I remember the first time I ever actually tried hard. It was a random session on a random weeknight after school. The route – a new red 5.12 on a slight overhang. At the time I was a decent climber with a few 5.12 redpoints under my belt, but never a flash. My step-dad, Eric, put me on belay and gave me a quick pep talk before I started, nothing special. Three quarters up I met the crux where I messed up the beta and started getting pumped. This is usually where I’d throw in the hat and say, “Good enough”, but for some reason I wasn’t satisfied with that. This time, I decided I wouldn’t let go. I improvised with a downwards dyno onto a block and struggled my way through a massive pump to flash the route. I was really proud of what had just happened, seemingly out of nowhere, and Eric made no effort to hide the fact that he was ecstatic about it.
We finished the session with a few more climbs and packed up. We called my mother on the way home and she asked how the session went. Before I had a chance to answer Eric took over to say, “Really, really good” with a huge smile on his face. He told her that I just had a breakthrough session that would act as a precedent for the rest of my climbing career. As a kid, I was preoccupied by the fact that I just flashed a hard climb to see the actual success in my training that day, which Eric had identified, and the importance of the skill I just practiced for the first time: trying hard.
I wouldn’t come to truly appreciate or understand this for another five years, but here I finally am – five years later.
Try Harder
Trying hard only moved into the spotlight for me when I started coaching. The team at my gym is strong, and I mean really strong. So when I see them fall, I search for answers before I approach them. Did they miss the beta? Was the foot too low? Did they overshoot it?
Most of the time, though, I can call it immediately – “You didn’t try hard enough”.
As I started paying more attention, I realized this was a universal truth. Very few people consistently try hard, but those who do truly leave a mark. This is what separates legends from wannabes, professionals from amateurs, and athletes from the ordinary.
Even take those who always land on the podium in your area but don’t seem to excel in the big leagues. If the skill is there, beta reading is solid, and strength is high, trying hard doesn’t have to be in the equation at every competition. Athletes like this still put in the effort and log the hours, but when it comes time to bite down on a problem, that drive just doesn’t come out enough. Even worse, when it comes to higher level competitions, athletes like this just can’t perform because the try-hard needs to be running at full capacity from the word “Go” and they just don’t know how to hold the switch down.
Then we see the people who dominate competitions and take down crags. Not only do they have the skill, but they’ve harnessed the ability to unfailingly try as hard as they can at every possible opportunity. They are the first people who come to mind when you’re asked who the competition is. They are the reason you’re intimidated at an event. They are the ones who cast a shadow on your dream of first place – unless you can rise to their level.
The path here feels so simple as I’m writing this. Just try hard. But as you’ve probably been told before, if it were easy, everyone would be a champion.
Trying Hard is Hard
Trying hard just isn’t in our nature. As humans, we are constantly fighting the urge to skip exercises, cheat the rep, take longer breaks, or even bail on a session. At home, we succumb to empty calories and late nights, and on the wall, we step up to routes knowing we’re distracted, let go when it gets tiring, or the worst one – half-heartedly go for moves you’ve told yourself you won’t get. To that I just want to scream, “NOT WITH THAT ATTITUDE YOU WON’T!”.
But like I said, it’s not easy. Trying hard is incredibly hard. I constantly struggle with it, but like all other important skills, I focus on it and train it to get better. With every attempt and every rep, trying hard is the objective, and only I can truly tell if it’s been achieved.
And this really is the only metric we should be worrying about, right? After all, it is the only factor that we can reliably say is completely under our control. Many people attach the “good” or “bad” label to their sessions purely based on how successful they were in their climbing. Sending all the new climbs or making progress on a project is great and all, but in my mind, the number of tops you get is not as valuable as the number of times you tried your hardest or better yet, the number of times you fell trying your hardest. Because what if you didn’t work for those tops? What if they were too easy? You have to be able to recognize when you need to push yourself harder because, as I often tell the team at practice, we aren’t here to top problems. We are here to get better at climbing.
Let’s start by establishing what trying hard is so we can work towards it. Because I can tell you right now, screaming on every move and over-gripping is often not what we’re looking for and can easily become very disingenuous.
No, we’re going to need the real thing.
So let’s bring an image to mind. You get to the gym for your first session of the day, it’s a morning lift. 10:00 am on the dot you turn on Bluetooth and sharpen your mind like a spear, ready to devote all your attention and energy to what you’re about to do. You begin the warm-up like it’s competition day. Every motion is made with confidence and quality. You’re thorough, paying close attention to your body in the environment, ready to adjust any aspect of your routine at will.
