Going for Broke: An (Ir)Rational Pursuit of Every Climber’s Dream
(January 2005)

Read PDF HERE

It’s 7:30 a.m. and you’re at the parking lot of your local crag. Today you plan to finally get on the choice route on the cliff. You’ve been waiting for two months to do this climb, and the perfect finger crack is a siren beckoning to you again and again. Now you’re finally heeding her call.
    Today’s my day, you remind yourself as you cut your car’s ignition. Grabbing your coffee mug, you open your door only to have it hit the car next to you with a resounding thud. You look up surprised, since you hadn’t even seen the car, and lock eyes with the climber in the passenger seat. You know in an instant that the climber and his partner are headed for your climb. Scanning their bodies reveals that they’re fit, though you think you could out-hike them to the base. Climbing out of the car, you mouth an apology to your opponent and move to the trunk in three quick strides. Less than a minute later you’re buckling your pack when your partner announces that she has to use the facilities. You fake an under-standing smile and watch as the other climbing team seizes the opening and heads for the trail.
    By the time your partner saunters out of the bathroom you’re ready to sprint the thirty-minute approach and don’t care if she’d prefer to walk. The cold morning air burns your lungs, and your calves cramp as you power up the rocky trail. When you arrive at the route’s base, the other party is just beginning to climb. “We’ll be quick,” the leader mutters over his shoulder.
    An hour later you’re still waiting, and your left leg is falling asleep from the inactivity. You look up to gauge their progress, and note that the other climber and his partner still haven’t dialed their French-freeing. Since it’s obvious that they won’t be making it up the route in any other
style, you re-adjust you pack, remove the number four Camalot that’s been jutting into your lower back, and hope for the best.
    When you finally get on the route, you can’t seem to clear your head of the background noise of dogs barking and the shouts of “take” that signify the arrival of the hordes at the crag. Quiet! you say to no one in particular as you try and wiggle in a RP before the crux. Too late, your stemmed-out legs begin to shake, most likely from your rigorous approach. Looking down, you yell “take” to your partner, only to see that she’s flirting with the belayer next door. Pulling on the runner with your right hand, you repeat yourself louder and are relieved when you feel the rope come tight. Your on-sight blown, you stack an extra RP as you hang, cursing the fate of the weekend climber.
    The following Wednesday you drag yourself to the gym after work and
arrive at the parking lot at 5:30 p.m. You circle the lot, then the block, and end up parking four streets away. You start jogging as soon as you close the car door, and wait out a red light doing arm circles. By the time you’ve changed clothes its 5:45 p.m., there’s not an empty locker in sight, and the waiting list for a lead route is seven people deep. Thankfully, your partner arrived before you and is flaking out the rope as you walk over to the wall. Your warmup crosses paths with another climber, and you keep one eye on his trembling hands and the other on your route’s purple tape, praying he doesn’t blow your on-sight. Upon reaching the anchor, you lean back and feel momentarily suspended above the chaos. While you’re only thirty feet off the carpet, you pretend you are 3000 feet up El Cap, and wish it were so for the rest of the evening.
 
