Want to Send Your Project? Be Willing to Walk Away.
The Project Wall in Rifle Mountain Park becomes an acquired taste—or an acquired masochism—by mid-October. The nearly north-facing wall sees just a few hours of sun in the summer months, with climbers queuing up for their projects early in the morning to capitalize on good conditions. However, as October rolls around, and nighttime temperatures in the canyon plummet below freezing, a shadowy, cold reality sets in. The once-enthusiastic early birds now procrastinate, hoping for a few hours of just-warm-enough sending conditions before the impending snow shuts the canyon down for the season. And so there I was again, last October, doing the exact same routine as the week before, and the week before that, and the week before that: right kneepad, left kneepad, right shoe, left shoe, duct tape, chalk bag. My belayer, comfortably dressed in multiple layers and puffy pants, inspected his belay device and my knot while I, shivering in shorts and a t-shirt, straddled the fine line between stoke and an almost existential question: am I truly psyched, or am I just desperate?
Sport climbing—or, more specifically, mega projecting sport climbs—is a strange activity even to those of us who do it, so from an outside perspective, it must seem even more odd. Go climb on the same route over and over again, sometimes for multiple seasons or years, hoping to go from the bottom to the top without falling. Of course, there’s more to the story. We whittle the route down and employ certain tactics that help us make it a flawless choreography. We refine the beta. We work on overlapping links. We start from below the crux and attempt to climb to the chains. We climb the crux two, three, even four times in a row to ensure mastery while tired. We strive for the one-hang to let us know the send is close. But despite the training and tactics, we still show up day after day, hoping that, on one of those days, something will be different.
I thought about this a lot during my fall season of 2023. I was deep in the pit of despair with my Rifle project, Let It Burn (5.13d). The route is a 35-meter, rope-stretching endurance marathon on the left side of the Project Wall. A variation, it climbs the first half of the classic Sometimes Always (5.13c) before moving left, avoiding that route’s notorious technical stem-crux in exchange for two sustained crux sections. While the first half of the route consists of big holds peppered with standard Rifle knee crawling, the second half is very different. The rock becomes less blocky and the holds are smaller. The climbing is straightforward, but there’s little room for “trickery” like that found below. You’re either fit enough when you get there or you aren’t.
There was nothing at stake. I could always try again. And that, as it turns out, was a bit of a problem.
Every time I tied in, I found myself one-hanging the route. The conditions didn’t matter. How I felt didn’t matter. I was falling at the left-hand undercling at the 9th bolt, more than halfway up the route. I’d rest, pull back on, sometimes lower down for an overlap, and then head to the chains. The weeks were blending together like my own personal Groundhog Day. Every Thursday I’d rush home and pack the car. I’d clean the kitchen, and spend time with my wife, who was “88% okay” with me being gone every weekend. On Friday, I’d speed off on the 3.5-hour drive to Rifle, music blasting. In my sleeping bag in the back of my minivan at camp, I’d re-watch episodes of Emily in Paris. I’d warm up on the same routes in the morning. I’d wait for the wind to pick up and tie in for a redpoint go. But just like the Emily in Paris reruns, I knew the ending.
I’d been to this self-created hell before. I fell at the final bolt of No Philter (5.13d) at Seal Rock in the Flatirons fifteen times before sending it in the spring of 2023. But the route was close to my house—I could see it from my damn porch, taunting me!—and easy enough to get to that I could give burns after work. The thought of giving up never occurred to me, despite dreaded rinse-and-repeat monotony. There was nothing at stake. I could always try again. And that, as it turns out, was a bit of a problem. Since the process was easy and fun, there was no pressure to finish, which—I eventually realized—kept me from summoning the maximum, last-go, best-go effort we sometimes need to do our hardest routes.
Finding myself in this position once more with Let It Burn, I wondered if there was a way to arbitrarily increase the stakes? Sure, it was still a 3.5 hour drive, but how could I— a weekend warrior, armed with an 8a.nu scorecard, a penchant for grade-chasing, and seemingly all the time in the world—further ramp up the pressure to potentially increase my performance?
Several summers ago, I met Ben Gilkison while on a trip in Ten Sleep, Wyoming. He was road tripping with his wife and two young daughters. While his family supported him at the crag, his familial needs limited his time. He couldn’t drag his family back to the same crag and to the same route over and over again, so his motto was “One try, no second chances,” and on that try he tried hard—like, really hard. And it worked for him. His daughters cheered him on while he onsighted Shake ’n Bake (5.13b), climbing like it was the last route he’d ever climb in his life. I also watched him on Name of the Game (5.13a): he nailed every sequence up until the final move, where he fell. “I wanted it bad,” he said as he lowered to the ground. There was no excuse. He took the wins and the losses in stride. But he played his best.
As a kid, I struggled with the win/lose mentality. While my teammates shed tears over lost Lacrosse games, I’d suck on the post-game orange slices and reflect on my individual performance. Did I play well? If so, I didn’t care about the outcome. This, of course, is antithetical to most competitive sports; the football teams in the Super Bowl go out ready to do battle, because they may never get this chance ever again. My lackadaisical attitude seemed to work quite well in climbing until Ben’s ability to simulate a high-pressure situation showed me otherwise.
But of course, Ben’s “one try, no second chances” model couldn’t work for me on a route like Let It Burn. It took me a full season just to figure out all the moves! It was at my limit and demanded time. But I still needed to find a way to incorporate that sense of urgency into my climbing in order to escape from the dreaded one-hang purgatory.
