Here is where you get to see that I was not a young climbing prodigy, but rather a kid who dressed in camo cargo pants and played Dungeons and Dragons for long hours many weekends through junior high school. In fact, I was only peripherally interested in sports during those years—mostly because I had some friends who did them or because my mom signed me up.
Most weekends we’d shuffle into my friend, Brian’s basement and set up around his family’s pool table, each of the players with a pile of books, dice, and small action figures. We’d select a “character” to play, and then would be lead through various adventures and use that character’s abilities to address challenges. Often, you’d use the same character for many weeks or months, slowly developing experience and abilities and getting far more powerful as the game progressed.
(I promise this is not all going to be about gaming.)
The problem seemed to always come down to the type of character you chose. A Fighter was good with weapons, but not magic, healing, stealth, or speed. Likewise, a Thief was sneaky, but weak. A Cleric could heal, but wasn’t super useful when the knives came out. And so on.
Near the end of the chapter on choosing a character was a small section on “Multi-Class Characters.” This is where you could choose to be both a Fighter and a Wizard, or a Thief and a Cleric. This seemed to us like the ultimate hack, as you could see yourself being some kind of badass that shot lightning bolts out of your wand from a distance, but when things got heavy could pull a sword out and really do some damage.
And so a few of us picked these combo characters. The downside? The experience points you gained had to be split between two paths, and so it took forever to gain levels. When our friends reached fifth or sixth level, we were still stuck at level 2 or 3. The adventure’s difficulty advanced with the single-class character in mind, and so we regularly got the beatdown...or just died.
The single-class characters had fewer abilities, but they gained noticeably as the game progressed. Where, at first, specializing seemed lame, it became a secret weapon. Even though my multi-class character could do all kinds of stuff, my abilities lagged far behind, and it just got worse as the game went on.
And this is the lesson I now pull from those many hours spent rolling dice and having imaginary adventures. The more qualities you try to develop, the worse it’s going to go.
I am sort of infamous for hating on running (thanks to a quick answer in a podcast a dozen years ago), but what I really said is that training for climbing by running is not as useful as training for climbing by climbing. If I want to be a performance runner, trying to hit personal bests in distance or time, it’s going to be impossible to develop my climbing the same way at the same time. And the same goes for other sports.
Some sports may be more physically complementary, like, say, Judo or gymnastics, but the division of focus is still an issue.
More acutely, if I am trying to develop my ability to climb a lot (capacity), I can negatively affect my ability to do really hard moves (strength and power). Simply put: you can go hard or go long, but not both.
We all know specialists. There’s that friend that seems to always find a wide split-stance position on climbs to remind us how flexible they are. The climber that constantly seeks out super-powerful climbs that have little-to-no stamina component. The climber that seems like they are always doing mileage but without a clear need for it. People who find feet-off beta on almost every steep boulder.
This is not the specialization you’re looking for. What you’re looking for is to bring all of your foundational aspects of climbing performance up to the good-enough level.
If a climber has weak fingers, it doesn’t matter if they can do a one-arm pull-up. If we don’t have the stamina to climb all the way up to the rest position on a climb, it doesn’t matter how dialed-in we are at kneebars. Etcetera.
We all carry with us a fear of losing the qualities we have already developed, or that we hold dear. I, myself, have a high general grip strength, and tend to want to keep it—not because it’s useful to my performance, but because I am prideful of it.
If I want to climb better, I should focus my efforts on small crimps, footwork, or crag tactics. Each of these is challenging for me, and are areas where I get stuck when coming up against my maximum level.
The prescription?
In every week’s plan, put in exercises that address your area of greatest need, as often as they can effectively be trained. Do them early in the session. Break them down into smaller chunks if you’re not seeing progress.
Avoid trying to become good at divergent skills. If you’re going to run or ski or lift weights, or do mileage, you have to do them recreationally. your intention must be to address these as a participant rather than as an athlete aiming for progress.
Remember that the word priority is singular. Never let yourself pluralize it again if you’re looking to improve optimally.
Most of all, you have to be willing to be bad at the weakest part of your training for a long time...which is why we tend to avoid many of these things. If you can master that, you’re going to go somewhere.
If your heart’s desire is to be a good runner and a good boulderer, or whatever, just remember it’s going to take much longer to get better at either of these things, and your single-class friends are probably going to leave you in the dust.