The next day at work you sit at your desk daydreaming about a never-ending road trip. Your climbing has stagnated, you haven’t increased a letter grade in over eight months, and you’re running out ofideas. Climbing fulltime seems like the most obvious escape from your rut. Your potential is thus far  untapped, and you’re convinced that you could be better, if not great, if only you had the time.
    By lunchtime you’ve decided that the only way to get better is to quit your job. After a morning of web surfing and dodging your boss, you’ve made a hit list for your new life. The desert first, Joshua Tree next, Yosemite in June, and then points beyond. Over a turkey sandwich on rye you make a list of what you’ll need for the trip, starting with a brand- new van. Fulltime climbers need vans, you reason. The few nights you’ve slept inside your Camry were worse than any night you ever endured on a wall. And not just any van, but one with perfect Tupperware-sized bins that are just right for each category of item, efficient drying lines for hanging wash towels, and convenient curtains to close on those nights when the van is sleeping two. A van is a must for my new life, you decide as you pick up the phone to call the local VW dealer.
    Five minutes later you hang up the phone and wonder ifyou might have a hidden trust fund someplace that you don’t know about. You briefly debate calling your parents to ask, but come to your senses before dialing their
number. Without a trust fund your dreams of a van become wed to having a job, and you wonder how you’ll ever climb hard with such limiting constraints.
    Having established the fact that you need an income, you consider changing careers. Professional climber seems like the most logical choice. Of course, you’d have to climb fulltime to break the 5.14 barrier and be at the caliber that attracts sponsors, but that small point aside, you’re not so sure about the pro life. You scour the magazines and catalogs, trying to discern if the facial expressions are smiles or grimaces. You think it could be hard to keep up the media image; the last time you tried to create an image was in high school when you ran for class president, and that ended with you demanding a recount, even though you lost 254 to twenty-three. Plus, you might have ethical issues with the available sponsors, for example, the local brewery (what would your Aunt Mabel think?).
    Scratching the pro-climber option off your list, your brain arrives at the next logical choice: mountain guide. Just another way of getting paid to climb, you think while taking a swig of the beer you’re sure would have been first in line to have you on their label.
    Four beers later, you remember a small detail about guiding: clients. You decide that this might throw a glitch into the otherwise seamless plan. You don’t like teaching, and in general, you don’t like newbies. Just last week you averted your eyes in embarrassment from the climber desperately trying to place his entire rack on a forty-foot 5.3 slab. The funny thing about guiding, you remind yourself, is that you need clients, especially those with generous tip money. You think back to the last guide you saw at the local crag, and you consider his 1983 Subaru wagon with rust spots like Rorschach ink blots and the muffler tied on with leftover ten-mill accessory cord. Definitely not your dream van.
    Better than a climbing job, you think next, would be a job with ample time off for road tripping. Teaching comes to mind, and you make a note to ask a friend if you had to have passed high school English to teach it. Nursing is also a possibility, and you think you could look good in a pair of blue scrubs, until you realize why they make nurses wear scrubs and remember that you’ve never gotten along especially well with the sick.
    Having exhausted your career options, you opt for the next best thing: a sabbatical. It takes two months, but eventually you convince your boss to let you take a month off, telling her your aunt is sick. You keep from feeling guilty by studying guidebooks to the cliffs on your hit list.

The morning you leave town, your Camry is packed full with every piece of climbing gear and car-camping equipment you own. You’ve lined up partners for each major stop, and you’ve given yourself time in between, just in case you meet other potential rope mates. Your first stop is Indian Creek, and you climb for five days straight. When you wake up on the sixth day you can barely get out of your tent and declare your first rest day, proud of your maturity. By 11 a.m. you’ve had your fourth cup of coffee and are bored with your book, so you start trolling the Moab café for an afternoon partner. After easily finding one, you buy an extra roll of tape and cover your strawberry-marked wrists and forearms, declaring yourself good to go.
    By the time you leave the Creek you’ve climbed ten out of twelve days. Holding onto the steering wheel seems more difficult than it used to, so you use your knees whenever possible on the long drive to Joshua Tree. On your second day there you hand stack in an offwidth and feel your shoulder pull out of its socket as you fight to keep your knee bar. That night your left arm falls asleep, and you wake up to an annoying tingling in your hand. By mid-afternoon your whole left arm is aching. You sit at a picnic table scanning the guidebook for tomorrow’s routes, trying not to wince as you turn the pages. Maybe slabs are the way to go, you think as you search for a likely route.
    By the next day you can no longer ignore the fact that your entire left arm is malfunctioning. For a fleeting moment you tell yourself that you can climb the moderates one-handed, until you realize you can’t even lift a water bottle. Your partner finds another rope mate for the day, and you lie in your sleeping bag wondering if your body is cut out for full-time climbing. Maybe, you think to yourself, I could do this if I’d started when I was young. Rationalizing that this is what has kept you from greatness comes easily, if not naturally, and you happily spend the rest of your day thinking about what might have been.
    After three days off from climbing your arm hasn’t gotten better and you’re tired of hiking for entertainment. You pull out your calendar and realize that you’re not even halfway through your sabbatical. You wonder what your boss would say if you returned early. Sure, you’d have to explain that your aunt miraculously recovered — maybe she could write you a note? You also wonder how the one-handed drive back home will feel, and you reassure yourself with comforting thoughts of stops for ice along the way.
    Two days later you’re back at home, having been diagnosed with tendonitis in your left forearm, compounded by a torn rotator cuff. When you arrive at physical therapy, the therapist takes one look at you before asking if you’re a climber. “Yes,” you say, feeling triumphant for the first time in a week. You gaze lovingly at your scabbed hands and wonder what other indicators might have given you away: your tapered waistline, or our ripped back accentuated by your tight t-shirt? The therapist sighs, interrupting your self-evaluation. “Does this mean you don’t have health insurance?” he asks. You meekly nod confirmation and assuage yourself by deciding to think of him as a mere hiker.

