Read an Excerpt
Here’s a riddle. What do you have that you can’t turn off, you have it in abundance, and yet it is one of the scarcest resources in the world?
Attention.
As Herbert Simon reminded us in 1971, before the digital revolution, an information economy consumes attention. Every company, brand, and device wants your attention. Attention is our greatest resource. It is the manner, and method, in which we do things, and for that reason it is unique for both our daily function and elite performance. The same goes for all sports: awareness is the resource par excellence of any athlete. It is the coin through which we purchase mastery of our craft. Performance psychologists talk of situational intelligence, holistic field perception, kinesthetic embodiment, bodily cognition, and somatic intuition: these are all varieties of attention. Attention focused is awareness of one’s shifting opponents on the field; awareness of one’s limbs in space; awareness of one’s fatigue. And so on. Because it is ubiquitous, attention is the thing we think we all have, yet we seldom use it.
Climbing is the art of paying attention, of giving attention. Attention is the building block of our sport, and you will get nowhere without massive quantities of it. A beginner needs attention to get over the fear of taking a lead fall, or to calm the panic of trying hard; a top climber needs it to be creative in figuring our complex sequences, and then executing them. Climbing is equal parts jazz, improv, gymnastics, chess, weightlifting, and ballet. We need to be relaxed and aggressive, but, more importantly, we need to know how and when to deploy each, and then toggle back. Not only do we have to give full attention to execution, but we also have to give full attention to the apparatus, namely because it is always changing (from route to route), which is not the case with gymnastics, or the long jump, or most sports. We need to see the bumps in a sloper to hold it with optimal efficiency, but we also need to “see” how a route will go in the alpine. We need to be attentive in our training, in periods of extended patience while we are projecting, or while fishing in a bad nut on a dangerous route.
Most important, however, is seeing what is going on inside of us, and what is not going on.
Bill Cole, a pioneer in sports psychology, echoes the sentiment from another direction, “The ability to consistently stay in the moment when needed is what marks all great athletes and performers.” I would add that the inability to be in the moment, as that which keeps athletes from achieving their potential, is an awareness error.
Paying attention is harder than you think. There is a lot of junk in most people's “moment.” In fact, paying attention is the foundation of 99 percent of meditation practices, and most never progress past the beginner stage. If focusing on your breath for ten inhales and exhales without distraction is an enormous challenge, and it is, then imagine how hard it is to climb with a pure mind for minutes on end, sometimes hours, all the while completing complex biomechanical tasks that require memory integration, analysis, and prediction.
Ask yourself: How is a lack of pointed attention affecting my climbing? The answer is: a lot. Given that the vast majority of climbers fall on their projects or fail to improve because of awareness problems – botching a sequence, forgetting beta, missing holds, miscalibrating this or that, overtraining, undertraining, not seeing weaknesses – becoming not only more aware of your craft, but more aware in your craft, will make you a more agile, intuitive and intelligent climber. No, this isn’t just about practicing mindful climbing and turning climbing into a moving meditation. Meditation is one thing. Climbing is another. It’s much more complex, and simple, than that.
