If you are goal driven, dogging on the rope, falling off, and even climbing the route clean but not smoothly can all feel like a terrible failure, and failure is emotionally painful. It is easier to attempt routes that “fit your style” (as folk say) and can be climbed with relative ease. But, the only way to get better at climbing is to try hard routes. And the only way to keep trying hard routes is to rewrite your dopamine circuits so that trying hard is the reward.

It’s pretty much (unless you are looking at a terrible pendulum) impossible to get seriously injured on a top-rope but I still find myself sagging onto the rope rather than falling off because, despite trying hard, I did not complete the move. I’m working at it, but it takes hundreds, perhaps thousands, of repetitions to over-write the engrained “sag” neural wiring. One can only hope that I can erase the sag reflex with half as many try hard reflexes else I’ll be climbing the walls of the care facility I’m living in when I’m 97 (should I make it that far) trying to remember to try hard and not sag.