You return to your job on Monday to your boss’s surprise. Using her combined shock at both your early return and your dilapidated physical state to your advantage, you negotiate a four-day workweek with little effort. You amble back to your desk and stretch your shoulder as you walk, thinking that it might be better to start your new schedule after you’re finished with rehab. Back at your desk, you remove the power putty from your drawer. Small steps, you whisper as you methodically kneed the dark blue substance and scan the climbing web pages for inspiration.
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This week I am going to start doing something differnt and introduce back insallments of my column Whipped. I hope to alternate between column installments and other comments. You can also see this in a PDF version here

Finding Your Better Half : The search for the perfect (rope) mate (April 2004)
 
You wake up to your alarm at 6:30 a.m. Your dog hears the buzzer and jumps in bed to make his wet nose your second reminder. You have a date today — this morning, in fact. At 7:45 you are meeting a new climbing partner at the local coffee shop and you don’t want to be late. You spring out of bed and briefly debate whether to take a shower. Will your new belay slave/rope gun be more impressed with yesterday’s odor or today’s Irish Spring? You opt for a two-minute oral-hygiene attack instead. By 6:43 you are standing outside in your flip-flops staring into the trunk of your car. You’ve offered to bring the rack and wonder: Should you go light, to encourage questions about your virtually unknown alpine career, or should you load up with doubles of every cam and the offsets in between — maybe he is a potential wall partner?
    You decide on an eclectic mix: your new set of RPs commingled with various bootied nuts, and one cam of each size, including a couple of rigid Friends to show your climbing breadth. You clip your draws onto a sling and smile as the sun reflects off the biners into your eyes.
    Today is the day.
    Arriving at the coffee shop right on time you spot your partner on the patio. You make eye contact and feel the vibe begin. Both of you are wearing the same Verve pants — same length (you don’t do capris, and neither, thank God, does he), but different color. You both order double nonfat lattés and skip the baked goods. By the time you load the gear into your car you’re chatting effortlessly about the new crag pack you both have.
    The approach goes quickly today and you arrive at the base of your first objective before 9 a.m. You offer your partner the first lead and he starts racking up immediately. While flaking the rope you compliment yourself on your generosity. As he scampers up the initial moves you make a list of all the climbs you will do today, allowing yourself to dream of surpassing the ten-pitch ceiling. That’s when the rope stops moving through your hands.
    You crane your head up and see that Elvis has joined your partner on the pitch — they are dancing together forty feet up, your partner’s left leg beating in time to some long- forgotten tune. You don’t let yourself believe that he can be pumped already, but your daydream of cruising pitch after pitch begins to fade. You hear a whimper from above and watch the biner full of new RPs come tumbling down the face. Should you offer words of encouragement? You decide you do not know them well enough for words of encouragement, and mentally review your rescue skills.
    Two hours later you are both back on the ground. Your partner apologizes for the ninth time and you nod your head again and say that it’s all right. You accept his thanks for lowering him from the midway anchor because he could not seem to see through his tears. You promise again that you did not mind only climbing the first quarter of the route, and that you were not too scared down-leading. \
    As you throw your rack in your pack you gaze wistfully at the party on the route to the left. They have perfected hand signals and rope tugs and don’t even have to talk. They move as one up the cliff, having climbed over 500 feet to your forty.
 
