The Identity Trap: When Performance Bouldering Becomes Who You Are

How do you know when you’re a climber? Is it a certain number of days climbing outside per year? Is it a willful sacrifice of other sports and activities in order to optimize climbing performance? Is it a monetary spend on the sport each year? I believe, you just know. I knew straight away from the first day I climbed on a piece of rock, that I would be a climber. The movement, the adventure, the physical challenge, it just all made sense and clicked for me straight away. But can you go too far? Is there a price to chasing performance that should not be paid? Big questions, which I’ll at least try and provide some opinion on in this short form post, and give you some ideas for exploring your own relationship with climbing.  

Self worth 

Focusing on performance in our climbing usually means that at some point, suddenly we find ourselves attaching the outcome of performance to self worth. It’s not just enough to enjoy being a climber and loving the act of climbing, but we need to be performing, and performing up to a standard in order to enjoy it. Suddenly, if climbing performance is not going well, self worth is affected as a result. Suddenly confidence dips, motivation slump can set in and for many people it’s easy to take big breaks, come back to climbing feeling worse, and suddenly quit altogether. And whilst most climbers never consider quitting, they do lose motivation to improve, and find themselves constantly measuring themselves against their former selves, wishing they could get back to a certain level. The more they try to chase and grab onto performance and the numbers associated, the further away it seems. So when performance is your framework, how do you reframe that? 

Practice vs Performance 

A big shift in my climbing has been exploring climbing more as a practice, rather than an outlet for performance. For years, I purely viewed my climbing through the lens of performance, looking simply for the next challenge, and looking for how to get stronger and fitter. And yes, there has been immense reward in that, but at times I began to find the relationship unhealthy. I found myself over prioritising optimising performance for a particular day, or being unwilling to compromise on sleep or nutrition. The scales became slightly unbalanced, and I began to find myself needing a new approach, realising I had gone a step too far. 

So what did I change? Well, I let myself relax more, gave myself a bit of slack, and  tried to shift my focus to practicing and perfecting, instead of performing. So what did that look like? Instead of focusing on sets and reps during a training session, I would focus on drills, refinement and movements I traditionally have struggled with. I wanted to widen my toolkit, so I began slab climbing more, repeating easier boulders outside, and trying to bring more focus and intention to each move I was doing on the wall. I would warm up, and try to feel out how I felt on a given day, before deciding what to do during a session. What I found was that on days where I wanted to perform, my body was much more rested and in tune with my brain, which suddenly was seeing patterns more quickly.  

In the years since, I have been much more able to separate performance from  improvement, and enjoy my climbing even when it isn’t going exactly according to plan. It’s about always finding something to enjoy, and an area you can make some big gains in.  

Find the low hanging fruit!

Eliot