Narrow Margin

“Because straight is the gate and narrow the way.”

When you are young, it seems you can get away with about anything when it comes to climbing or training or living. You recover quickly, don’t need all that much sleep, and you can burn a lot of junk as fuel. It seems ridiculous to be careful with rest days or with hydration, and a lack of good skin seems to be the biggest problem of them all.

As you age, things change. The hill on the approach seems more a workout than a warm-up. The morning after training, you move slowly and make sure to take it easy that day. You feel slower, tired. Plus, for some reason, you’re always busy with some crap you don’t really want to do. Going for a walk is a real thing.

In middle age, you’re no longer capable of the peak strength levels or powerful movement you’d had in your teens, twenties, and even thirties. Your heart still wants to perform well on the rock, yet doing so requires more attention than it ever did before, and the risk of over—or under—doing it is real. In short, the line between not doing enough and doing too much becomes very narrow indeed.

If we try to hold on to intense training too long in a session or if we try to ramp up too quickly, boom...injury. If, on the other hand, we stick to the vertical walls on the margins of the steep sectors, our ability to climb hard takes a downward turn and might never return. Even with the busy schedule of living, we need to focus even more than we did in our peak years. Staying strong becomes a full-time job.

In order to keep climbing hard, we need to get four things very, very right. Cover these bases, and you can keep up the hard sends for this year, and next, and maybe a few more.

1. Stay Strong. We hate weight training and used to stay plenty fit by just going climbing. Well, those days are over. At forty, you’re in danger of losing muscle mass if you stop activity for any significant duration. At fifty, you are unlikely to maintain it no matter what you do. At sixty, you’re just going to try and slow the loss as much as possible. Two to three times a week, you need to hit the gym to train general movements for strength. This will help hold your overall capacity for fitness, but it will mainly be for maintaining muscle mass, limiting strength loss, and keeping you durable.

2. Stay Mobile. You need to stretch, a lot. This one is easy to implement if you get the environment right. You’re too sore and tired to train all the time like you used to, so set up a place to sit on the floor and stretch in the evenings. Most of us have downtime at the end of the day and watch TV or spend time looking at a phone. Setting up a clean, comfortable open space on the floor in front of the television can be a game changer. You don’t need to be crazy about it, you just need to do it for a few minutes. Hips and shoulders.

3. Keep Grinding. Spending time working on projects or goal routes is key. If you travel, try to get some good and challenging redpoints or sends in rather than just doing the tour of the easy routes. At home, work to send the routes you still haven’t done at your local crag, even though you’ve climbed there for twenty years. Long-term projects are OK, but be aware that the injury risks and fitness drops associated with single-focus climbing are amplified as we age. Or…re-send things you did back in the 90s. They’re still great routes, and you can have a new experience with them.

4. Do Something. You are going to end up not feeling all that awesome a lot of the time. Instead of just taking a rest day, take your training down a notch and keep after it. Can’t hangboard? How about some circuits? Can’t climb? Do weights? Short on time? What about some hill sprints? Beat down? What about a walk and a longer stretching session? Any activity is better than none, every time. An austere recipe for staying fit is to aim at an hour each day.

Things aren’t what they used to be, but you can still have great experiences as you age. Some of my most enjoyable climbing trips came after fifty, and if we can let go of wanting to perform like a teenager, there are amazing things we can still do.