2025-04-02
I wrote this a while back when I decided to take a break from climbing. Even though the site is newer than that, I dated the post to back then for context.
I started rock climbing at the Hangar 18 gym in Upland with some friends during my junior year of college. I was instantly hooked. I've long been an exercise/ movement guy, and climbing's emphasis on strength, flexibility and natural motion was really enjoyable. I'm also a pretty small guy, and I definitely liked that climbing doesn't foreclose the possibility of getting really good if you're small.
I tend to go all-out on whatever hobby I'm doing. Climbing was no exception. I saw decent progress, which served as even further motivation. Pretty soon, I was going to the climbing gym three or four days a week, and doing climbing-specific strength stuff in the regular gym at school. Climbing became my main non-work thing. Aside from being imminently pleasurable, my progess became a huge focus. I started to think about orienting my life around the ability to climb post-grad. I wasn't ever crazy good, but it was such a source of happiness that it felt like it'd be worth a hypothetical career sacrifice.
I ended up out in LA after school for other reasons, but I got to stay close to a lot of really solid sport climbing. After a breakup a few months after moving out to LA, climbing became even more central to my life; climbing trips became a big part of my social life as well as an opportunity to get outside more often than I otherwise would've. I made some great friends climbing; going on a sport climbing trip with an approach hike is a pretty solid filter for people who live embodied lives and have good attitudes.
In 2024 I had one of the best summers of my life. I was climbing almost every day and I was in solid shape. I was starting to push boulder and sport grades I was pretty proud of. This progress came after a solid half-year of serious programmed training: tons of weighted pull-ups and finger-strength exercises, doing deadlifts with my fingertips off a little wooden block with a 20mm edge carved into it. I was seeing the direct results of this focus and dedication and my fixation on the sport was reaffirmed. It became a HUGE time-suck, though: I was spending two or three hours at a time in the gym, and I put off social stuff to spend more time climbing.
What's more, my focus and training had put me into a mode where I wasn't enjoying the pure movement as much anymore, but fixating on performance and deriving my satisfaction from how well I climbed. When I climbed well, I had a great day. But when I couldn't do something, especially if I had done it on a good day last week, I felt really bad about myself. Looking back on this, it's obviously goofy that I cared so much about a hobby I was kinda mid at. But I was feeling really unmotivated at work and a little socially isolated in LA, and climbing had become a huge pillar of my life there.
I started surfing around this time. It's funny, but surfing ultimately got me sane again. I don't see myself as the kind of cool, chill guy who'd be naturally good at surfing, and I approached learning to surf without any expectations of performance. In contrast to climbing, it was imminently pleasurable. I started surfing a lot. Suddenly, I was wet and tired from being in the ocean all the time, and my skin wouldn't stick to stuff as well. I have to keep qualifying this with how silly it is, but being slightly worse at climbing ruined my focus and dedication.
Not being able to climb as well as I had when it was the only sport I was doing was really frustrating at first. I redoubled my effort in the fall but never really got back to where I'd been that summer. It just wasn't possible without giving up surfing. In the end, surfing served as a foil to demonstrate how silly and pointless my fixation on being good at climbing really was. Once the ego boost of performance was gone, I realized that my enjoyment of the sport itself had basically eroded to nil. I got a lot more immediate pleasure from the yoga and calisthenics work I'd started doing to replace weights at a gym. Even more, surfing being a sport that relies on the commons through access to the ocean was a reminder that climbing in a commercial gym, and gym use overall, frames fitness as a commercial product in a way that I'm not really jazzed about.
So I just quit. I was worried that it would impact me in some unforeseen negative way for like half of the first day without a climbing gym membership, but now it doesn't feel like a big deal at all. We'll see if I keep it up. Maybe I'll rediscover the joys of climbing next month or something.