"Bro, V8 Isn't THAT Hard!"
I hyper fixated on the Reddit thread on my phone.
“Bro, V8 is pedestrian. I live in Boulder, Colorado and I see people here climbing V8 all the time, so it’s really not that hard. V8 is mediocre…. pedestrian at best.”
I could feel an aneurysm slowly forming in the deep recesses of my brain.
“i LiVe iN AsPeN cOlorADo ANd eVeRY OnE HeRe maKEs $2 MiLlIoN a YeAr, sO $200,000 A yEar Is NoT tHat mUch…”
I set the phone down on the pads. I was ready for my first burn.
I approached the starting holds of my Moon Board project – a stout benchmark V8.
I pulled onto the holds and felt strong and secure. I stuck the long gaston crux with ease. My engaged lats whispered sweet neurological nothings to my brain. Physically, the confidence was there, but as I sunk my hips, poised for the infamous Moon Kick, thoughts of Reddit bros broke through the doors of my beautiful mind palace, where my ego was naked and vulnerable.
“Pedestrian?!”
I slipped and fell right before the top.
“At fucking best?!”, I screamed as I fell through the air like a bag of disappointed sand, flat backing onto the pads below. The air quickly expelled from my diaphragm.
Gasping, I made my way back to the bench, determined to google the definition of pedestrian and mediocre. However, before I could continue to rage scroll through my phone, the only other person there asked if I was okay.
I couldn’t afford to lose my train of thought. Still struggling for air, I ignored him and began to google the definitions - pining for any kind of validation.
Jabroni didn’t even use the definition of ‘pedestrian’ correctly, I thought to myself, while completely ignoring the definition of ‘mediocre’.
I threw my phone to the pads and waltzed up to the board, still wheezing. Ready for my second attempt, I pulled onto the start holds still feeling strong. I felt mellow and relaxed on the subsequent moves, only slightly dizzy. Unfortunately, I missed the lunge to the crux hold, and fell to the floor.
“God damn it!” I screamed.
“Ah man, so close!” exclaimed the stranger on the bench. Trying to make me feel better, he added, “That looks pretty hard!”
“Yeah, well apparently it’s pedestrian,” I mumbled dejectedly, already looking at my phone.
“What?” he asked.
But I was already too deep into Reddit to afford a response. I read another comment:
“If anyone is capable of doing it then it is by definition pedestrian, even V10 is pedestrian. Any halfway serious climber can climb V10.”
I could feel an uncomfortable pressure building in my head and chest as a flood of rebuttals flowed through my mind palace ready to defend my sheltered ego from the Reddit bros:
“40% of Americans are considered obese so at least 120 million people are going to find V8-V10 quite difficult.”
Some people who dedicate their entire lives to climbing won’t even send V8. Even V6 takes a significant amount of work to achieve for some.
Are you fucking trolling?
Etc.
But being the smug and hypoxic individual that I was at that moment, I eventually settled on:
“Bro, just skip to the part where you show us your 8a.nu score card so we can see all the ‘pedestrian’ problems you’ve climbed.
“What?” said the stranger next to me, snapping me back to reality.
“I didn’t say anything,” I replied wheezing, trying to save face.
“Oh, okay,” he said, puzzled.
I decided that I should close Reddit for the day. Still kind of tired from my last go, I decided to rest a little longer and catch my breath.
I opened Instagram instead.
Staring in disbelief, I once again fixated on the screen. It was like God, the universe, and Ken M himself were all trolling me all at once.
“V9 is as close to V1 as it is to V17 so that means V10 is a moderate on the bell curve.”
I felt dizzy. My head and lungs were throbbing.
“Is this it?” I thought. “Is this how I die - via a social media-induced aneurysm of rage and disbelief?”
I rushed up to the board to distract myself from my inevitable and sudden death. I pulled onto the start holds and fell going for the first move.
“Oh man, that looks like a boxy start. No worries, you got it!” exclaimed the stranger from afar.
I silently sulked back to the bench.
“Ya know….I never knew that in order to generate an accurate bell curve that all you had to do was poorly divide the highest number by two…”, I whispered, as I practiced my thousand-yard stare deep into the soul of the Moon Board.
There was an awkward silence for a moment.
“Uh…what?”
“Forget taking a sample population! I guess if Danny Woods and the Mellow boys send a few V17’s then V10 is a moderate for everyone else hahaha!”
“I wouldn’t say that V10 is…”
I began laughing maniacally, frantically grabbing at my phone in a desperate attempt to distract myself. Maybe I just need better beta, I thought to myself.
I found a video that looked suitable and began to watch. I knew all the previous moves well, so I skipped to the end to see how he made the final throw, but as he went for the last hold he fell.
I opened the video’s description to see if there was more insight.
“Yeah, I couldn’t complete the last move and snag the send because I am tired today, but judging by the lower moves this problem is honestly pretty soft, probably more like V6…. Anyways remember to like and subsc….”
I threw my phone at the Moon Board, and it exploded into infinitesimal pieces.
I heard a loud gasp and then a long silence. I remained there transfixed on the board. The blue and green lights were taunting me. I erupted into a broken and disassociated rant.
