Lead Head - By Lisa Levine
Photo by Greg Petliski
Lead Head
By Lisa Levine
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“On that first route, how scared were you?”
It’s an odd question Troy asks me, at least the word “how.” I don’t know that I can define an amount of fear, although I can remember features of the climb – prockets of limestone and a fat, liebackable flake. Fun, easy terrain. I remember mental instructions to various body parts – Foot, move there! Hand, find a hold up that way! At the time I think I said zero, because the question sounded like a joke to me. Was I point seven percent scared? Point two? It’s like, who measures this stuff? It just works. Or it doesn’t. But is that actually the case? In her January 2023 talk in Tucson, professional paraclimber Mo Beck described fear as “a muscle; the more you stretch it, the more you learn how to use it.” Awareness is a foundation for developing or maximizing the fear “muscle,” especially in the complex psychological state of lead climbing. Lead head, or a climber’s ability to synchronize mental state and movement, plays a major role. Like all good slang, the term’s connotation varies, but invariably denotes some state related to the psychological aspects of lead climbing, including fear management. Let’s break down aspects of each of three types of lead head.
1. Hypers: People saturated with emotion. They feel, and they know it. 2. Hypos: People unaware of emotions. They may feel, but don’t realize it. 3. Tolerators: People influenced by emotions to a degree, sometimes measurable.[1] |
Diego Diaz taking the whip over Tucson off the upper final crux of Hebe (5.13d/14a) at Beaver Wall
Photo by Michael Russo |
[1] The prefixes hyper, hypo, and tolerance are borrowed from a handout, “How Trauma Can Affect Your Window of Tolerance,” produced by the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
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Fear hyperawareness
Fear hyperawareness might look like:
I experienced a striking instance of hyperawareness at Crags with a friend who’s been climbing for a few years. Julie stopped between bolts on a curve of granite shelf, stepping up, then back down, seven or ten times, while talking about how scared she felt. “PTSD,” she said. Julie, as I interpreted from the other end of the rope, led from within a brain awash in emotion. After a very long time, she committed to the move that overwhelmed her, finished the route, and, after I lowered her to the ground, talked at length to another climber about trauma and working through its effects. She was specific and articulate, explaining every feeling she felt as it had happened. Hyper-awareness felt like a natural force in Julie. This place she inhabited, where everything had emotional tenor, drove her to ascend, and could also delay her movement. For those who lead out of an emotional awareness, hypo moments might be a power source, and like any outlet, there’s both danger and light. Although Julie worked her way through her fears, a lead head swept into emotions can bring a climber to full stop. Not up and “over it,” not down and uninterested in doing it, but simply stopped. |
Luke Bertelsen dancing up Just Do It at Punch and Judy Towers.
Photo by Lena Caton |
Being that Julie’s new to leading, skill might be a logical answer to her situation. The more experience she gains, the less scary leading will be – right? The problem with assuming that skill will resolve emotional contradictions like the desire to lead and fear of leading lies in climbing’s risk. Because the possibility of serious injury lurks in any scenario, regardless of difficulty, climbers’ brains may still be hard-wired to bypass years of training and expertise, leaping into lizard-like responses that were shaped in their earliest years of life, long before learning to flag or crimp. Nature or nurture, whatever we do when we have legitimate reasons to be afraid may be more self than practice. Some climbers – Julie’s photonegatives – have a sense of self in which emotions, like fear, live in compartments.
Melissa Russo finishing the crux sequence on Coup d'etat (5.13a/b) at The Orifice.
Photo by Michael Russo |
Fear hypoawareness
Fear hypoawareness might look like:
On a gorgeous February weekend, I’m moving up the first pitch of Ewephoria, thinking about hand jams, slippery feet, and lobe alignment. These thoughts must be fear-based, because when I enter a section where the movement is so smooth and natural that stopping to sew it up doesn’t make sense, I feel great, sort of terrified in the joyful way scary movies scare you by creating an authentic replica of fear. Feeling fearful, to me, isn’t expressed in emotion but in mechanics; I compartmentalize the emotion and instead become focused – fixated – on details. Is my hand facing the most locked-off direction? I switch it to find out. Is the foot firm against the facing rock? I might reposition it to be sure. Are the cam’s lobes as flush as possible in the crack? I release and reset it. This wasted movement is my body’s way of processing fear that my mind isn’t allowing me to feel. That’s why, back in that Las Vegas parking lot, my answer to Troy’s question was only, “I wasn’t.” I mean, I must have been scared. There was plenty to fear. So many stimuli in that space – neighborhood hikers, new partners, my preoccupation with picking my friend up from the airport a few hours later, the series of handholds and footholds asking me to focus, and the quicks demanding to be drawn back and clipped. Yet on that route, as on many routes, my mental frequency tuned to the technical things I could accomplish on the way up, and I had no answer as to the degree to which fear motivated me. It was locked away from my conscious mind. So many much-loved routes go this way for me: Chihuahua Power. Ego Donor. Marathon Man. |
Route after route, I have no idea what I’m feeling as I climb, even when, obviously, I’m thrilled to discover flow and scared when I struggle. I don’t know that the absence of detectable emotion equates to a healthy lead head. While leading, my emotional awareness shrinks; the feeling that makes me ‘me’ drops into a compartment of my brain disconnected from my conscious mind. My feet move, my hips crank or swivel, my knees bend and straighten – all the actions engage as the route demands without the intrusion of a pesky twinge of fear. While my ego enjoys the times when partners perceive this as a good lead head, I think it’s more the counterpart to hyperawareness – an extreme that looks like composure, but is dysfunction. Later, I’ll lie awake replaying the moves, stuck on that absent feeling – fear, pleasure, boredom; whatever it was, it’s still floating around in my consciousness, wanting to be felt.
