Bouldering Tip: A Flash is Useless Training (Jenya Kazbekova)

Training is a step toward something distant

“If you do something first try, that doesn’t mean you have learned anything. It just means that’s where your level is at…if you flash everything, it's useless training.”

- Jenya Kazbekova

When trying something difficult, the atta-boy platitudes from good-intentioned bystanders are to be expected. At every failure, you should expect the quick chorus of “trying is half the battle”s and "you'll get it next time”s and “at least you tried”s. And while it’s reasonable to appreciate these statements with grace and humility, it’s far easier to dismiss them with an eyeroll because, sure, trying is important, but failure sucks!

But buried within these platitudes is genuinely good feedback. Intellectually, it’s easy to understand the benefit of failure, but only when you’ve established the purpose of your climbing. Jenya doesn’t say that a flash is useless. She says that a flash is useless training.

When your purpose is training, meaning there’s an end goal on the horizon, that purpose necessarily excludes an immediate goal. The training-climb is a step toward something distant.

When your goal is to ascend a flight of stairs, a flash is cheating with an escalator. But if the goal is to reach the second story of your house, then an escalator is perfectly acceptable.

When your goal is to learn chemistry, then a flash is cheating on the midterm test. But if the goal is to pass a chemistry class, then cheating on the midterm is reasonable.

When your goal is to cultivate a window box garden, then a flash is using plastic flowers. But if the goal is to have something beautiful to look at, then bring on the plastic flowers.

I avoided climbs several grades above my comfort grade, because I insisted upon linear progression, so much so that I forced myself into a plateau. I’d get comfortable with a single grade and would convince myself that harder problems within that grade are a form of progress. And maybe they were…sometimes. But more likely, I felt comfortable. And comfort is hard to reject. But comfort, by default, means an absence of a training-minded goal.

I’ve given you a lot of information here, so I’ll leave you with a bonus piece of advice from Jenya Kazbekova:

“...you have lots of information that you just received about what you have to do, what you shouldn’t do, but once you are on the wall you should just turn off your head and trust your body that it understands what you want from it.”

When you are staring up at the problem, from the ground below, think all you want. But once you are on the wall, turn off your brain. Allow your body to move. And if that includes a failed send, good.

Answer in the comments, how do you handle failure?

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The climber: Jenya Kazbekova

The source: What it Takes to Become an Olympic Climber