Highlight: Overcoming Insecurity and Errors in Big Walling

In today's Lattice Podcast Highlight, coach Maddy Cope is joined by coach Billy Ridal to discuss the challenges and insecurities faced while climbing a difficult pitch on a big wall. They delve into the physical and mental efforts required to overcome insecurities and stick with the climb.

Topics include:

• Facing Climbing Challenges: The physical and mental efforts needed to tackle difficult pitches on big walls.
• Recovering from Errors: The importance of making small errors and being able to recover from them.
• Confidence & Climbing: How confidence levels can vary between climbers during challenging ascents.

This episode is just a highlight from a more in-depth conversation that explores additional insights on managing nerves, maintaining focus, and handling time constraints during multi-pitch climbs. For the full discussion, tune in to the complete episode available on all major podcast platforms.

The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.

Transcript

Maddy (00:00)
do a move perfectly and then find yourself really insecure on the next position.

And sometimes that would compound, if you got like a few moves wrong in a row, it would compound and then you'd be done. But if you made like a small error, you could kind of get yourself back to feeling good again, which is a bit different to what I've had in bouldering or sport climbing in the past where usually you're so close to your physical capacity that a small error would be pretty terminal. Whereas, yeah, with this, you could go a little bit around, you can kind of get it back a little bit, but you'd,

never actually feel comfortable in any of the positions. It's interesting isn't it though, I think, for kind of the head space as well as the physical effort because...

you sort of really have to stick with it, even though it's feeling so insecure and I think a temptation, especially when you work pitches, is that they will start to feel more and more controlled or perfect or... And they know. And obviously in some cases that is how the process goes, but it sounds like this, even as a single pitch, as a red point in your pitch, sounds like it really wasn't like your same experience of other outdoors.

Red points. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. Because you could never be, you could just never ever be confident in it when you were going on. You could kind of, you could slip off pretty much any move through the crook sequence. And normally it would be because, well your foot would nearly always be the failing point. It wouldn't necessarily be because the foot placement was bad, like something else could be wrong. But it would pretty much always be the foot that went. So yeah, for the entire time that you're going through that crook sequence, you just kind of feel like you're, you're running.

on the edge and you're kind of rolling the dice with every move and they're just the dice rolls like stacking on top of each other through it and you're just hoping that you get the right roll basically which is quite it's quite frustrating just as a single pitch because you could just it feels like you could just slip off it forever

which has been particularly stressful when you've got there from the bottom and you don't really have much sense of whether it's going to come together or not. And you've only got like a limited amount of time. Yes. And like sort of with you and Alex sort of having these similarities and differences in your climbing, did you climb it the same way? Did you, was your guys trajectory somewhat similar or? So we actually ended up with a pretty similar sequence for changing corners. There was a few bits.

few bits that we did differently but if like two people watch, if you watch the footage back of the two of us it would probably look more or less the same to most people. There's a few subtle differences and yeah we did end up with coming out relatively similarly. In terms of the trajectory on that pitch

from maybe, so we had seven working sessions in total, from maybe session five, something like that, it really looked like it was coming together for Alex. He was starting to be more consistent through the sequences. And then either in session six or session seven, he did actually link the entire crook sequence. I never did.

I was by the end of it I was I very much got to the point where it felt possible I think I've done it in sort of basically in two sections

But I was definitely not at the point where I was kind of confident that I could do it. So when you set off from the ground, you hadn't actually linked it. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was... Alex was relatively confident he could put it together by the end of those seven working sessions. I would have liked some more time up there, but we didn't have it. We needed to go, basically. You did the time just fly by, I bet. It went fast, yeah.

month but because everything takes so much so much work like we have to do this huge hike to get to the top to work every single time so yeah even the it doesn't feel like you have a great deal of downtime and the downtime that you do have goes really fast because you're absolutely exhausted and so it kind of just felt like we were like on the

the accelerator the whole time and then suddenly we only really had a week left of the trip and if we were going to go for it we needed to go for it and so yeah we went from the bottom

Did you literally have sort of seven days left of your trip? You, the flight was like looming for you, right? Yes, basically. So we, I think we had, we, we ended up setting off a day earlier than we were planning to actually, because our plan was we'd stash some water when we'd been up from the top at Camp Six, which is the last, um, like good ledge before the top and directly blow changing corners. Then a couple of days before we were going to go from the bottom.

we'd hold the bag up to Dole Tower which is the first like big ledge and we'd be leaving most of our stuff there so that when we came from the bottom we could kind of fly through the bottom bit without having to haul.

we did that and then the weather changed and there was this, there was these couple of days where it was looking like it was going to rain and we kind of either had the option of waiting until the rain finished and then only having five days before my flight home which felt like...