On the drive home from the crag you curse your stupidity. You found this partner at the local mountain shop and had a plan to climb after chatting for less than ten minutes. Never again, you tell yourself. Next time you will do your homework.
    The next week you go to a slideshow at the same shop. In line for the bathroom you strike up a conversation with a fellow climber. You casually ask about her experience and feel your heart rate rise with every climb she lists. She seems to have been everywhere. You ask her to go climb. She accepts. You’ll meet at eight o’clock. You arrive at the parking lot late — it’s 8:03.Your new partner is leaning against her truck waiting. She is already racked up. You choose not to hold this against her. You shift your attention to her attire, and quickly see that you have very different tastes. She seems to like capris. In fact, her pants would more accurately be called knickers. When she bends down to hide the key in the wheel well of her pickup, you glimpse neoprene-wrapped knees. Her elbows sport matching braces. She’d offered to bring the rack and you had agreed, thinking yourself congenial, but as you eye her gear you promise yourself never to be so careless again. You count seven draws, two of them frayed in the middle. All oft he biners are ovals. The five hexes, the bulk of the protection options, are slung with what looks to be secondhand rap webbing, its color long lost in an extended battle with the sun. You wonder if your partner also has wooden pitons stashed in her pockets, and console yourself with your contribution to the climb, a two-week-old sixty-meter bi-color dry-treated rope.
    Your partner climbs the first pitch in thirteen minutes. She places two pieces of gear. When you get to the anchor you see that it consists of a hex cammed in a horizontal crack and a jammed knot. When your partner starts to hand you the so-called rack for your lead you tell her to go ahead. You wedge yourself against the rock to avoid weighting the anchor. After following three pitches you broach the subject of modern climbing gear. Your partner harrumphs. When she asks what you are doing next weekend you say you are washing your dog.

