Blog

Concentration

• December 2009
• Hi Steph Climb

Steph,
Awesome website – the pictures are killer!

I just got into climbing a couple months ago and you’re a huge
inspiration for me. Couple questions:

How do you go about planning a free solo climb? Like, how many times
would you do it with rope first?

What is going through your mind when you free solo in order to keep
focus? That type of concentration must feel like being high!

At what point would you say you achieved national recognition for your
talent? How long had you been climbing at that point?

Are you married? lol

I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and I would be very
greatful if you responded!

Stay safe and keep climbing.
Thanks,
John

Dear John,
Thanks for writing, and I hope climbing has been going well. You have a lot of questions! So I’ll try to answer a few 🙂
Free soloing…is something that takes a lot of mental preparation, but also a feeling of ease. For me, I started doing easy free solos just a couple years after I started climbing. So I’ve been free soloing for almost 20 years.

After a while, as with anything, it’s something you find very natural, like hiking or running. But I find a big difference between doing an easy solo I’ve done countless times, and onsighting or climbing at higher grades. To me, the reason to do a more difficult solo is to have a strong learning experience. And to me, soloing is about finding my limits and backing way below them. I think this is a good exercise for me, and harder soloing is always a way to live this.

When I want to do a harder solo, I make sure I feel totally comfortable on the climb with a rope, and then I climb it a few times with a rope but placing almost no gear. Because the gear is for emergency, like if I get scared or if it feels hard. If there is an “emergency”, I’m not ready to solo it. Usually for me, a harder solo is of a difficulty that I only need to climb it 2-4 times in this way before I know I should be totally confident that I would never fall.

One part that becomes very interesting is what goes through the mind when actually doing the solo. Because it’s always different. A lot of times there is some issue for me with conditions, often it’s colder than I want, which makes it harder to climb easily, so that’s always a big issue for me and something I have to put energy towards. Or the weather looks strange or something. So sometimes that’s really on my mind, the external situation beyond my control, as always with climbing.

So mostly I want to take control of what will be in my mind. When I first touch the route and leave the ground, I make a decision to repeat something to myself, or to have a certain song playing in my brain. Mostly those are the words in my head, for the whole climb. I want to erase most of the things in my mind, beyond breathing, calculating and feeling happy. When I can do that successfully, the climb goes right. It is really amazing to me how the mind changes when climbing without a rope, every time.

For me, being in situations like this is what it takes to get to that place, though the yogis and teachers I read about are able to do it by merely sitting on the floor. It is a very different mental state, and it makes me appreciate the beauty of my life. It is in some ways very easy to choose your mental state through your activities, whether through chemical release that comes from daily endurance activity or meditative breath you use when you need extreme self-control and acceptance. So I guess these are the moments in life when you are high.
🙂 Steph