In fact, there’s a very real chance that desire will inhibit your ability to try hard. So, funnily enough, just wanting to send does not equate to trying hard. One reason you might not be trying hard is fear: fear of falling, and of failure, are the usual suspects. You have to clock in intentionally to exercise your try hard on the thing in which you intend to try hard on. Yoga classes aren’t going to do the trick. If you make a commitment to yourself to work a project with the goal of sending it, you must show up and get on the project there are no workarounds. You have to hold up your end of the bargain. Because it’s also true that to try hard you must simply try hard. Those are all key elements to both physically and mentally being prepared to try hard, and, yes, it is very complex.īut am I overcomplicating trying hard? Maybe. To truly try hard, you have to master the art of setting yourself up for it, which includes not only proper training, but nutrition, sleep, work/life balance, stress-management, days spent doing little to nothing, days spent doing absolutely nothing, etc. I think at its essence trying hard is all about mastering complexity within a training protocol, which is intertwined with daily demands. Now I frequently take two, and I’m a better, more complex climber for it. A former, younger me never took more than one rest day in a row. Wait, part of trying hard is resting? Yes, and on a day-to-day level, it’s incredibly important. And then I come back stronger, with a deeper ability to try hard. Personally, I’ve found that after every three to four weeks of consistently climbing and training hard, I need an easier week, where I don’t train as much and I don’t force myself to get on the project. But eventually you have to complete the cycle and fully recover. We tend to bounce between training and adaptation. Of course, an important element of trying hard is balancing this triangle in which we all live: One corner is training, another is adaptation, and the third is recovery. I think at its essence, achieving flow state is the art of trying so hard that it feels easy. I read once that to achieve a flow state in anything, your actual abilities (physical) have to meet your expected abilities (mental), which have to line up with your goals. That naturally raises the question: is trying hard mostly physical or mental? It’s equally both, I think. And I was an emotional kid: I would cry, too, when I thought the lesson wasn’t hard enough, because I craved to be pushed to that physical and mental limit. No, seriously, he taught me everything I know about climbing. Years later, while we were reminiscing over a cold one, he told me that back then, he didn’t consider it a good lesson until I was in tears. Growing up, I had a coach who did two-hour lessons with me every Saturday starting at 9 a.m. But the key was to tell myself I would do my best, that I would try to try hard, while letting go of the result. Other days I would be hanging from each and every draw.
So some days I would get on my project and surprise myself by making a good link. I learned that sometimes there was in fact more in the tank, if only I gave myself the opportunity to dig a little deeper, but I had to be OK with getting on the wall and failing completely. I learned this past year that I don’t always try as hard as I could or should, that while my limit for “hard” expanded through training and the course of working a difficult project, my perception of “hard” likewise had to shift. Such is the elusiveness of true effort, which, of course, applies just as much to climbing as it does to everything else. It’s funny how as soon as you think you’ve got some sort of grasp on the art of trying hard, you find yourself procrastinating and then failing to even start. I did background “research.” I ate a snack. I went for a walk and then stared some more. I tried multiple times to write this essay.
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