Free The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers by Arno Ilgner

clipping. All he could see was his goal: clipping the bolt. He did not notice the subtle flaws in his technique that were rapidly draining his strength and throwing his body out of balance.

    Pay attention to subtle rock features such as small pinch grips and out of the way footholds. They will help you turn a struggle into a dance of balance and efficiency. Photo: Jim Thornburg
    A friend of mine experienced the importance of subtleties during the first free ascent of a very difficult climb called Fiddler on the Roof in Fremont Canyon, Wyoming. The crux of the route involves climbing a ten-foot horizontal roof. Steve Petro, a very strong climber, had worked out the sequence of moves in two halves. The first half involved five feet of upside-down finger jamming, and the second involved long moves between assorted flakes and hand jams. Steve had worked the route for many months, and though he found the moves very difficult, he was consistently able to climb either half of the roof. But despite strong efforts, he couldn’t link the two halves of his sequence into an all-free ascent. Even when he felt strong going into the second section, the linkage thwarted him—again and again.
    Frustrated, Steve finally gave up his claim on the project and offered the first ascent to Todd Skinner, who was traveling through town. The pair went to the route and Todd suggested that Steve give it another go. Steve got on the route and, again, could climb both halves separately but couldn’t link them.
    Todd went up and worked the moves out the roof. Then he came down and gave Steve a subtle suggestion. Todd, a very precise technician, had noticed something while Steve was climbing. Steve kept body tension through each half of the climb, but when he transitioned between the two halves of his sequence, his hips sagged down slightly. Todd felt that if Steve would suck in his hips during the transition he would be able to link the sequences. Steve took Todd’s suggestion, and on his next effort linked the two halves and made the free ascent. Fiddler on the Roof is rated hard 5.13, but we really don’t know how hard it is because no one has repeated it. Todd couldn’t do it, nor could other climbers who gave it their best efforts. The difference between the free ascent and countless efforts involved a three-inch shift in the position of the hips.
    Petro’s subtle hip shift was manifested by his body, yet its root was in his mind. By breaking up the climb into sections, a useful tactic, Steve was able to focus on and refine two more manageable sequences of moves. Steve’s body, intuitively, knew how to keep the hips tight to the rock when moving from jam to jam. The transition between the halves, however, formed a psychological break, a place where Steve had not applied his attention. As his mind jumped from the first sequence to the second, the flow was lost, hips sagged, and that brief loss of attention was enough to sabotage the ascent.
    There are two points here. First, little things matter. The attention you pay to the chance of a fall, rather than to maintaining poise, drains large amounts of energy. The way you perceive a climb, the body memories you develop as you work a sequence, the words you choose when you speak to yourself—everything you do, no matter how subtle, has an impact. The Life is Subtle process is about learning to notice the little things and using attention to perform them impeccably.
    The second point is that the body and the mind are a single, interrelated unit. The body has characteristics that we normally think of as belonging to the mind. Your body has “memories,” which sports physiologists call schemas. (Schemas are referred to as engrams in Europe, but schema is the accepted term for American physiologists.) Schemas allow you to “remember” the complex combination of muscle activity and balance involved in riding a bicycle. Schemas exist partly in your brain and partly in the nerves and fibers of your