“If 5.10 is this hard, I’ll never be able to climb 5.11”.
Hands up if you’ve ever had this thought. I have. I got so stuck in 5.10 that 5.12 was my life goal. You know, something I was hoping to achieve sometime, one day, at a point far in the future – definitely not today, tomorrow, this year, or next. 5.12 was just inconceivably hard.
But then, in April 2021, I sent my first 12a – just five months after I sent my first 10c. That’s a six-grade jump. It seems totally outrageous. And yet, it happened, because I learned something super important: what feels hard changes as you get better.
Hard gets… much easier
My brain told me that if climbing 5.10d felt like x, then climbing 5.11a would feel like x2, and climbing 5.12 would be equivalent to space travel, winning the lottery, and becoming the next Beyoncé. One can dream and all, but none of those things seemed remotely possible.
Then a funny thing happened. Once I could climb 10d, 11a felt just like 10d used to feel. And 11b felt just like 11a used to feel. And so on. Guess what: this continues. Climbs that are hard for you feel hard. Climbs that are easy for you feel easy. The grade doesn’t really play into how hard something feels for you at all.
Now, climbing 5.12a now feels just like climbing 5.11a used to.
Grades don’t matter?
They do and they don’t. They are useful tools to guide your climbing and measure progress. But most people draw far too many conclusions about grade x based on grade y. And it just doesn’t work like that. Just because some grade feels hard for you right now, that doesn’t mean harder grades will feel impossible, and you’ll never climb 5.12 or harder, and you may as well go and buy a lottery ticket right now and hope you have better luck with that.
Climbing harder is possible
It’s very possible to climb harder things. People do it all the time. I did it – and that means you can too. Go to the gym and look at all the crushers. They aren’t aliens: they’re just like you and me, only better. They thought 5.10 was hard at some point, and they definitely think 5.something is hard right now.
Don’t believe me? Go climb a 5.9. It probably feels easy. 5.9 was not always easy. Go figure.
You can definitely climb 5.12.
Things that used to feel hard become easy as you get better. So stop thinking about how hard progressing might be and go do it – you’ll probably be surprised how easy it is.
Photo credit: Ryman Wiemann