I hate the term “resilience.” Resilient is defined as “able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.” Getting back to baseline? Fuck that. I don’t want to ever get back to baseline. I want every hardship to make me better. In fact, understanding that hardships are what do make us better, perhaps we should even want more of them?
There are too many stories of people who suffered through disease or financial hardship, and on coming out the other side declared that it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. Unendurable pain and an unbelievable lesson. In most people’s lives, it’s the hardships, not the successes that made them.
It happens in our brains, but it also happens in our bodies. As a young climber, I knew that if we climbed more, we got better. I didn’t really think about how it happened, though.
In the summer of 1993, I was in Yosemite trying to free climb the Direct Northwest on Half Dome. I was there with my friends Chris Oates and Todd Skinner, and we had been in a pretty good routine. Although it was my first big wall experience, I knew the mechanics of ropework and spending time in the harness for hours.
When I’d first arrived at the wall, I was whooped from the approach and first day’s climbing. My knuckles were banged up, toes sore, and hips raw from the waistbelt of the harness. If we were home, we’d have taken a rest day. But camping at the cliff (or even on the cliff), doesn’t encourage a lot of sitting around. We ended up climbing again the next day, and the next. Eventually we were either trying hard pitches or just doing the work of being on a wall for 8-10 hours each day.
Since the hardest climbing was in the bottom third of the route, most of our nights were spent at a camp in the trees near the base. We’d wake early each morning to climb in the best conditions, ascend the fixed rope to the previous day’s high point, and start climbing. As the heat of the day came on, we would switch from technical climbing back to hauling water, moving gear up the wall, or even hiking back down to the valley for supplies.
As the weeks wore on, I noticed the hiking felt easier, and the hours on the wall were not all that taxing. The suffering of the early days in the trip led us to being extremely fit for the business of hard climbing on this cliff. In the end, we were more limited by daylight and logistics than by physical capability.
When I really noticed the change was when we got home. At the crag, long uphill approaches with a normal-weight pack were easy. Climbing pitch after pitch until night time settled in seemed like no big deal. We didn’t just withstand difficult conditions, we leveraged them to be better than we’d ever been before.
What we want is to seek anti-fragility. This term, first coined by Nassim Taleb, describes things that gain from hardship or disorder. Subject your body to the stress of pulling weight off the ground and what happens? It gets stronger. Hang by the fingertips? Get better at that thing. Climb high above your last piece of protection enough, and you start to function well - even better - in that situation.
I think that non becoming anti-fragile is largely a function of the mind. I think the environment and our biology urge us to this place all the time. Where it gets sabotaged is when we let ourselves believe in limits, in reasonableness.
There is a razor's edge here that all of us must walk. Does this advice not contradict my constant urge of steady and slow progress? Of conservative training? Of avoiding obsessing over being tired at the end of each session? In a way, it does. But the truth is more subtle. In truth, even climbers who constantly seek out fatigue with each day at the cliff or each hour in the gym are not creating anti-fragility at all times, but rather its opposite.
Too much strain on the wrong parts of the system doesn’t protect us. It breaks us. We get “simple.” We look too much at the immediate result of the session without even looking at a week’s time. This is where training becomes training and not just exercise. Chris Sommer put it succinctly when he said, “There is no amount of work you could do today that will offset the progress you could have made in a properly structured week.”
Go hard enough to make yourself better and recover from it. Understand that going to the death is usually going to take you too long to recover from effectively. If you train conservatively, but well on Monday and Wednesday and Friday, you are going to be better next Monday. If you bury yourself on Monday, have to go a bit easier on Wednesday, and take Friday off because you’re still tired, you’re probably starting from zero again next Monday.