The next week you scout the climbing gym every day. You arrive at a different time each visit, and decide that the kind of partner you want is most likely to be found during the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. You mark off every Tuesday and Thursday night on your calendar. After a month of scoping out the prospects you settle on the criteria for partners: They dress in the current styles, they lead efficiently up all the moderate gym routes, they backstep and foot switch effortlessly. One Thursday you are feeling lucky and identify a candidate to whom to pop the question. You leave that night with a phone number and a tentative plan for Sunday.
    Sunday morning dawns crystal clear. You both arrive at the same time, both driving fuel-efficient Honda Civics, yours blue, his gold. You slide your pack on and within seconds you are on the trail discussing best and worst Honda mechanics in town. You admire your partner’s approach shoes and notice how well he smears and edges on the talus leading to the climb.
    Your partner lets you have the first lead and you think that this is the way to start the day. You offer to carry a CamelBak up the route and he agrees to this plan. You have never before had a partner who will drink from the same nozzle on the first climb. Your lead goes well (you’re sure your partner doesn’t see you pull on the cam behind the roof). The sun is just warming the ledge as you set up the first belay. Minutes later your partner arrives. As you hand him the rack you watch as he arranges gear on his harness, making a mental note of the style: left shoulder gear sling, carabiner gates in, draws on both sides of the harness, gates out. You decide to make this your style, too, shaving precious seconds at the belay changes. By the end of the day you are discussing hand signals.
    After two weekends of climbing you and your new partner have logged over twenty pitches. At the bar you discuss stepping it up. Your partner wants to push his leading grade; you pretend you want the same. The next weekend you arrive with extra TCUs and hope he will not mind the additional gear. Your partner warms up and by 9:30 is ready to take it to the next level. Nestled in for a comfortable belay, you are surprised when the rope barely stops moving through your hands. You try to be an attentive belayer, tie in, and lace your shoes all at the same time. You almost make it, but end up making your partner wait at the anchor while you run and pee.
    Thirty feet of moderate climbing bolsters your ego. By the time you reach the second piece, however, you start to worry. The lieback corner he raced up seems to lack footholds. As you pull into the first move you tentatively place your left toe onto the granite. It skids back down to meet your right. You try again. The belay tight- ens as you achieve a desperate smear with your left foot, dyno for a finger lock — and skid back down the corner. Looking up you make eye contact with your partner at the belay. He gives you what you hope is a smile.
    A half an hour, two aid moves, and one stuck nut later you join your partner on the belay ledge. He has already threaded his end of the rope through the rap rings. You meekly untie your own end and watch it snap to the ground. As you rappel you search for a plausible excuse but your partner is already a step ahead. He’s forgotten
about an appointment, he says. You wonder who has appointments on Saturday, but do not ask.
    At 1:30 p.m. you pull up to the gear shop. You make your way over to the clothing department and check out the newest capris. Suddenly they don’t look so bad. You take them to the register and strike up a conversation with the person ringing up your sale. You leave your name and number on the back of a piece of register tape and drive home hoping she will call.

I did my first lead climbs at the Gunks, in New York. Back then I was feisty, eager, and adamant that I could pull anything off. After my first lead tying off trees for pro, I decided I was ready for more, hopped on a climb, placed two pieces, and took one of the biggest whippers of my life. On a climb called Baby. The Gunks never really got to be more for during my time out east. It was where I constantly got schooled, while in school in New Jersey. My friend Andrew and I would roam the carriage road looking for a likely two-pitch 5.6 on which to spend the majority of our day. We would toggle the guidebook to our harness, appraise the route, and often times come down with elaborate rappels before even getting to the top.
    Last weekend I was back at the Gunks for the first time in twelve years. It was just like I remembered it. It kicked my butt. I didn’t really expect anything different, and in fact I might have been disappointed if it had seemed easy. What then would I have thought of my younger self?
    In the middle of my book tour I’m also on a climbing tour of the US. Quick forays to Vantage, Washington, Rumney, NH, the Gunks—all in-between dodging rolling luggage in the B Concourse at DIA. The climbing helps keep me sane, but I’ve also had to re-adjust my view of what climbing means in the midst of all of this movement.
    Bodies take time to catch up. I’m bad at letting mine do just that. I have clients all the time who feel out of sorts that first day we are up on a climb together when the day before they were operating on brain or teaching a five-year old math. I have always told them to go easy on themselves. Now I need to take my own advice.
    Yesterday, back on the home turf in Eldorado Canyon, it was no different. Somehow committing to heady leads above loose flakes with mirco cams was not jiving with making sure I had enough shampoo to make it through a seven-day trip out east.
    If you let climbing fully get under your skin, it might never not be a part of you. Believe me, I’ve tried to pretend I don’t need it. Tried to pretend it’s not the one thing that cuts the rest of me off—that part of me that cannot slow down, cannot break out of mental loops, cannot stop thinking of what and how and why and why not.
    But then I actually go and climb.
    I’d like to think this recent burst of travel has taught me to better appreciate the other people who climb in this world. Those who don’t just have access to it every day. And to then, in turn, appreciate climbing more. That felt like a good thing to contemplate yesterday with the Eldo river rushing below me, drowning out any sense of a city but also any sense of full composure, with the air cutting beneath the roof, with hollow blocks, with rounded holds, slippery feet, and then, finally, a respite.
    For me, yesterday and as of late, it may not be pretty and it may not be graceful, but it’s climbing.

