“Climbing is hard here: if you get one good send under your belt that’s a pretty good season.”
This are rarely stated outright: more of a pervasive attitude in the local climbing culture. The interesting thing is when we encounter it enough, we start to believe it too. And it becomes a self-fulfilling belief.
One send per season.
The 18-year-olds don’t believe it: they don’t see 5.14 as that big of a deal. They put in the work, send their project, and immediately move on to the next one.
For the rest of us, breaking the mold feels audacious. It can be lonely and frightening at first.
But when we refuse to accept the arbitrary limits that everyone around us agrees on, we accomplish a whole lot more than we ever thought possible.
The Daily Nugget 