If You Need It, you Can’t Have it
performance stress on karly’s first 5.13c - decoded by coach dana taylor
A note on this piece
I invite you to come with me back in time for this piece. To a place you may not have been to—but let me take you there.
To a feeling—performance stress on a redpoint—that so many of us experience. Let me walk you through a story of that in my climbing.
To understand more fully what really goes on when you experience performance stress, Coach Dana Taylor will demystify this experience from a biopsychological perspective and explain the interplay between our brain, our nervous system, and our behavior.
Quick Navigation Links
- → The Send You're Chasing is Running Away From You
- → The Psychology of Redpoint Climbing Performance
- → How Attachment to Grades Sabotages Your Progression
- → The Power of Detached Confidence on Rock
- → Practical Mental Training Strategies for Climbers
- → Key Takeaways
- → Train Your Mental Game with Headpoint Training
- → New Athlete Intake Form
The Send You're Chasing Is Running Away From You
Initial Impressions
Streaks of orange and gray rip down the wall - sculpting tufas like gargoyles over the canyon. Wind passes like secrets from tree to tree; suspending my attention skyward. I feel I am not alone. Las Animas (The Spirits), the namesake of the crag, are here too.
This place holds everyone that has been here before me. I can feel it. It feels like it holds everyone that is to come after me too.
And, while I may occupy this space for a sliver of time, I am just a blink of an eye to Las Animas. My time here will fold over like the waves of tufas around me, absorbing more than what can be held in a single moment. At most, I am a nameless thread in the loom of Las Animas.
Infierno del Dante (5.13c/8a+) is towering. And it’s a classic. It is notoriously run out and scribes over 100ft of incredible climbing through rolled tufas, biting crimps, and near-frictionless slopers at the chains.
The sustained nature of the route is punctuated by a compression boulder at the start, a precision deadpoint in the middle, and an almost-comp-style boulder on flowstone at the chains.
I was actually first drawn to this route because of how run out it is. I wanted the mental challenge of that. I wanted to dance with the spirits up there while being 20 ft run out. But, as I got closer and closer to the redpoint, the relationship between my climbing and the redpoint felt asymptotic. I was good at getting closer and closer, but there was still something out of reach about it. A secret still held by Las Animas, and not yet understood by me.
Working to understand this was the most challenging part of weaving together the send… and this thread ended up having a very personal shade to its hue. In the end, it wasn’t so much about the falling or the sending, but the sticky mentality of somehow feeling like I needed it… and figuring out how to disengage with that. Las Animas seems to always carry a lesson for those who climb there, me included.
Challenges
In addition to being quite run out, the route presented other challenges.
I tried this route for the first time in February 2023. Pulling all of the moves relatively quickly, but severely powering down in my larger pulling muscles and body tension after the second crux.
Often when climbers talk about training for a long route, we talk about pump in our forearms. But as a trainer, athlete, and coach, I know through my personal experience and through coaching others, that folks also experience being “powered-down”. That was a challenge for me to train for.
Another unique part of this route was the pace of it. After I passed the mid-route deadpoint, I still had to climb 30ft of sustained 5.12+ to a block (the final rest). If I climbed it quickly, it flowed so beautifully. But if I climbed it slowly, it would kick me right off. It seems silly to say a rock is “meant” to … anything. But this portion of the route is meant to be climbed quickly if you mean to send it.
And, while strength and pacing got me closer and closer to the send, the mental side of a project—the pressure I put on myself to send—was still limiting me.
The Psychology of Redpoint Climbing Performance
Balancing the Coin
However, like a coin, there is another side to the experience. That same willpower needed to get me in position to send, barred me from climbing very well on redpoint burns. My movement was tense and robotic. I found myself too keyed up to climb as well as I could if I were more calm. Essentially, I cared too much. I climbed like I needed it.
But if you need it, you can’t have it.
Finding the balance between these two sides of the very same coin, is the real crux of projecting. You have to be able to balance that coin. You have to care enough to prepare and try hard but not care so much that you can’t flow. You’ve got to balance the coin on its edge for enough time to climb without knocking the coin on its face.
If you need it, you can’t have it.
In modern society, the prefrontal cortex does a lot of heavy lifting. This area of the brain is responsible for higher-order cognitive function, including speech, spatial reasoning, and attention regulation. It’s also the part of the brain that organizes thoughts and holds your inner dialogue.
However, motor control and emotional regulation happen in a different area of the brain. The motor cortex is responsible for movement and physical athletic skill, and the amygdala–part of the limbic system–handles emotional regulation. The limbic system and motor cortex work together to influence movement.
Alright, let’s quickly review the terms we’ve learned so far:
- working memory: amount of ‘processing power’ available for your brain to use across all its different functions
- prefrontal cortex: a region of your brain that is responsible for higher-order reasoning and executive functioning (including speech, spatial reasoning, and attention regulation, among others)
- motor cortex: a region of the brain that controls voluntary movements
- limbic system: a larger region of the brain that controls emotions and instincts (the amygdala is part of this system)
- amygdala: specific area of the brain that’s responsible for emotional processing
With these definitions in mind, we can now explore the difference between procedural memory and explicit memory.
Procedural memory is the type of memory that allows you to perform skills without conscious thought. This type of memory is sometimes referred to colloquially as “muscle memory.” In climbing, procedural memory is responsible for storing coordination sequences that are often too complex to recall each step or muscular engagement accurately via conscious thought. The bulk of these sequences are processed in your motor cortex.
