We have all heard about “controlling the controllables,” but no one ever talks about what those things might be. We all want better conditions, more energy, etc., but these things don’t always line up. It’s not uncommon for a climber to be totally rattled by something minor, over which they have no control.
In the performance environment, things rarely line up the way we want. In reading Jeff Troesch’s book “One Day Better,” (awesome book, #1 recommendation from 2025) I came across Troesch’s A.C.E. scale, where an athlete can grade their ability to manage the things they truly can manage. A.C.E. stands for Attitude, Concentration, and Effort.
How am I showing up today? Am I set off by the crowd at the crag? Poor temps? Something that came up last night at home? On a scale of 1-10, an athlete can grade their attitude that day or that session.
Concentration refers to how well the athlete stayed focused on the effort at hand. Did I keep checking my phone? Get pulled into a bunch of conversations at the gym? Keep thinking about yesterday or tomorrow? Again, this is graded on a 1-10 scale. One is totally distracted, ten is your most focus ever.
Effort is graded on a scale from 1 (didn’t try hard at all to follow the plan or to perform as desired) to 10 (went all in and climbed or trained at the limit). This also can refer to the effort of staying at low intensity when the plan calls for it—showing discipline.
These three numbers are added up, giving us an “ACE score” between 3 and 30, and tracked over time. Often they will drop during times of overreaching or under recovery, and they’ll crawl higher if the athlete is enjoying the training or climbing well.
If we can redirect ourselves to focus on these values, we can learn to quit worrying about the things we can do nothing about. We can buffer our comfort zones, and move into a realm of ownership over actions.
This score relates closely to my recommendation of adding a small star or asterisk to a line in your training log where you were particularly proud of the effort. If you tried hard on a move or pushed yourself on a particular set of exercises, you want to acknowledge that by combining both the star scale and the ACE score for a workout. We start to get a good picture of what we are bringing to our efforts, rather than looking simply at numbers or trying to compare ourselves to other climbers.