Climbing Training and Being Stuck
Dear Steph,
I admire what you do from the very beginning. Not only in climbing and base jumping area but especially in your everyday life. With this, I would say, vegan approach (for those who are vegan, this should explains everything). And wow! In the past I could only put the poster of you at my wall or desktop, and now I can write to you directly and even expect the answer:).
Anyway, I’m 34 years old girl with about 10 years of climbing experience. With some ups & downs and few breaks for bicycles expeditions but in sum up always coming back to climbing. We have some rocks and beautiful Tatra mountains (not very tall but with bloody character:) here in Poland, but not as much and impressive as in USA. Probably that is why we are so crazy about climbing:).
I’m writing to ask about this moments during the training when you really want to play high, have this precise steps writing down in front of you and the only thing you need to do is to follow by this regularly. All space around you is perfectly clear, all duties and obligations scheduled and all friends informed. First 2 weeks are just great. You are gazer of power and you smile to strangers:). You feel that the training is effective and your aim is coming to you closely. Nothing will stop you now!. And than: “boom!”. After a few weeks your passion to regular training breaks into some stupid excuses. The blood slows down, the time distracts. Your goals is already gone. And you have start all this once again. And over and over again.
Even if you know this process by heart and you are knowledgeable enough to explain why this is happen to you all the time, you cannot find the effective solution to cut it. This might be really frustrating, but what is the hardest thing: your training is stuck and there is no perspective for any progress. Your aim seems to be unreachable.
As an expert of “being in stuck”, I was asking myself what’s wrong this time? Maybe my training is too repeatable, maybe I should take some more rest or it is not relaxing enough, maybe I’m working too hard/or not hard enough?, maybe I’m not (I wasn’t!) sure what is really important to me? distracting by too many things on the way? Finally, maybe I’m simply the person who is not able to take long distance and I need to stay where I’m, spin my heels? (this is of course totally bullshit).
You have probably never had such a problem, considering what you have achieved. But maybe you’ve got someone around you, who is also struggling with such twisted chemistry and might share some advice?
Will be great to receive few words from you:). The goal is still waiting and the pleasure of climbing – still flashes.
Warm regards,
Aga
Hi Aga,
I don’t have a single answer for you but I have some things I have learned over time about this topic–and some of them are contradictory as well.
Climbing and training for climbing are interesting because they are really not linear. I’ve noticed with running, if I run regularly, each day I run I will feel just as good and usually better than the time before. Which is very satisfying and clear! It’s like painting your house–you just do it every day and you get to see nice steady results as more of the house is painted. Climbing is really not like that at all. It’s like you’re painting the house every day and one day half the house is not painted and you can’t make the paint stick on it and every day the house gets less painted. And then at some point, some of the paint is sticking and the house gets more painted again, and who knows how long it’s going to take for the whole thing to ever be painted…. Which is obviously extremely frustrating! I think with climbing there are too many factors involved for progression to ever be linear. It’s a very different type of physicality, a combination of power, endurance and power-endurance. And climbing itself is so various and also very style- and body-type specific. There are also significant emotional and mental elements at play. So unlike running, climbing seems to have a very up and down progression with training and climbing.
It’s normal to have plateaus and even declines, and it’s also normal to lose motivation for training, especially if you don’t have a specific project in mind. I’ve dealt with this in different ways. Sometimes I stop training if I’m not motivated for it. Sometimes I just force myself to keep training, knowing that eventually my feelings are going to change. Usually I try to find something new to me that seems more interesting and fun than what I’ve been doing. While training science seems to have become really specific nowadays, the bottom line is that any training you do at all is going to be more helpful than nothing. So if all you can motivate for is a 10 minute hangboard workout (rather than the hour power endurance gym session you had planned), it’s a lot better than doing nothing at all. I have a few different training activities I like: hangboarding, campusing and linked boulder problems, and anytime I stop being interested in one of them, I switch to another one. If I’m climbing a lot and/or too busy to train, I just do 10 minute hangboard workouts 2-3 times a week because I know I’ll be glad I did.
Nutrition can also be a factor in training plateaus. A while ago I called a friend to say hi and he told me he was at the doctor’s office, because he’d been constantly fatigued. The doctor was telling him he had “chronic jetlag” which I’d never heard of–he travels nonstop as a photographer. I asked him if he took iron, and he immediately brightened up and told me he’d often been anemic in the past and needed to take iron, and had completely forgotten about it (he is not vegetarian, by the way) and was going to start taking it again immediately. I talked with him after that and he was feeling energetic and healthy again. It’s hard to say if it was definitely the iron, but iron deficiency or vitamin B deficiency are both common causes of fatigue which can lead to a feeling of low motivation. These deficiencies can happen to all athletes, regardless of what type of diet they eat, so it’s worth considering.
Another problem I’ve run into with training is being too motivated and over-training. Even one rest day can sometimes seem like forever, so it’s easy to become over-trained without even really feeling like you’ve been doing very much. Sometimes taking more rest days or even a break of up to a week can allow your body to repair more and bring back the motivation–your body may be telling you something if you don’t feel like training.
And there is also the issue of losing motivation because sometimes training doesn’t feel fun. In that case, you have to ask yourself why you are training. Are the benefits of training so worthwhile that you can deal with some feelings of tedium in order to earn them? If so, sometimes you have to remember that not everything in life is easy and fun. Coiling ropes, organizing gear and rappelling are pretty unpleasant activities, but sometimes they are necessary and they are a part of climbing, which is very enjoyable. Doing dishes isn’t very fun, but eating good food and having a clean kitchen means it’s worth it. Not every little thing we do is fun all the time, but if it contributes to something that improves life, it can be worth it.
Also remember that climbing isn’t going anywhere. If it’s not lighting you up, maybe you do something else for a while and come back to it again in the future. Climbing isn’t a chore and it’s not what defines you as a person, it’s a thing you do because you enjoy doing it. If training makes climbing more fun, then it’s worth dedicating some time to it–if not, then don’t do it!
Again, there are so many issues at play and this is a really complicated topic. But these are a few ideas for you to think about.
🙂 Steph