When I was in sixth grade, I thought being an adult meant you were done. Done with anything tough or complex in friendship, life, love—any of it. My best friend had recently been stolen by an evil girl, the boy I had been going with moved to another school and seemed to have lost my number, and I suddenly sucked at French. My parents, all four of them, in contrast seemed fine. Normal. Done.
    Twenty years later, I get together with long time friends and we look at each other and can’t figure out how we got here. Weather we read “The Second Shift” and are now working it, weather we promised we’d never get divorced and just left our spouses, or if we swore to stave off panty hose and now carry two extra pair in an oversized leather purse. “This,” we say, “This is it?”
    I think back to my time as a kid and my interpretation of my parents as having it easy. What’s clear now is that they just didn’t let me in on the underbelly of their lives: the custody negotiations, promotion pass-ups, potential bankruptcy, fights to stay in the same city with their children, or missed hours of sleep to get in a run or bike ride. My parents just did it all, and didn’t tell me about what if felt like when the all felt like too much.
    Maybe they should have.
    Sure, I appreciate their tenacity. I owe the same in me to them. But, if my mom had turned to me when I was 12 and said, “watch out, it doesn’t get any easier,” might I have been better off?
    Life is about choices, constantly. I’ve given eight shows in five cities in six days and with each stop I meet yet another person who is trying to understand if they have made the right decision to be a teacher/ leave the peace corps/don a suit/have a child. It’s memory lane, accelerated. From out of the crowd comes a friend from kindergarten, summer camp, or college. All long displaced, but suddenly more real than my day-to-day life at home. We stare at each other and want to secretly steal part of each other’s lives.
    In between all of these encounters, I am zipping around the country perusing every airlines version of the sky mall magazine. I’m contemplating THE PERSONAL BETWEEN THE SHEETS BED FAN even though I don’t have the other person to warrant needing an independent bed cooling system.  The 150 COUNTRY TRAVEL ADAPTER is a must. So, to, is the PORTABLE PET CHECK IN SCREEN AND WATER MONITOR. (This, surely, would make the reunions with my poodle smoother when I come home.) But when I get to the MARSHMALLOW SHOOTER, and when I think it might come in handy, I know something in the system has broken down.
    Am I trying to prove to myself that I to can do it all without looking like I am doing anything? To whom is this message going out? My poodle over the portable screen? Maybe the beauty of growing older is being able to look at our friends, long lost or current and say, yeah, this is tough, but this is what makes it interesting. That clear, easy track I foresaw as adulthood never existed. Admitting to uncertainly encourages the same in others. I’m odd in that I like this clustering of thoughts and ambitions and realities. I seem to think that only when a friend and I can both say, “what the hell are we doing?”, that the real conversation starts.
    Human life is not prescriptive. That might seem obvious. But I think I am only understanding it now. I think that had to do with making sweeping choices when I was young—job, house, marriage—because if I just set myself on a track I could keep going. But you can never really keep going, or at least I cannot without serious psychological drugs that I am unwilling to take. So instead I get this—a life up tumbling through the skies at 35,000 feet wondering is I should buy bamboo lawn furniture covers for lawn furniture I don’t event have.  And then wondering who does do this, if I should, when I would know if I should, how to know, if knowing would be easier if I moved to Manhattan, if I would understand the word better if I had them, if I would understand myself better, if… and then I land back on the ground.

Guest Blog for The Conversation, the blog for Telluride Mountain Film, where Majka will be this May with her book tour.

"And so we begin. Away from images of an aching population continually subject to drought and famine made worse by human hands. Toward something deeper. For me, this depth includes adventure—climbing this time—in a landscape and culture that is known only for everything that is the opposite." read more