Monday, April 13, 2015

One more Red Rock

Jason and I were at Red Rocks this past weekend. On Saturday we started by doing a mish-mash of a trad route: Jason led most of the first pitch of Splitting Hares to the first belay of Too Many Tantrums. I then led the second pitch and most of the third pitch of Too Many Tantrums, back to the roof and traverse of Splitting Hares. Got lost a bit above the roof, downclimbed and traversed. Super fun!

Then we moved to my old friend, Pauligk Pillar. There I had to over-protect the first few moves, resulting in a mid-route belay stop, and Jason led the second portion of the pitch. We weren't feeling the second pitch, AGAIN, so we hiked out to make the 8pm exit time.

On Sunday we played on Panty Wall, then went down to the Hamlet, got schooled on one of the lower tier sport routes, did an upper tier 7, and tried for a lower tier toprope, which proved uninspiring. Overall a good day to stretch out the soreness!

Monday, January 5, 2015

A paragraph about suffering

I enjoyed this article in Outside magazine about Misogi. This paragraph about what my older mountaineering friends call "suffering" struck me as particularly accurate:

But something funny happens once you’ve been in the grip of a painful ordeal for a certain amount of time. Namely, the body and mind—inured to the unwelcome task they’ve been set upon—mostly stop fighting it. Resisting takes too much energy. It cannot be sustained. And, gradually, in place of my instinctive resistance came an active kind of relaxation and acceptance.
This definitely happens to me when backpacking or approaching climbs in the mountains. Invariably I'm in pain of some kind -- my knees, my shoulders from the pack, altitude, it's always something -- and I just grind on and on. It's slightly different from paddling, which puts me in a distinct zone I call "machine" mode, where I'm lustily pounding at some physically exerting thing for hours with my brain finally shut up.