climbing myself

I typically like to start off with my hand firmly gripping my opposite forearm. It’s most like a jug and gives me a solid foundation to start my ascent.

“The summit is what drives us, but the climb itself is what matters.”

—Conrad Anker

Fancier climbers will then slide a foot between my legs and up to my ass crack to take the pressure off my arms but as I’ve just started I don’t need a break, so I jump to throwing a hand up over my shoulder. This gives me two solid points of contact with myself. Putting my foot on my stomach gives me a third.

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about fear. For me the crucial question is not how to climb without fear―that’s impossible―but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.”

—Alex Honnold

Leaning away from my face, my nose gives me a crimp to work with, but this is where it gets tricky. Because my nose isn’t very large and I can only hold it with two fingers, I have to tuck my thumb over them for extra grip strength. Strength I’ll need because my head is a real sloper with no positive angle for my hand to grip. Grabbing my hair would be cheating. I have to remember to keep my weight directly opposed to the direction of pull, strive for a low center of gravity and maintain body tension to stay balanced as I make this move. Taut. Stretched across myself like the strings on a violin. Dropping my knee downward towards my hip while the other leg flags out helps no small amount.

“I would say that the need to climb comes from that tough, lonely place of searching for your dignity. You know, that place – where we actually choose to confront our own weaknesses and fears, where we rebel against the terror of death – is really about dignity.”

– Voytek Kurtyka

Then it’s one big move to end up with my arm straight up and down and resting on the top of my skull. Success!

“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.”

—Rene Daumal