mvs wrote:

CClaude wrote:

rhyang wrote:............

Did I do the right thing(s) ?

You made a decision. Don't look back and question it. On the day you made it, it was a decision. Don't look back but only forward.

Yep that's right. It's natural after being "bitten" to be a bit more cautious, but that's just wisdom. The main thing is you are out there gettin er done and asking yourself those questions. Keep that up!

Rob.... It's BESTnot to fall to much in JT, IMHO....

Just the fact that you are uptight and worried about "the falling" would tell me that your head is not into the game. Coupled with the fact that you couldn't lead "Bypass", a climb about FIVE grades below what you have done. This shows me you have, "Compounded Negativity" ...... an aliment I have had in the past.

If I was your climbing doctor, my RX to you.

Go follow "Tons of climbs" from 5.0 to 5.11+ .... Have fun, always.

Maybe take a year away from leading, but not climbing.

Sit down and evaluate your strengths and weakness, and work on them.

Don't worry, just improve your climbing and don't have any more mishaps. One day you will look up a route and say to yourself, I can Lead that. ( not- I think Ill TRY and lead that...)

Good luck with this.

gk

Thanks guys. Sounds like some sage advice in there .. I'll keep it in mind.

Got my lead card at the gym last night .. hard to believe I've been pulling plastic for 5.5 years at that place. I will be logging some air time for sure

Well said DMT! I didn't even have to break an ankle to start getting a creeping paralysis about harder leading. And like you, it irks me to find myself getting used to the habit of pulling on pro: that's not what I want to be doing out there .

I've had a great experience with this "clip dropping" stuff. In the gym I'm leading basically at my limit now again...and that helps me push my limit some more, also it generates excitement about the future.

I am fascinated by this topic of how your mind works dealing with fears real and imagined. Just now, reading DMTs story I remembered another incident that MUST have contributed to my growing scardy-cat-ness in the last few months: in August my partner at the gym (who remains nameless!) actually dropped me while lowering me from a route. I hit the gravel from about 15 feet up and smacked my tailbone really hard. I was hollering and carrying on a bit to work out the pain. (The problem was that he thought he'd lower me quickly but he didn't look at where I was in relation to the ground. His bad. Lesson learned.) I was okay again a week later. But I think it left a kind of "mental scar."

The point is I trusted a system completely and it failed. It made me less willing to trust the system. Now I've had to make a concerted effort to trust again.

For me, my abiity to concentrate on climbing and not on the fear of falling waxes and wanes, and I think tgis is probably the case for many or most people.

Some advise I have learned over the years from friends and friends of friends, (thanks Mikhail, Doug Sprock, Tom McMillan, Mike, Matt.... I don't always seem to be listening but it sinks in).

1) Have fun. Your time is valuable and if you are not having fun, you should be doing something else. And how can you be scared if you are having fun.

2) Separate the ego from it all. Sometimes its not the fear of falling but when you look at it, the fear of failure. No one REALLY cares if you fail (unless failure is defined as death). Your personal worth, and for that matter no one elses, is dependent on how hard you climb.

3) If other things are going on in life (death of loved ones, getting married/divorced, finishing school) your mind is elsewhere and concentratee on just having fun and nothing that requires too much mental work.

4) Hang out with positive people. Only recently (about a decade ago or so) did I start climbing with people who didn't stress about falling (a conservative viewpoint) but more on climbing while being critical about systems that make the risk reasonable (a more progressive viewpoint). It sounds like the same but viewpoint but one is concentrating on a negative and the other a positive. Who you climb with WILL influence your viewpoint. I am still trying to undue the influence of those I had previously climbed with.