Send It

            Climbing is an intimidating sport. If you look up climbing on the Internet and hit “Images,” this is what you see:

Seems doable. If you’re a crazy, jacked, monkey with Spiderman fingers.

Climbing succumbs to an intimidation unlike any sport I have encountered because the only form of climbing I ever knew existed was hanging off a giant cliff by one hand with some tiny ropes fixed to tinier metal clips being the only thing standing between you and your immediate death.

When I played soccer, I knew it existed in small peewee form and then in adult intramural, low-stress form. It didn’t feel like you had to build up to a professional level. When I rowed crew, well, that was a sport doomed to end at high school graduation anyway, so no pressure there. But climbing had never been introduced to me at the sport level where it was okay to just go and climb for fun. And even when I arrived at Middlebury, and realized climbing was something people spent their time on, the exposure was still seeing Instagram and Facebook posts of crazy climbs around Vermont and New York crags, only this time instead of professionals, it was with the kid in my English class.

And when you go into an outdoors shop to look at buying gear for climbing, you’ll be overwhelmed with boatloads of different shoe types, piles of multi-colored ropes, and gobs of belay devices that could probably double as torture devices. Not to mention that any outdoor clothing brand store you venture into, and there are many in Vermont, will be adorned with photos just like the ones Google shoves in your face. Just downtown in Middlebury, at the “Green Mountain Adventures” store, a large decal of some man staring out over what looks like the Himalayas and some woman scrambling over a rocky ridge with large drop-offs on either side are the images tacked to the window to promote a small puffy jacket that the store most definitely just wants you to wear, not when you’re skiing on Everest, but when you are walking twenty feet from your car to the grocery store. But they would never tell you that.

And in the past few months, the documentaries “Free Solo,” featuring Alex Honnold, and “The Dawn Wall,” featuring Tommy Caldwell, have brought even more attention to professional climbing with their impressive, should have been impossible, ascents of El Capitan in Yosemite. But obviously the moments of athletic prowess featured in an Oscar-nominated documentary are not going to be ones of embarrassment or weakness. Even when these climbers would fall or miss their holds, embarrassment couldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, since they were doing it two-thousand feet up on a sheer face of smooth granite.

But when I’m up five feet on a wall made of plastic and my sweaty hands slip off a jug hold, believe me when I say the embarrassment is tangible. If from nothing else, from my tomato-red face as I turn in shame from the wall that rejected my body’s feeble efforts to move upwards. I looked at my friend, Annie, who was dragged here largely against her will, and she gave me a shrug and a look that said, “I don’t know, were we expecting to be good at this? I didn’t even want to be here.”

It should be known that I pride myself on my ability to do things independently. If no one wants to go to a concert with me in Burlington on a Tuesday night, I’ll go by myself. If no one is available to go skiing, I’ll go by myself. Entering a space alone doesn’t intimidate me – except when that space is littered with people who resemble those weird goats that magically stick to walls (see below):

 

So my friend and I proceeded to watch these goat-people climb for the better part of an hour, neither of us budging from our seats on the chalk-covered bench.

“Hey, what’s up guys!” our friend, George, sauntered over and plopped down beside us. He kicked off his boots while simultaneously whipping out his climbing shoes with the dexterity only the hands of a climber could have. “You guys climbin’?”

“Well, yeah, I mean…it’s so busy…our arms are sore…we’ve already done so much…” Annie and I stammered out over each other.

“Oh nice, nice,” George said, popping off the bench. “Which one were you working on?”

“The blue.” “The yellow.”

We looked at each other. “The blue and yellow one,” I said.

“Oh wow, a V4. Nice.”

“Yes, it was nice.”

“I’ll give it a go,” George said in his peppy-George way.

He sent it on the first try. In the climbing world, that’s called a “flash.” As in, any embarrassment that had subsided from my original failed attempt at a V0 came back in a bright, searing flash.

“I think we should go,” I told Annie.

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

We slinked behind the groups of climbers swapping beta about routes they had yet to send, shot an angry glance at the magazine cutout by the stairs of some climber hanging precariously off a large face of rock and left, having not fully decided whether or not we’d be back.

 

But climbing was weird in the way that it seeped into my head at all moments. For the next few days, I’d find myself distracted with thoughts of where I should’ve put my hands and feet and how I should’ve shifted my weight here and not there. I would dream about boulder problems. Stonewalls around my college campus suddenly looked like playthings rather than stagnant facades. All I wanted to do was return to the wall. So I did.

For three, almost four months, I went to the wall every afternoon. I discovered muscles in my body that I never knew existed – my fingers and forearms ached with a pain they could only feel after being forced to hold my entire bodyweight multiple times in a night. But each day I came to the wall, I could reach holds that I couldn’t the day before; I knew how to twist my body so I could better angle my legs around overhangs; I felt my body honing into the movements of the monkey-goat-people.

And that was something I hadn’t felt in a really long time – being in-tune with every muscle and ripple of skin, or ripping-off of skin, to be totally honest. I hadn’t had blisters like this since my junior year in high school when I rowed crew. But climbing brought an appreciation for my body that had long been absent from my life thus far.

Let me take you back: it was the year 2008, when I, Fiona Brook McCarey, became a troll. I say this not as a way garner pitiful assurances that I was not, but just as a fact of my life. In middle school, I looked like an unsightly troll. I was taller than most, wider than most – keep in mind that I went to a Massachusetts private school where girls had been on juice cleanses since the second grade – and yes, uglier than most.

