When Gold Isn't Enough

Let's start with the facts: I went to Paris for the World Championships, and I won the gold medal. I am the World Champion. I beat everyone else in my category, fair and square. This is the thing I have been training for years for, to earn my spot on top of that podium while our national anthem played.  That should be it, right? Let's celebrate and go home!

"Oh, geeze," I can hear you say. "There's going to be a wildly ungrateful 'but' here, isn't there?" Yup. That's going to be the point of this whole post. If you can't stomach some whining, check out my favorite instagram account, Goastigram. Otherwise, bear with me and read on. 

Next on stage in Paris, Photo by Jen Gold

There's something that isn't quite healthy about being a higher level competitive athlete. Your approach to a sport becomes obsessive as you craft the rest of your life - jobs, friendships, other interests, marriages - to best suit the ONE activity, that one prize that you're gunning for. I spent the last two years finding that every cliche about sacrifice was totally true, but hopefully worth it: Spain was a freebie. I didn't climb as well as I'd like, and I wasn't going to let that happen again. I wanted to win in France decisively, and leave no doubts that I really was the BEST. 

Unfortunately, while I left France with the gold medal, I did not leave feeling like I was certainly the best. The routes, all three of them, were too easy. A good competition route is one that everyone gets off of the ground, but only one person tops, and everyone gets spit off at a different point along the way. Your score comes from how high you get, so a good route leaves the competitor placements crystal clear. The routes in Spain were like that. The routes in France were not.

"But...that looks like 5.9..." Photo by Jen Gold

We all knew it. From when we were told we wouldn't be competing on the steep, challenging lead wall like we had been training for, but on vertical speed wall. From when we saw the first qualifier routes to when we saw the last route at finals.  I climbed three routes there, and they felt like 5.8, 11a, and 10c. Not the level I (or others) had been training for, and not the challenge that this level of competition deserves. 

What gives? Did they underestimate our gimpy prowess? Was the paraclimbing competition just a side show, an after thought to the pro, able bodied athletes?  Was our principle reason being there not to compete, but to be the feel good inspiration for the spectators? I don't know, and I doubt we ever will. I don't think the IFSC did anything intentional to make the competition less than stellar, and I did feel like they were treating us like serious athletes. 

On qualifier #2 - Photo by Andrew Chao 

Still, something didn't set right. The final score came down to a three way tie breaker: We both topped finals. Call back to qualifiers...where we had tied again. The final tiebreaker was speed, where I did beat my competition - and not by a little. By a lot. But we weren't here for speed, so my gold medal is missing a significant amount of glimmer. 

Maybe I got lucky. Maybe if it had been set harder, I would have lost. I'm now more motivated than ever to get strong, so that the next time I see my competition, I can win. For real.

Whiny rant over, now go check out Goastigram.

72 Hours in Vegas

430 AM DOESN'T FEEL LIKE IT'S THAT EARLY when you haven't slept in two days. Wait, that's hyperbolic- when you can squeeze in a few winks on a red eye flight and in between a tent collapsing on your face in a high desert wind storm - you've kind of slept. This was my first trip to Red Rocks, just outside of Las Vegas, so that just seems like a part of the deal. 

Sunrise on Red Rocks, Las Vegas NV

"The gate opens at 6," Christina said over a loaded pack, explaining the lore of the early morning starts needed for Red Rock's most classic lines. "We need to be at the gate by 530. Maybe earlier. And then we need to haul ass across the approach so no one passes us. NO ONE can pass us." 

And no one would pass us. We were the second car at the gate; when a third car made a move to squeeze by us at a wide spot on the road, Christina wheeled our little rental like it had the soul of a formula one car and blocked that poor, greedy bastard.  This was our first 1:1 climbing trip together - taken on a whim ("hey flights to Vegas are like $200, wanna go?")  and now here we were, careening down the one-way park road just after sunrise at questionably legal speeds. Did I mention that I had just quit my job, and the Tuesday morning we got back to Denver Christina would be my new boss at my new job? Yeah, my life is weird. And awesome. But mostly weird. 

Appropriate desert ninja attire with the hood popped up - this gal ain't getting sunburned.

At the trail head, we loaded up our heavy packs and started trekking across the desert. I thought I knew what a desert felt like, smelled like. I'd spent a lot of time in them in Colorado and Utah, but this was Nevada - LAS VEGAS - where nothing is half assed. There were real life flowering cacti. Scorpions. Allegedly, desert tortoises. And it was a certain level of dry that has you sucking the life out of your hydration hose as you sprint across the flats towards the steep scree field at the base of the mountain. 

'We're...crap...the turn...this isn't...there's another group headed up!' Christina puffed when she realized we had missed a turn. Making our way across goat paths, we desperately moved as quickly as we could so as not to lose our coveted spot. It was safe to assume that every human being we saw out there on the flats had the same objective we did: Crimson Chrysalis, a 10 pitch Grade IV 5.8 that on three other occasions Christina had gotten turned around by too many parties on route. This would not be that time. 

