On the Other Side of Defeat Lies Opportunity
Why you should give yourself some slack when you hit a snag
“Unfortunately, the weather conditions won’t allow for an ascent tomorrow.”
Jean-Luc, our mountain guide, was as disappointed as the rest of us. The climb of Mont Blanc was supposed to crown our Alpinist course, and while it had been a great week of climbing, hiking, and making new friends, this just muffled the experience.
“The mountain will still be here next year,” he said, tentatively trying to smooth over the fact that the vacation was soon to be over, and we would all be back in the grind.
“And there’s another climb we could do as soon as the weather clears,” he continued.
I silently cursed my bad luck as I walked back home to our rented Chamonix apartment. Ironically, the sky was blue, and the French sun warmed my face.
I didn’t want to climb some fallback alternative. My desire was to reach the summit of the highest mountain in Western Europe.
My wife tried to cheer me up: “He wouldn’t have canceled if he didn’t have good reasons for it. Besides, his job is not to take you to the summit; it’s to bring you back safe.”
She turned out to be more right than she wanted to be. By the next morning, the entire valley was swallowed by low clouds. Definitely not a great day for climbing.
In the afternoon, I went to the guide’s office. And by then, the seriousness of the situation dawned on me.
An Italian party of experienced climbers had defied the warnings and made a summit attempt without a guide. They hadn’t made it back.
The realization: ego vs. reality
That moment I made a realization. The real struggle is not to reach the summit but to control one’s ego. To be able to turn back and call it a day, no matter how invested you are.
No wonder people make bad calls on climbs like Mount Everest. I can only imagine what it would feel like to be queuing at the Hillary Step, some 76 vertical meters from the goal of a lifetime, to realize that I might not make it back down if I don’t turn around now.
When you are that invested, not only physically and mentally, but financially as well, it is all too easy to take a chance and persuade yourself that you have the situation under control.
These psychological mechanisms work the same in more mundane, everyday situations as well.
A common hazard among beginner climbers is that they progress too fast. Their muscles and technique evolve faster than their tendons and ligaments, making them prone to injuries and pain.
I know this from first-hand experience: over the course of a few months, I went from climbing 5a to 6b, desperately trying to tick off a 6c or even a 7a.
Eventually, thanks to peer pressure and sheer willpower, I managed to claw my way up an easy 6c route, but my hurting fingers and forearms soon forced me to drastically decrease my training volume.
I have made the same mistake in running: wanting too much too fast. When I signed up for the Stockholm Marathon, I went from sporadically running 5 km once in a while to running around 40 km per week.
My body responded fine at first, but after a couple of months, I developed shin splints, which took what felt like forever to heal, and almost made me cancel the marathon.
In retrospect, I should have progressed more slowly and allowed my legs to adapt.
But again — my ego got in the way.
Relax, it’s almost never all-or-nothing
The problem is that the pain sneaks up on you. At first, it might not even be distinguishable from a regular bad workout. But gradually, it gets worse and worse. And by the time it becomes a real problem, you are typically so mentally invested in your goal, that you persist against all logic and ride it a little further.
So it continues, all the way up to your own little oh-shit-moment when you finally realize that you have to stop what you are doing, or things will get ugly for real.
It is all too easy to get stuck in all-or-nothing thinking under these circumstances. But unless you are literally standing just below the summit of Mount Everest with a $50.000 hole in your pocket, you can come back later. There’s a marathon next year as well.
Instead, try to see the situation for what it is. Sure, it’s a setback. But it could also be an opportunity to explore and develop other aspects related to what you were doing.
Early this summer, after spending way too much time at my desk indulging in comfort eating during the COVID-19 pandemic, I suddenly realized that my pants were too tight.
The beach body I wanted had been replaced with a full-blown dadbod.
After contemplating the probability of this being a world record in bad timing, I decided to bite the bullet and get back in shape, using the most effective tool I know for the job: heavy weight training.
You might disagree on this, but while cardio can burn more calories in a single session, weight training has been proven to increase the resting metabolism over time. That is because your muscles burn more calories than other tissue, and they continue to do so many hours after the actual workout.
Said and done, I started out with functional bodyweight exercises. But it quickly became apparent that my new dadbod physique was too heavy for doing any serious calisthenics work.
And as the gym opened again after the lockdown, I dragged my dadbod there to get access to more adjustable resistance.
Soon enough, my body responded to the exercise. It went so well that I decided to go all in and give the good old Advanced German Volume Training program a go.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with AGVT, it is a regimen designed to let you make ridiculous strength and volume gains in a short period of time.
I have done it twice in the past, and while the program is challenging, I got great results both times.
Nothing was going to stop me know, especially not that annoying pain that had started to emerge in the forearms.
You see where this is going.
Ego vs. reality, round 2
Yesterday, I had to quit my workout due to said forearm pain. And after discussing the problem with a physiotherapist, I got the verdict — 6–8 weeks of rest.
The root cause? Most probably, I have lifted too heavy in my pulling exercises, resulting in too much stress on the fingers and forearms.
Just as that day way back in Chamonix, I cursed my bad luck. And for a while, I tuned in to Radio Negative Self-Talk: “This was going so well! Why do I always let my ego ruin my training goals and screw it up?!”
Or did I? I took a step back and realized that this is ok. While the AGVT program would have been an accomplishment in itself, it was never my primary goal.
It was merely a tool to get leaner and meaner, so I could pick up where I left to pursue my REAL goals — stuff like L-sits, pistol squats, planches, handstands, and muscle-ups.
These feats have been on my goal list for more than three years, so it’s pretty ironic that it took forearm injury to remember that.
The good part is that I don’t need forearms or grip strength to train legs and core strength, so I guess that is what I am doing for the next two months.
And with the snowboarding season around the corner, aiming for pistol squats and excellent core strength until Christmas is probably the smartest thing to do. Winter is coming, as they say in GoT.
While lifting weights for a change was stimulating and fun in its own way, taking a break from it doesn’t mean giving it up forever.
“The mountain will still be here next year,” like Jean-Luc put it.
I just need to heal first.
Sometimes good things can actually come from bad. Sometimes you need to shift your perspective, and sometimes you end up realizing that this is what you should have been doing all along. On the other side of defeat lies opportunity.
Like that day, way back in Chamonix, when my guide Jean-Luc took me on that “alternative” climb. That turned out to be Arête des Cosmiques, a way more demanding and technical climb. The other guys in my group passed on the opportunity, so it was just him and me.
For a guy that had never climbed anything more spectacular than a 10-meter high cliff in Stockholm, scaling the exposed granite leading up to Aiguille du Midi was the experience of a lifetime, by far surpassing anything I would have experienced on the ascent of Mont Blanc.
