62 may–jun 2020 http://www.climber.co.uk
I can remember a competition, a world
championship for that matter, I finished
last in the final because the beginning
slab had scared me. Some 6a slab in
Font might have allowed me to keep a
cool head – how much time out of my
‘regular’ training would it have taken?
I could have spent a few mornings at
Sainte Victoire (an old limestone cliff
next to Aix en Provence, where the
French training centre was) to climb
some slabs, before training indoors.I would have gained stronger fingers
and better technique... but I never did.
Why? Because I didn’t like to fail and
at a time when I could achieve an F8b
on-sight on overhanging limestone,
it hurt too much to fall on the F6cs of
Sainte Victoire.
I had not understood yet, at 20, that
the grades do not mean anything, that
I was not ‘an F8b climber’ and that my
performances and failures didn’t define
me. At that time in my life, I saw failureon an F6c as an attack on my integrity
and my validity and so avoided any
situation that might take me there.
At 20 years old I still didn’t know my
real place in the world. I wasn’t ready
to trust myself completely, nor was
I able to separate my failures from
my failings.
And here it is, the trap of grades.
The mistake was right there, defining
yourself as an ‘F7a climber’, using the
grades to categorise humans, but then,
if you fall on an ‘easy grade’, do you
change category? Does it change who
you are? Or hopefully, is it just a bad day?
The temptation becomes unbearable
then to avoid at all costs a new failure.
You first go on your strong points –
saying "I do not like bouldery routes",
implying, "I do not want to go because
I'm going to fall on a grade below
myself” – which is the best recipe for
not improving on your weak points and
eventually you stop climbing when your
level drops due to an injury, age, etc.
Really? Stop climbing when your level
goes down? Will there really be no more
beautiful routes to discover at easier
grades. Yes, of course, there will. We
should continue, we would like to be
able to have fun on beautiful routes,
no matter the grade. Of course, one
still likes a little bit, or even a lot of
a challenge when climbing a route.
Maybe it will be on a slabby F6a, an
F7a on steep terrain or a F4b crack.
Grades should not define us for we
would have to split things into so many
categories. You’d need a slab level,
a roof level, a different one for granite,
slate, limestone... one for good days,
bad days, hungover days until, finally,
you realise that to put it simply, you
have to let go of the grade.
It is precisely once you reach that
understanding that you can begin to be
surprised and enjoy it all. You are finally
free to enjoy the variety. You can excel
at certain routes but can also happily
dabble in other disciplines which you
used to avoid because, behind all your
excuses, you secretly knew that you
would be bad at them.
From bouldering, you can finally
discover the magic of the impossible,
a sequence of four moves that begin as
a mystery. You then decode the moves,
then after this, the mystery becomes a
mental game – can I ever link them all
together? Whether you end up succeed-
ing or failing, what have you learned?
To trust yourself, to be patient. Not to
despair. A precision in the movement on
a particular problem that you had never
needed on routes... and all those things
can be applied in the future to ‘boulder
style’ routes.Caroline Ciavaldini at her very
limit on Matchpoint, a F8a
slab in La Pedriza, Spain.
“I constantly had visions
of myself sliding down the
granite and destroying my
skin in a fall, but actually,
slab falls are just okay If
you have a decent belayer.”
Photo: Talo Martin
james Pearson & Caroline Ciavaldini