Me, before the death march, with my pointer at the base of the climb

We hit the scree field as the sun started cooking the landscape. Our pace slowed, I could feel every nut, every inch of rope and every ounce of water sinking its weight into the soles of my feet. The hill steepened but we were getting closer, and it seemed like the first spot was ours. On a SUNDAY during peak season. Unbelievable. I stopped to rest, turning around to check on Christina who had started to slow. She rounded a corner and looked up at me with panic in her eyes: 'RUN. There's a party of three right behind me!'

No further encouragement needed. My heart felt like it was going to explode but I'd be damned if we didn't keep our spot. The last 200 yards of trail wore on, but finally I slid over the last boulder like Jim Abbott* sliding into home plate. Panting and stumbling, I pulled our rope off of my pack and ceremoniously draped it across the start of the climb, marking our spot. 

'Dibs!' I gasped, '...after you guys?'

Two older gentleman were racking up at the base of the climb and stared at me like I was a crazy lady who had just sprinted two miles through the desert at 6 am. 'Hey,' I struggled to say nonchalantly, sweat dripping out of every pore. 'I hear this is supposed to be a sweet climb.'

How the hell did they beat me there? Did they cheat and get into the park before the gate was open? Did they pass us while we were turned around in the scrub? How can I be so thirsty yet have to pee so bad? How am I going to not pee for ten pitches? I didn't know, and it didn't matter. Second party it was. 

****

When it rains in Red Rock, you do Vegas

IT TURNS OUT, it wasn't our day regardless. The party of three and the party after that skeered off after they saw there were two groups queued already. But the party of the older guys was too slow. They took a long time on the first pitch, so we waited for the follower to launch off the start of the second before we even started to head up. Christina got to the top of the first pitch only to have the guy's ropes drop on her - they were bailing after two due to a forecast of high winds. Not wanting to be the only party on a route where ropes notoriously get eaten (an ironic position given our race to BE the only party on route, or at least the first) we also decided to bail. Something felt off, and the weather looked sketchy. Stranded, cold, benighted and full of pee 1,000 feet off of the deck is not something I felt like working into my first Red Rocks trip.

The next day it rained, and we caught our 8PM flight out after a day of cruising the strip, exploring other climbing areas, and trying to blend in with the crowd at the Bellagio.  Friday night to Monday night. I crammed in as much mileage as I could - turns out with the weather, there wasn't a lot of mileage to be had. 

Is it weird that my most memorable few hours of the trip was not the stellar climbing we did squeeze in between bad weather, but the toiling miserable hike to a failed objective? Maybe. Probably. Insert uplifting metaphor and deep, meaningful words about failure here - whatever, I'll be heading back to Vegas soon to do it all again. 

*Jim Abbot was a one armed baseball player. See what I did there?

Training for Climbing - Admitting you're clueless

I tend to think highly of myself when it comes to my DIY and self sufficiency skills. My first house was a horrendous, uninhabitable fixer upper. I knit, sew, and bake. I even have a huge garden and chickens. As such, I have a bad habit of forging ahead in failure well past the point where a normal person would have just asked for help. In fact, I'm REALLY bad at asking for help.

The chalk is for show, I haven't done jack shit.

That's the story behind my failed experiment in 'training' for climbing. To 'train' for Spain in 2014, I climbed a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I was able to improve my onsight level by two grades in four months, simply because I'd never climbed four days a week consistently before. It wasn't until well after the world championships that I felt myself start to plateau from 'just' climbing. Because rapid gains are fun, I signed up for a 3 month training-for-climbing class at my gym and saw improvements again. Having coached, directed training was incredible. After the class happened I pledged to read all of the books and coach myself. How hard could it be? All of the information you could possibly need is out there! I read the Horst book, the Anderson's book, memorized MacLeod's training blog...and went no where. 

I bought a hangboard and didn't use it, under the excuse of having to figure out one-handed hangboarding. I figured it out, and I still don't use it*. I do TRX, and run and lift...but aimlessly. Don't get me started on how good I am about avoiding core. I have a notebook I keep track of my workouts in, but never look back. Really, when I read this rant by Kris Hampton about 'training' I immediately though 'Oh f*ck, he's talking about ME!'

My default setting is to just climb. Why not? Climbing is FUN! 

Now it's time to bite the bullet and admit I have no clue what I'm doing. My biggest fear is to get to Paris where I'll defend my title and lose it -not because I was the weaker climber, but because I wasn't prepared. If someone can beat me because they're better, then they deserve it. My imagined worst case scenario is that I'll beat myself, stand up there with a non-gold colored medal and reflect on how I didn't train right, smart, or hard enough. 

I got lucky in Spain, the field was small and I truly believe that I won because I had more experience, not because I was stronger- in fact, looking at pictures, I was a good ten pounds chubbier then than I am now. I won't get lucky again. 

It CAN be done, I just need to DO it!

I think I'm figuring out what my issue is - accountability. When I took the class at the gym, not only had I invested dollars in it but there were people there waiting for me and expecting me to show up. I need someone to tell me what to do, not ask me what I want to do (because the answer will always be 'screw the weight room, let's just climb!')

So, who wants the job of yelling at me?

*As I was writing this, I felt super guilty and finally completed my first night of a real, start to finish hangboard session. I survived, so there are more scheduled now...but it's certainly not my favorite thing!