Explicit memory, then, is the type of memory that requires conscious thought. In climbing, you likely use this type of memory when you’re trying new beta (for example: right hand to the jug, then left hand to the crimp), or focusing really hard on one specific piece of beta (for example: telling yourself to press into the left toe). Explicit memory draws more working memory to the prefrontal cortex–and away from regions of the brain that control movement and emotion.
So then, when an athlete’s prefrontal cortex is very active, the amount of working memory available for other areas of the brain becomes limited. Because the prefrontal cortex plays such a critical role in modern life, it is common for this area of the brain to be overworking in athletic performance too–especially if the athlete is feeling a lot of pressure to achieve a goal they’ve worked very hard for.
An overactive prefrontal cortex feels like your mind is stuck in thought loops–sometimes racing thought loops. Your mental chatter may be consumed by worry, or what not to do (for example: “don’t fall,” “don’t miss that clip,” “don’t blow it now”). You may be hyper-focused on social pressure (for example: “I look like I don’t belong here,” “What will think of me?”). Or, you may be holding tightly to beta sequences that you are specifically cueing with your thoughts.
High achievers often feel more pressure to perform and are worse at downplaying the importance of a high-pressure situation–both of which concentrate working memory in the prefrontal cortex. Focusing on the pressure can limit activity in the brain related to movement and procedural memory. By letting go of pressure and rewriting unhelpful thought patterns, you are able to give more working memory to what your body knows–your procedural memory–over what your mind thinks it knows. In other words, the more you want something, and the more your thoughts focus on how badly you want it, the more difficult it is to access the parts of your brain that will actually help you achieve it.
Truthfully, this was a lesson I had learned before. Sometimes, that happens - we need to learn something again and again until we really know it. We need to be humble enough to rediscover it - to pull it up from the depths and take a look at what we’ve got going on down there.
Subconsciously, I really felt like I needed to send Infierno del Dante. But why?
How Attachment to Grades Sabotages Your Progression
To release the need for a send on this route, I had to understand how this route and I got so tangled up down there and cut myself loose. And it took letting go many, many times.
The first time I tried to release it, I sensed my ego being sneaky.
“Ok, I let it go... Can I have it now?!”
Nope, nice try... but that wasn’t it and you know it. Have to go back in.
“Ok, I feel like I need it because I have worked hard and I want to complete what I’ve started. I will feel like a failure if I don’t complete it. I have need-to-prove-myself tendencies and this is a manifestation of that....again.”
Gulp. There it is. This was the same lesson I needed to learn to send my first 5.13a in 2019 and there it was… again. Except one major difference between 2019 and 2023 was that now I am a full-time, professional, public-facing climbing coach. I felt like I needed to send this to prove myself to those who doubted me and my abilities as a coach–nd the only way to do that was to send. Yikes… talk about a way to have a bad time doing something that you initially pursued out of joy.
Finding the source of this fallacy and detangling it was the most important thing I needed to send this route. It probably took me 2 days of reflection to get out of my own way, out of my own loop. I needed to fully accept and be content with myself without the send. Untangling the weight of the send from my own identity was not so easy–this one goal was all I’d been thinking about for weeks on end. N. In order to let go of the weight of the pressure, I had to do something that felt counterintuitive to “making progress”--leave the route alone for a few days. The self-reflection I did during this time is what helped me get out of my pressure-building loop.
The Power of Detached Confidence on Rock
Feeling a Shift
On the day I sent the route, I pulled onto my first redpoint burn caring a lot less than previous goes. Laughably, I don’t think I cared at all and I gave a bit too much weight to the side of the coin that didn’t need it. My foot slipped around bolt 7. The coin fell on its tail.
“Welp,” I thought, “I’ll just go back up, tighten the core tension at that one spot, and see what happens.”
And, finally, I balanced the coin.
I flowed, completely without thoughts, until I was looking up at the final moves that hemmed the chains. I switched in and out of the kneebar rest, letting my pump cease and letting my thoughts come back into my head…
Many people fall up there on redpoint burns. It is such a test of your movement and balance skills. There is no way to just “power through it” - I needed to really understand my hip trajectory and weight transitions to use those directional, sloping foot holds. I knew this redpoint was very, very much not in the bag. As I looked up at those moves, I reminded myself that I did not need this climb.
Rather, I thought through the moves and how they felt in my body and how I could enjoy them best. How I could climb confidently, decisively, and in a way I would be proud of - send or no send. Pulling out of the rest, I excluded my thoughts again and only experienced the rock in my hands and the pressure in my feet.
If you need it, you can’t have it.
I didn’t need it anymore, so Las Animas let me pass. I sent Infierno del Dante that morning.
Going forward, I hope I hold this lesson a little closer to the surface. If I don’t, I know I’ll have to dig it up again to balance the coin on its edge.
Practical Mental Training Strategies for Climbers
Key Takeaways
Rigid attachment to a climbing goal can block your brain’s ability to access coordinated climbing movement. Learning strategies to release or reinterpret performance pressure will help your brain and body perform their best.
The climbing goals that matter the most come to you when you approach them with passionate curiosity rather than desperate attachment. Master this mental shift to develop detached confidence, and watch your climbing transform from ego-driven struggle to authentic expression.
Structured mental training can help you overcome climbing stress and learn new habits to manage performance pressure on redpoint attempts. You can learn to improve your climbing mindset with support from a coach in Project Direct’s Headpoint Training program.
Fast-forward to now, and I'm not scared anymore. It's kind of crazy. Karly is the best investment i have made for my climbing. she has completely transformed my head game. I am performing better than ever and having more fun. Headpoint Training is truly priceless.