Proof of said claims:

As you can see, this was no joke. I really looked, and dressed, like that.

In four years, I went from this:              To this:

Now you’ll understand where I come from when I say that my body has never been a point of pride for me. I was so much taller than all the other girls that I would play the male roles in the musicals, serve as the male partner in dance class. And in a lot of cases, I was taller than most of the boys, which only amassed more snarky comments about my body.

Cut to ten years later:

That’s me (on the right), on top of a three-thousand-foot mountain, feeling fine as hell.

If you’d told my 12-year-old self what climbing mountains and walls would do for my self-confidence in ten years, I would’ve been scrambling up every dirt pile and rock face I could find. When I climb, everything else in my life blurs out of sight and only my body is left in clarity; this body that ten years ago felt like it belonged to a hideous troll. When I climb, that troll is replaced with what I imagine a spider monkey would be like – lengthy limbs, strong muscles, pushing itself across expanses that once felt impassable; not beautiful, necessarily, but powerful and made for the sport.                                                                                                                                                                   <– Me

When we left school for winter break, I knew my body couldn’t go long without climbing, so each morning, I drove myself into Boston to scrabble around the local gym. I jumped onto the wall where the top-rope section met the corner of the bouldering area and began my daily traverse routine. About halfway across, my left kneecap tugged slightly to the outside as I twisted my foot, attempting to shift weight on the tiny foothold. Shit. I popped off the wall, my hand instinctually rubbing the patella that had been forcing me in and out of physical therapy since the seventh grade – yet another point of shame for my physical being.

Glancing around the gym, I noticed a mother and her son eyeing a 5.9 route with a crux just halfway up that I’d been struggling to get past for almost two weeks. The mother clipped into the auto-belay, and I decided I’d rather not bruise my ego anymore than it already was after falling off the wall by watching her send the route.

The back of the gym was my favorite place. I could traverse almost sixty feet of wall without anyone coming back to climb, which would force me off the holds and back to the auto-belays or bouldering cave. It was especially great at a time like this, ten thirty a.m., when almost no one explored the gym, save for a few other college students and parents with young kids.

I flexed and relaxed my left thigh muscle, bending and unbending the unstable knee. It had seriously sublex-ed, meaning the patella popped out of, then back into its socket, and or dislocated roughly once a year, for the past ten years. People always cringe when I describe my knee injuries. But they had become a part of my life, just like breathing in air or taking steps to walk, so the instability no longer freaked me out in the same way, unfortunately.

Standing in front of the edge of the wall, I grabbed onto the two triangular handholds, no bigger than my palm, which rested at my eye level. My right foot lifted and landed on a foothold that looked like a large beetle. Ever so gently, my left foot followed to a hold a few inches away. I slowly put weight on my left leg, making sure there were no twinges of pain in my knee, and when everything checked out, I was off.

Traversing was like solving a puzzle that could be solved a different way every time. There were no rules, no one judging your route; nothing but free-flowing moves. A pocket here, a jug there, a series of animal-shaped holds to make your fingers laugh, if only for a second before they had to move on to a crimp. Reaching a corner, I sent my foot across the three foot diagonal to the safety of a protruding shelf. I paused, letting my muscles release the tension they’d been holding for the last twenty-five feet.

I examined the leg in front of me. The thigh muscle had definition even when relaxed, and its calf muscle had clearly tightened up over the past three months. My brain struggled to attach this leg, which grew stronger each day I came to the wall, to my own body. Whether it was my kneecap, my pinched nerve in my neck, my ears prone to infection, my permanently bruised anklebone and pulled tendon, or most recently added, my decaying eyesight, my body seemed subject to more and more physical short comings every year I grew older. And I’m only twenty-two.

Shaking my arms to get the blood flowing again, I leaned forward and grabbed the pinch hold in front of me, shifting all my weight onto my right knee. No pain, I smiled. My arms fell back into the motion of push and pull as I continued my trek. Grab. Squeeze. Pull. Foot. Under. Grab. Pull. Foot. Match. Shift feet. Grab. Squeeze. Pull. Until the remaining thirty-five feet of wall had been sent.

 

But after three months of climbing every, single, day, I returned to the Middlebury wall from my winter break with less enthusiasm than I had hoped. My body had hit that point that all my climbing friends had warned me about – the plateau. The plateau happens when your body gets to a point of physical fitness that allows it to achieve a certain boulder grade, but it isn’t yet strong enough to go higher than that. So, I had gotten to the point where I could send up to V3s, maybe an occasional V4, but there I stopped. And when you hit that plateau, the initial shine of discovering a new sport in which you can feel your improvement every day disappears faster than your ego when you fall off a V0.

So maybe you start going less. Or you pick up a different sport. Or if you’re like me, you continue going back just to do the same five routes and be shut down by any other consequent problem. My hands get sweatier than usual, causing me to slip off holds that often are easy for my fingers to grasp. Leg muscles that once felt rock-solid turn to Jell-O the second they attempt to push my body upward. Regardless, I decide to try a V4 route that even some of the strongest people at the wall haven’t been able to send. And I made it halfway up! Halfway! After two tries of starting, but still! It’s been four months now, and I can feel the plateau ever so slowly starting to angle upwards.

So that’s why you keep going back, to fail, because eventually you don’t and the shine of every dusty handhold and black-scrubbed foot crevice returns faster than the ground hitting you when you fall.