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Fear tolerance
Fear tolerance might look like:
While the idea of putting a number to my fear level leading a forgettable 5.8 warm-up on a chunk of limestone surrounded by luxury tract homes outside Las Vegas sounded like work, it turns out, the how scared question has a simple answer. When I ask Troy to explain it, he says that “1 is cruising down the Rillito bike path [and] 10 is pumped out of my mind 10’ above a 0.1.” Mo Beck’s muscle analogy correlates with this state: with practice, climbers can learn to be psychologically aware of fear without losing themselves in it. This idea of a scale suggests a practice tool for juggling mental space between logic and emotion with grace, and for developing a natural sense of how much space fear occupies while stippling C4 rubber to minute deformations in geologic time. Tolerators incorporate fear in their leading, and while they might feel stress or pressure, it doesn’t bother them all that much because they’re constantly adjusting and responding to maintain a psychologically balanced state of mind. |
Rachel Mendoza leading the 10a on Hitchcock Pinnacle.
Photo by Jason Howard |
After Ewephoria, I belay Ali up the first three bolts on Ranch Hands. I’m tired; she’s focused. I notice her movement. It’s precise – cautious. She places a hand into a shallow fissure, removes it, resets it in the same spot, and stays with that. She talks to me about how very close she would like the belay to be. Although her actions communicate some fear, she isn’t stopped from sidling her feet right and then back up and over the long undercling barring her way. She leads, and looks, to me, like a person who knows that she’s fearful, but isn’t stuck on it.
Flow states like Ali’s happen both by accident and design; when I talk with a friend of a friend who pours himself up gym walls in a steady, powerful amble, he’s the type who gives a genuine answer to my thoughtless “How are you?” His body language on the wall and his persona, even to the superficial degree I know both, radiate emotional awareness. Another friend, influenced by yoga, climbs in a way that resembles breath, with deep rests and pauses. Still another acquaintance, whose patience remains fixed in my mind as a North Star of what cultivating a true relationship with rock can look like, stayed locked off below a bulge on a trad line (I think Centerpiece). I followed a guy up the climber’s-right route; she stayed below her bulge. I scrambled to the rap line several routes left and descended, pausing to say something encouraging because she stood there, poised, still below that same bulge. Her in-passing reply, along the lines that endurance was not her problem, captured something awesome, unthinkable, and novel – that a positioned limb could maintain such a sensation of safety that the person attached to it would rest, contemplating the next (intimidating) move, for thirty or forty minutes. I’ve never asked what that felt like, or if it was related to fear; what else would have blocked her from making the move? Her long, silent pause took the shape of a controlled fear-management state in which she must have tolerated a high load of stress hormones in order to gain dynamic confidence for the next move – as long as it took.
Flow states like Ali’s happen both by accident and design; when I talk with a friend of a friend who pours himself up gym walls in a steady, powerful amble, he’s the type who gives a genuine answer to my thoughtless “How are you?” His body language on the wall and his persona, even to the superficial degree I know both, radiate emotional awareness. Another friend, influenced by yoga, climbs in a way that resembles breath, with deep rests and pauses. Still another acquaintance, whose patience remains fixed in my mind as a North Star of what cultivating a true relationship with rock can look like, stayed locked off below a bulge on a trad line (I think Centerpiece). I followed a guy up the climber’s-right route; she stayed below her bulge. I scrambled to the rap line several routes left and descended, pausing to say something encouraging because she stood there, poised, still below that same bulge. Her in-passing reply, along the lines that endurance was not her problem, captured something awesome, unthinkable, and novel – that a positioned limb could maintain such a sensation of safety that the person attached to it would rest, contemplating the next (intimidating) move, for thirty or forty minutes. I’ve never asked what that felt like, or if it was related to fear; what else would have blocked her from making the move? Her long, silent pause took the shape of a controlled fear-management state in which she must have tolerated a high load of stress hormones in order to gain dynamic confidence for the next move – as long as it took.
Keeping in mind that a framework like these three mindsets captures sections of a mental spectrum rather than fixed destinations, I believe the tolerators represent the most sustainable mental state. Too emotional, and the lead isn’t about climbing but about another experience stirred up by a fear-inducing situation; too unemotional, and the same is true. Tolerators climb while aware of feelings, particularly fear, yet practice managing them as part of the big, fun picture that is lead climbing. Further, being aware of individual, innate tendencies is a starting point for having a healthy conversation with and about fears. Had I been able to say, “That was a two for me,” about that warm-up route, I’d have proof positive that I climbed with a reasonable awareness of my feeling about climbing on that day, up that route, with that belayer, and in those conditions.
What about you all, Tucson community? From where do you lead when you’re poised on a crystal intrusion the size of your pinky or an edge of granite that fully loads the weight of one-eighth of the ball of your toe - your head, your heart, or that woefully well-adjusted balance of both? After you’re off belay, could you answer the question: How scared were you?
About the Author:
Lisa Levine started climbing in 2013. She loves slab, Metolius thumb depressors, and belaytionships. Her fiction has appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Manifest West, and The Furious Gazelle. Comments about psychology of lead climbing? Contact Lisa at @alluvialdispositions or alluvialdispositions@gmail.com |