“V8 isn’t mediocre bro! Like who the hell actually thinks that Midnight Lightning is God damn mediocre? It’s a fucking accomplishment! ‘Ohhhhhh just romping up some moderates today here in the valley bruhhhh!!’ Says the guy who has watched endless hours of beta videos, is on three different $500 a month training protocols, while also using blood panels, glucose meters, sleep trackers, and macro calculators. Also, who downgrades something that they didn’t even send!? The fucking audacity of that! Go put on some John Bachar 1990 bricks for climbing shoes, wake up hungover, suckle a tab of LSD, and then do Midnight Lighting with no pads and then tell me it’s ‘mediocre’….”
I began to wheeze uncontrollably, which mercifully cutoff my seemingly endless and incoherent rant.
I continued staring straight ahead at the board, struggling for each breath. When I was finally able to breathe normally again I addressed the annoying guy next to me, thinking I would finally get a meaningful response from this badgering fool. I looked up to see what he thought, but he was gone.
“Huh, that’s weird,” I thought to myself. “Was he ever there? Now that I think about it, I never even looked at him. Was he just a voice in the back of my mind? Perhaps it was just the faint echoes of my beaten ego reverberating -imploring the sick part of me to let this all go. Am I even real? Are climbing grades real? If they aren’t then what is?”
The gym stereo started to play Where Is My Mind by The Pixies.
“Did I just Tyler Durden myself?” I panickily wheezed.
I thought of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy:
“Don’t panic.”
I began to panic. In desperation I ran back to the Moon Board. I breathed deeply.
“Come on you can do this…. breathe…. breathe…. fuck…. wooooah…. come on…. oh Godddd……. let’s go…. let’s fucking go!!!”
I viciously latched onto the starting holds and anime screamed like Goku unleashing a full throttle Kamehameha. I engaged my steel fingers. I felt the tempered muscles in my lats begin to fire. I thrutched upwards with the speed of one of those poor airbag-prank victims. But instead of my head flying through the ceiling, I was aiming for the fucking stars.
I immediately dry-fired.
It was so loud that I could hear the gym fall silent. I didn’t even hear music anymore.
I could begin to feel the warmth of tears form in my eyes. I laid there on my back a while. Time stopped. I was lost in a fever dream. I recalled the words of my high school basketball coach reverberating off the walls of time.
“My dog took a huge dump in my yard this morning. Your performance tonight reminded me of that.”
I began to feel an immense sense of disappointment, failure, and insecurity as my fragmented mind occupied the liminal space between the corporeal and metaphysical worlds. For a moment, I thought I could hear God weeping.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“Hey man, you okay?” said a familiar voice.
I looked up and saw none other than Danny Woods himself.
“You were with me all along…” I whispered - the tears still welling in my eyes.
“You can’t take that shit too seriously dog. Never go full Return of The Sleep Walker, homie. You just need to drink that vino and vibe, dog. We put V10’s on Mellow dude… shit’s still hella hard.”
He then slowly took off his shirt and pulled out a can of Fat Tire from the ether. He raised the can to his eye-neck tattoo and began to pour. I watched as the great green eye blinked as it slurped down the sponsored libation.
“What the fu…”
But before I could comprehend it, I was suddenly ripped from the ethereal world, dragged out by the powerful current of a great river. I struggled to the surface. Drowning.
A brief eternity later I awoke on a bank under a great tree. The water was slow and calm. Fragmented and forgotten memories came and went like the falling leaves.
I observed the leaves as they gently kissed the water and gracefully flowed forever away. Each one passing by for just a moment, just enough for me to acknowledge their presence and individuality.
On one decayed and rotted leaf I saw an old sport that was taken too seriously, and how awful and upsetting it was to look at that leaf. I saw heartbreaking death on a thing where there was once life. I felt a sense of relief as it continued down the river.
“Why are you drinking water on the sidelines?! Water is for pussies and pregnant women…”
My old coach’s voice echoed away with the withered leaf.
On another I saw my high school best friend and I at our local YMCA climbing wall, rocking oversized Tarantulaces and rustic tube-style belay devices. We felt so free. The leaf was bright and beautiful to look at. I was sad to see it go.
On another resplendent leaf I saw an Arkansas night and a campfire surrounded by future lifelong friends. I saw my first trad lead and how excited I was to just feel so alive. I saw the first climbing trip where I met my wife. I saw the honest life in her eyes when she laughed.
I didn’t see any of the grades.
I felt a measure of peace and looked up to the great tree and all its beautiful leaves.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I woke up still laying under the Moon Board. I sat up and looked around. I noticed the broken pieces of my phone scattered about me. I got up and went to the bench, sat down, and took off my climbing shoes and just sat there for a moment. I somehow felt lighter.
I reflected on more of the weird ass things that my old basketball coach had said.
“Do you kiss your sister? Because only people who walk the ball down the court kiss their sister.”
“What the hell was he on?” I laughed.
I looked at my broken phone scattered about the pads and sighed.
“What the hell was I on?”
The whole incident reminded me of one of those salutary spiritual experiences one acquires from taking too much ayahuasca. Unfortunately, the only thing that I was tripping on was a fragile ego.
And so, I thought perhaps at this nexus of fragile egos, somewhere between insecure sandbagging and feeling insecure because of sandbagging, there remains the forgotten concepts of fun, friends, and adventure. The nexus lies somewhere under a great tree with many more beautiful leaves to give.
I smiled and went to collect the pieces.