It Only Counts If You Send It 3 Times

 

It’s mid week at the Rock Oasis, and the gym is busy with the after work crowd. The walls are covered with climbers and ropes are everywhere. It’s loud, chalky and buzzing with energy. There’s a bouldering area in the back – spray walls with taped problems – campus rungs, hangboards, rope ladder - but I only care about the routes. The vert, techy, powerful routes. Ahhh! I check in and head upstairs to change, passing posters of Lisa Rands trying hard with her green nail polish, a baby faced Chris Sharma sporting Prana shorts with the Sierra mountains behind him, Lynn Hill being fucking Lynn Hill.

Halfway down the stairs to the main area, I look up and to my right at the steep overhang that dominates this part of the gym. Usually there’s two routes set here, one easy and one hard. The thought of being upside down like that scares the shit out of me, I want no part of it. I tell myself it’s just not my style and there’s no technique involved in it anyway, though deep down I don’t believe my own bullshit. Anyway, it’s easy to avoid it with all the routes that do suit me.

Tonight though, I pause before heading left to find my husband. There’s a man smoothly making his way up the hard overhang. I can hear his breath, steady and consistent even as the angle gets steeper and steeper, his straight black hair falling back from his head toward the ground. He stops just past mid way up the wall, one foot hooked onto a hold, the other toe-ing down, his calf muscle flexed. He’s taking turns letting go of one hand and shaking it out while holding on with the other, back and forth, his breath like a metronome. He starts moving again, into the short headwall and redpoint crux which he executes with a grunt, never losing his smooth style. I cheer for him as he clips the chains, “Nice, Nainsin!” I’m 29.

 

It's late and I can’t sleep. The house is quiet. I get up and go to the living room, tip toeing in the dark, my breath shallow. I quickly turn the volume on the tv way down so I don’t wake them up. I flick through the channels one by one – mostly infomercials – until I stop on the CBC.

 They’re replaying a figure skating exhibition event. A black girl, her dark skin standing out against the white ice, turning and gliding and spinning across the screen, arms extending out through her fingertips, head held high. She owns the space she’s in even as the commentators mention criticism for her lack of gracefulness and artistic expression. 

Toward the end of the routine she lands a back flip on one blade, with a smile. The audience cheers, the commentators are in awe! According to judges, this move is illegal in competition because you can’t land on one foot. 

Waving to the crowd with one hand and holding a bouquet of flowers in the other, she does another one legged back flip before exiting the ice. I am 14.

Among other things, I watch gymnastics, ballet, and figure skating on tv. There’s a documentary about ballet dancers, a behind the scenes look at the kind of strength and discipline it takes to make the smallest movement feel like a work of art. You’d never know it from what you see on stage. When you watch them rehearse, it’s sweaty and bloody and tense and frustrating and also there’s bursts of smooth flow, where everything clicks seamlessly. I’m fascinated. 

This kind of athleticism resonates with me and lives in my subconscious until I walk into a climbing gym, years later.

 

I make my way over to Nainsin as he lowers from the roof, looking calm and pleased as he unties his knot. I congratulate him on the send and he says he only has to do it 2 more times for it to count. We laugh and make jokes about it but I know he’s kind of serious and not surprised when I see him back on it a few days later.

We talk about not just knowing the moves but understanding them too, and this speaks to me, I feel connected to this way of climbing. I see in Nansin and a few other climbers aspects that I want to foster in myself; the ability to feel nervous but be calm, to climb hard and be humble, to own my mistakes and not let them own me. To not bullshit myself. 

Over time I start to lose sight of this, it’s all distorted as I get caught up and pushed down in other people's pissing contests. 

 Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 12:38:49 -0400
 From:                                      
 To:                                 
 Subject: Re:

 Hey Sabrina,

 My weekend was really good. It rained, but that was ok. Still much fun had.

 Why don't you mention what routes you did, or got on?! I see it
 anyways when reading the 8a news...

To:________________​

Date: Tue 2011-05-17 1:23 PM

I don't feel the need to talk about what routes I got on, didn't get on, sent, flashed, onsighted etc. because when I started climbing harder, I noticed a lot of people are only concerned with that. It devolves everything I get from climbing into a scorecard of some kind. For some people it's just talk, but not for me.                    asked me how the Red was, I told him the same thing I told you.
Why don't you?