Basically to do it in five days was gonna be no wiggle room. We kind of just needed to bang out the hard pitches pretty much straight away. Or we go a day earlier and have eight days total, get ourselves up to camp four, which is below the great roof before the rain comes, and then sit it out there. And then we'd have...

four days after that to then get to the top. So we decided to do that.

first couple of days went pretty well. The start of the nose is, in terms of grade, there isn't supposed to be any particularly difficult pitches, the hardest thing is 12a. I think there's some hard moves down there. The whole route is set up for aid climbing, it's like the most popular aid route in the world. Probably.

So it's really well equipped, like you've got really good anchors.

but it's not set up for free climbing it. And there's all these sections where you'll, as an A-climber, you'll go up to a bolt and you'll do something called a lower out, or you lower down the rope and then you do a swing across to get into the next crack system. And those bits are usually where the free climbing gets hard because you've got to transition between these crack systems and the granite is pretty featureless usually when you get out of the cracks.

And so there's just a few that they're boulder problems really, because it's not very far to actually get between the cracks. But there's some quite hard climbing down there and it's really insecure and you're standing on tiny holds. It's pretty hot and we're kind of nervous. So there's a few sort of hairy moments. Alex had a few falls. Both of our like shoes were like rolling and like the rub.

was peeling off because it was really warm on these tiny little smears and it wasn't super confidence inspiring. I was going to say like how were you sort of like you know you've worked on the pitches and you're setting off knowing that really it's now, this is the time you're bringing it all together. How were the nerves? How was it setting off? Could you sleep the night before as well? I don't think I slept particularly well the first the night before. I actually slept really

tired. I was trying to just sort of like take it, take it just one step at a time, like this is where we're trying to get to today, let's think about what we've got to do today and I'll think about tomorrow, tomorrow. And that was made it much easier to manage and make it feel more reasonable. Is that something you pulled from your comp, like, but you know, like your past experience because you know, it must be really nerve wracking the night before a comp and when you turn up at a comp.

Yeah, I think with Yeah, again competitions like with especially with bouldering around it's very much like you You have this ball in front of you. This is your focus right now pour over energy into that Then you five minutes is done forget about that focus on the next one. And yeah, we definitely

teach ourselves to have that very sort of singular focus and to block out the things which aren't important in that moment and yeah I definitely think I was doing that kind of the whole way through it like this is what I need to do now I think about the next thing. And also when you've done something and it's been a bit tricky or you're falling off just be like forget about that, that's done. Yeah exactly yeah but yeah those first couple days when

relatively smoothly, there was nothing that went really wrong even if we had a few sort of hairy moments. Alex got his knee stuck in an off-width and had a bit of a panic. What a horrible feeling. Yeah, I've unfortunately haven't had this feeling but he was on one of the easy pitches where we're trying to move relatively quickly, we didn't have an abundance of big cams of us because we were trying not to go too heavy so we were doing relatively big run-outs

We weren't going to fall off. Hopefully. But yeah, he got relatively far above his last piece. Then suddenly... He was...

He was a bit less happy than me on the kind of like number four sized off width. I think that's probably a body size thing. He's a bit smaller than me. He was kind of like sinking into them a bit more, whereas I was getting quite a lot from them. Yes, he sort of got a little bit stressed, sank his knee in for a bit of respite and suddenly couldn't get out anymore. Probably, I know, six or seven meters above his last piece. And then was like wiggling it around, like shouting back down to me like...

I'm a bit stuck and I can't do anything about it now. I'm just like, nah, you're alright mate, just like wiggle it out It'll come out. It's fine and then he eventually like Did get it out But it was such a jerk that he bet like I could see even though it was 30 meters away kind of went like

all the way out from the wall, sort of like leaning back, almost overbalanced. Let out this whiff and then sort of like wind his way to the top. I think that's the interesting thing about big these sorts of routes is that you can be such a talented climber, you can be climbing really well, you can be capable of climbing the changing corners, such a hard route. There's just so many moves on a big wall. Yeah, there's so many opportunities.

opportunities to mess up. You really have to, yeah, you really have to kind of build that confidence in a lot of stars and be okay to do lots of moves and types of movements that you...

would maybe shy away from. If you weren't choosing to climb a pitch, one pitch, you probably wouldn't bother with that pitch because you'd be like, oh I don't particularly like that size, you know, maybe I'll just be like, oh I don't really like size fours. But that's just not an option. Yeah, like, well we've got to go up it somehow, so. Yeah. Yeah, that was a, we were a bit quiet at the B-Leg after that one.