Motivation

The expiration date on that carton of Northeast Milk is quickly approaching, and I find myself struggling to understand my motivation to do much of anything. In High School, I believe such a sentiment has been labeled Senioritis, but high school is also contrived and constricting, things that climbing (at least, to rock climbers) is not. But the feeling that comes over me when beginning an essay for my second semester AP English class is all too similar to the feeling I get when trying to make plans to climb. I want to finish the essay, and obviously I want to go climb, but I'm not at all invested in the work I'll do to accomplish the assignment, and similarly, I feel detached from the things that used to motivate me to get up and out on the rock.

In the past, a lingering project or the excitement and freshness of a new area, or the thought of putting my paws on something I hadn't tried before was more than enough to saturate my brain with the type of tenacity necessary to make hiking with structurally inefficient packs and spending a day with smelly climbers and far too many black flies simply to fall, a lot, off of a lot of problems seem like a perfectly reasonable idea.

But six years of climbing here have exhausted a lot of my immediate options. I've completed most of my old projects, and the remaining all feel too difficult to finish before I leave this August. The boulderfields, once ripe with possibilities and new, unexplored blocks and problems hidden behind the next crop of pines are now more familiar than the streets of my hometown.

Interestingly enough, it's only when I exhaust the initial attractions of climbing that I begin to see and appreciate the facets of the sport that I hadn't considered to be as important. I've come a very long way from the my gym-rat days of Electric City Rock Gym, where a bouldering session generally meant four hours of flailing on V2's or chatting it up with the local homeless before they set off to chew on barbie doll heads and/or fling their fecal matter at the nearest roadkill. Now, a gym session consists of flailing on V4s and the homeless problem has been contained.

Seriously though, while grade-chasing has never been a motivation of mine, mapping my strength and measuring my ability is slowly becoming the main reason I get psyched on going to areas like Nine Corners and Great Barrington. Repeating old projects helps me to appreciate where I've been and where I'm at, while simultaneously providing the best kind of training for what's to come.

Lately, I've also made a couple trips up to McKenzie, one of which included a large group of new climbers, a few of which had never been outside. Seeing them really realize what climbing is all about, and watching them humbled by the apparent infinite mystery of a new boulderfield is incredible. I realize, seeing them try at Great Roof of China and Brock Lee Soars and even the mossy, dirty, unnamed slabs, that I have progressed in parts of my being vastly more significant than strength, my place as a climber in the northeast is much different than theirs, and if nothing else, that is enough to get me on the road at eight in the morning on a Saturday with a coffee in the cup holder and a crash pad in the trunk.

-WB

I have a new camera, D7000, expect more picture posts.