That’s the answer, I thought after listening to the Power Company’s podcast episode “Failure: How Quitting More Leads to Bigger Sends,” in which Kris Hampton and Annie Duke talk about how we tend to stick to our goals instead of looking to other things that could make us happy or help us reach bigger goals. When things go wrong—when we get to one-hang purgatory—we tend to get more invested in our original plan, arguing that we’ve already invested too much time or resources to give up now. It can be hard to remember that climbing the same route over and over again—even if it’s at your limit—doesn’t make you a better climber, it just makes you better at that specific route.
Hampton and Duke suggest creating “kill criteria,” which is a literal checklist that prevents us from getting bogged down. If we can check certain items off, we can continue projecting our route. If we can’t, we need to re-examine our goal or quit. The important part of this kill criteria is including a condition and date. By adding a deadline and a specific benchmark to our goal, we avoid continuing with no direction. A simple example could be if I haven’t one-hung the route by X date, I need to move on. We are forced to maximize our effort because we’ve created a limit on how long we can continue. If we aren’t meeting our goals, then we move on to other more attainable ones, with the option to return to this one later. However, we want to avoid having our goals be so attainable that we always meet our kill criteria.
Hearing this, I worried at first that there would emotional downsides to forcing myself to perform under pressure—the idea that I might have to win or lose with various rock climbs—but, after some reflection, I realized that I’m not unfamiliar with the process of using kill criteria, and that some of the most satisfying climbing experiences of my life were the result of these types of scenarios.
As teachers, my wife and I travel during school breaks. When visiting a new location, I tend to explore the area and climb routes I can easily do. But on the few occasions when I’ve decided to try closer to my limit, there’s a natural kill criteria built into my relationship with each climb: the end of the trip. In El Salto, Mexico, in 2019, I dedicated the entire two weeks to Camino del Chino (5.13b). On the last try of the last day, when I was forced to perform at my best, I sent. In that instance, the trip was successful because I put myself in a situation without guaranteed success and I rose to the occasion.
But I’ve also walked away without the send. In Kalymnos, in 2022, I fell on the final hard move of Marci Marc (5.13a) on the final day of our trip. The conditions were great, I tried my hardest, but I couldn’t get it done. We spent the rest of the day at the beach and then caught our flight home the next day. When two teams play, there’s a winner and a loser. Yet even though I was the loser on that trip, I wouldn’t define the trip as a failure; I still put myself in a situation without guaranteed success—and just knowing that I’d tried hard was enough to be satisfying.
Still, experiences like these were anomalies. In general, I avoided situations like that on Camino del Chino or Marci Marc. Maybe that’s what was initially so attractive to me about projecting: I rarely exposed myself to failure, pressure, or the need to “turn it on” and try my hardest. Instead, I’d pick something so hard that success was only a distant option—which made the process more comfortable.
In the same failure episode, Kris Hampton suggests practicing failure by intentionally putting ourselves in situations in our training where success isn’t guaranteed and we may have to walk away with no tangible results. The key is to normalize failure and quitting, viewing them as opportunities for learning rather than negatives. In the gym, for instance, you might give yourself three attempts on a hard boulder problem or try to onsight a difficult route. If you can’t do it in the alloted time, then move on for that session, or altogether. This forces a more significant up-front effort, and it also helps us practice working through little mistakes. With limits, we create a win-loss paradigm similar to many sports, where the outcome is final.
It had been almost a month since I met my last kill criteria on Let It Burn. I had one-hung the route by the end of August 2023. I had started from the good rest a few bolts below the crux and gone to the chains by mid-September. The final kill criteria was to send. I set the date for a long weekend in mid-October as my last chance of the season. Not, “Oooh, next weekend looks pretty nice, I’ll go give it another shot.” No. Done. That weekend would decide whether I’d “win” or “lose” this season.
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Related: Alex Megos talks about how his Olympic disappointment helped him send two of his hardest routes
That final weekend was no different from any other. My friend Jacob and I stood below Let It Burn. The summer-camp crowds had dissipated. Those that remained bemoaned the coming winter. Fallen leaves adorned the ground, and the sun struggled to reach the canyon floor. Jacob, offering his customary encouragement, urged me to “try hard” and “let the big dog out.”
I felt terrible as I made it to the meager rest before the move on which I had fallen twenty times. My body was fatigued, forearms pumped, and the shallow right kneebar was slipping. Switching to the less restful left knee, I shook my right hand hard. Without much thought, I started the crux, anticipating another fall. To my surprise, my left hand stuck the undercling, and I stood tall, hitting the next crimp as my body seemed to drift away from the wall. A moment of pause, and, like a scene from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I uttered, “Whoa.”
As I latched that crimp on Let It Burn, doubt entered my mind. Cool, I’ve done the move I hadn’t been able to do, I thought. But I feel pretty bad. Maybe I’ll take here and try tomorrow.
But then I remembered that there was no tomorrow—not for Let it Burn. I had only this one chance to succeed and define the season. Suddenly—and with friends cheering below in the autumn sunshine—I realized I had been afraid of this moment. I had been scared to find myself in a position where I would have to try as hard as I could and know I could still fail. But I pushed, and I pushed, and a few minutes later I was clipping the chains.
As I drove out of the canyon that evening, leaves swirled into the open windows of my car. I thought of something a Norwegian climber said to me years ago:“You Americans are so funny, driving around in your silly vans, posting on Instagram about how you sent on the last try of the day. Of course you sent on the last try; after you send, you aren’t going back to try again!”
Perhaps we need to give ourselves a last try—a real last try—more often to unleash our competitive athlete and “let the big dog out.”
Also by Brian Stevens: Stop Using “Redpoint Mode” As An Excuse to Skip the Line
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