Then it’s time to lift – weighted pull-ups. Chalking up, you close your eyes and begin to visualize the exercise. You can feel yourself moving as if you’re in the midst of the set: the muscles you’re going to be firing, the texture of the bar on your hands. Before you open your eyes, you take the last few seconds to clear your mind. Headphones come out and you take a deep breath. When you open your eyes, you’re ready to give everything to the bar. With a deep breath, you pull up as hard as you can, squeezing the bar to activate your back. After 4 reps the fatigue sets in, but you’re unphased. You go for rep five with as much power and confidence as rep one. Half-way through, you notice you’ve stalled in motion but you’re again unphased. You look up at the bar with undeniable certainty that you can complete the rep. You yell, allowing your body to breach the 90 degree barrier. Your chin hits the bar, the queue to start releasing the tension and put your feet back on the ground.
Fast forward to 5:00 pm. You warm-up again, with the utmost care. On the wall you ease your body into harder and harder movements until you’re ready to try hard. There’s a new section of boulders in the gym. You spent the warm-up avoiding them, but you now allow yourself one problem, and it’s a hard one.
A paddle dyno into a shoulder-buster with a delicate crimp finish. The gym is busy, but you step up to your problem with tunnel-vision, brush in hand. You sequence, moving with your beta, mind and body. You brush and chalk up. Walking up to the start holds you tell yourself, “I’m strong enough for this”. With hands on the start holds, you close your eyes for a brief moment to expel any remaining thoughts, good or bad. “The problem looks easy”, “I’m starting to get tired”, “I can’t even hold onto the start”. Everything is gone after one deep breath. You begin the problem and go straight into the dyno, no hesitation, perfect precision. You cruise the shoulder buster and throw to the first crimp on the face. You miss and your index finger is off the hold. That’s too bad. You full crimp the hold, placing your thumb over your middle finger. For a second you feel your hand sliding off but you double down and get your foot up. Slowly, you extend your left hand towards a gastón, tensing every muscle in your body to gain the last centimeter you need. Just as you become certain that you’ll hit the hold, your right hand dry-fires and you fall. Good attempt.
So what can we take away from these examples? First off, the climber is confident in their abilities. Especially in competition climbing, confidence is extremely important. If you turn around and see a move you’re not as practiced in, you need to be able to toss that thought out of your head and attack the problem like it’s a ladder. To do this, the climber makes sure their mind is clear before they do anything. This takes practice of course, but is an absolutely invaluable tool.
Focus Hard to Try Hard
There is also a high level of focus seen here. Trying hard doesn’t just begin when your rep goes. It starts when you wake up. You can imagine the climber had a pre-workout meal or snack prior to getting to the gym, put on clothes they can move in, and left for the gym early enough to not be stressed or strapped for time. Then they were meticulous with their warm-up and directed all their attention to whatever task was at hand. Despite training in a busy facility, the climber was oblivious to the commotion and was able to simply concentrate on the route.
At work, the climber never takes no as an answer. The last rep may be the hardest but you don’t admit that until the set is done. The crimp sucks but that’s the card you’ve been dealt. When things aren’t feeling solid, that’s when the deep-rooted motivation needs to shine. You’re pumped on a roof staring at that jug of a finish hold. You’re slipping off a sloper. You’re half-way through a set when your core starts burning. It’s now that you have the opportunity to stand out as a climber and bite down. Find the will to keep pushing as if death is your only alternative. Letting go is a choice and you refuse to take it.
But sometimes you can’t do this alone. Sometimes you need someone to tell you that your attempt was bad or that you let someone beat you for the motivation to surface. I was warming up for a competition once and my coach saw a weak attempt on a dyno. He came over and said, “Are you on?”. I was at a competition. There’s no room for bad attempts when I leave the isolation zone. I go the extra mile to make everything as ideal as possible for performance day. I train year-round for competitions like this and to what? Only give 60% when it matters? I might as well have stayed home if that’s the case. “I am now,” I responded, and I sent that dyno with authority.
Being able to just perform with the smallest prompt like that is a skill I’ve worked on. Over the last year, I’ve accumulated a series of trigger phrases associated with memories or readings that get me trying hard. Asking myself if I’m on is one of them. Another is calling to mind 2-time CrossFit Games Champion Katrín Davíðsdóttir. Her unique story is one that I’m particularly interested in – the year before she won the Games, she didn’t even qualify.
When I’m projecting the hardest route in the gym and need that extra motivation, I ask myself how she would approach it. Would she keep reminding herself that nobody has sent it? Would she be okay with falling because it’s so hard? Would she write it off and try something easier? If the answer is no, then neither would I.
I also write notes to myself in the front and back pages of my workout log. Little sentences that I’ve either said during team or heard somewhere. My favorite is “There’s no such thing as bad days”. So many people use the cop-out phrase, “It’s just a high-gravity day” to justify a bad performance. Now granted, they could be ill, injured, etc., but this phrase speaks more to the principle of never offering excuses for why you aren’t trying as hard as you can and never allowing yourself to write off a day as destined to be sub-par. I see these phrases every time I open my book to start my session off in the right direction, or if need be, steer it back.
Experiment with what works for you. I’ve done everything from motivational YouTube channels (highly recommend Your World Within) to pre-session meditations. Whatever ends up getting you there, practice it, and you can acquire what I would call the most valuable skill in athletics – trying hard.