Some Wicked Advice

Great advice for climbing - and life:



Wicked Gravity
Chris Weidner: Five tips to climb your best this spring
By Chris Weidner, Boulder Daily Camera, 03/13/2012

Over the winter I decided to try to make the next few months the best climbing season I've ever had.

I researched different training methods, interviewed climbers of all abilities and read countless magazine and online articles. The tricky thing about climbing is that there's no tried-and-true process or workout regime that works for most people like there is in running and cycling, for example. It's more complicated than that.

I was reminded that attitude, strategy and the mental aspect of climbing are at least as important as physical strength, and probably much more so. In fact, much of the advice I found has little to do with physical training.

I began with a list of what I thought were the most important concepts for climbing improvement. As I whittled it down to the following five tips I also realized that, with a little creativity, these tips are applicable to a lot more than just climbing.

Put people first.

The greatest thing about climbing is that it requires an extraordinarily deep level of trust between partners. Our ropemates literally have our life in their hands, and vice versa, every time we climb. That's amazing, yet terrifying. And it's why the climbing objective should always be secondary to the people with whom we choose to climb. After all, they have an enormous impact on our entire climbing experience, including our performance.

Decide what you want, and get after it.

Why do you climb? What do you want out of it?

No matter how hard you climb or how seriously you take it, goals help drive and steer your motivation. Define your goals as specifically as possible. Make them lofty yet attainable, and set a time frame to achieve each one.

Dream big. Expand your comfort zone. Rise to the level of the goals you choose.

Learn to deal with fear.

Whether fear of falling, fear of failure or something else entirely, fear holds climbers back much more than we want to admit.

Controlling fear in climbing is a lifelong process. The crux is differentiating the rational fear that keeps us alive from the irrational fear that prevents us from A) having fun and B) reaching our potential. Our fear is irrational when a relatively safe situation feels life-threatening. Like when the rope is properly anchored and secure on your harness, but the thought of falling makes you want to scream, sob and pray all at the same time.

The first step toward mastering fear is to acknowledge its presence. Next, try to identify your irrational fear and learn all you can about it: when, where and why does it sneak into your mind? Finally, once you know what you're dealing with, you can begin the coping process.

P.S.: If climbing never scares you, I recommend quitting immediately.

Variety is the psyche of life.

Even the most obsessed climbers switch their focus occasionally. Follow your enthusiasm, and when it dulls do something different. Go bouldering at Flagstaff, climb long routes in Eldorado Canyon, clip bolts in Boulder Canyon. We even have a world-class variety of indoor climbing in "Valmont Canyon" where four gyms are located within a mile of each other.

Mixing things up is not only good for your mind, it will stress your body in different ways, which aids recovery and wards off injury. Sometimes (gasp!) we need a break from climbing altogether. There's nothing like a little time off to stoke the psyche.

If only there was something else to do outdoors in Boulder ... .

Be flexible.

Like most things, climbing rarely goes according to plan. Embrace climbing's ups and downs (literally). It won't always be fun; you won't always climb well; you will get frustrated. But don't take it too seriously. With the right people, a few goals and a psychological strategy, you may just have the best season of your life.

Science Tuesday - Nomads, Marriages, and Medicine

Artifacts Show Sophistication of Ancient Nomads
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 12, 2012

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.

As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these nomads were looked down on — the other often is — as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town.

But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past.

These excavations dispel notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones. Grave goods from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that these people were prospering through a mobile pastoral strategy, maintaining networks of cultural exchange (not always peacefully) with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese.

Some of the most illuminating discoveries supporting this revised image are now coming from burial mounds, called kurgans, in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders with Russia and China. From the quality and workmanship of the artifacts and the number of sacrificed horses, archaeologists have concluded that these were burials of the society’s elite in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C. By gift, barter or theft, they had acquired prestige goods, and in time their artisans adapted them in their own impressive artistic repertory.

Almost half of the 250 objects in a new exhibition, “Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan,” are from these burials of a people known as the Pazyryk culture. ( Read More )

Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 12, 2012

In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up?

Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).

Now, with more five years of follow-up data, we can report firm empirical support for the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory.

( Read more... )

Things Adult Medicine Could Learn From Pediatrics
By PERRI KLASS, M.D., The New York Times, March 12, 2012

Twenty-eight years ago, I wrote about drawing blood for the first time, about the pain of the patient and the self-doubt of the medical student. In my first clinical experience, I was learning a strange new color code: red-top tube for blood chemistries, purple top for hematology, green top, yellow top, and so on.

In pediatrics, I soon discovered, the colors were the same but the tubes themselves were much smaller. And instead of those big needles I had learned to use on adults, we used butterflies, tiny needles with plastic wings to keep them stable.

I thought: If you can get enough blood through a small butterfly needle filling a small tube to do the necessary tests, why must we jab big needles into adults and fill comparatively huge tubes to do the same assessments?

It wasn’t the last time I wondered why children were treated with more concern than adults. And now it seems that attitudes long taken for granted in the care of children might be working their way up the life span to become more standard for adults.

( Read more... )