garage gym: Acceptable Risk

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Acceptable Risk

Everything we do in life has some level of risk of injury or death. Each person assess the level of risk involved in doing a particular task and weighs it against what is to be gained. Risk verses reward. Climbing and skiing come with inherent risk. Weather, avalanches, rock fall, loose rock or long run outs with poor protection all threaten to ruin your day. It’s your ability to assess the many changing variables, including your fitness level and headspace that can lead to either a great day in the mountains or total disaster. Throw in a partner who has a different level of skill, experience, fitness and desire and you have a very complex situation. And of course there’s intuition. Those “bad feelings” you get that need to be either honored or squashed.

After the recent deaths of my good friend Allison Kreutzen and her boyfriend Kip Garre, I found myself having to explain why someone would do something as dangerous as attempting to climb and ski Split Mountains Northeast Couloir. First of all, Allison and Kip were extremely skilled and experienced mountaineers and were well within their ability. Second, it was a very important goal of theirs to ski another fourteen thousand foot peak. For Kip and Allison it was an acceptable risk.

We live in such a privileged society that we have the time and resources to perfect our given sports to the point where we can risk our life for fun, fame, ego and personal satisfaction. As a man approaching fifty with a family of four, mortgage and a career, what I view as an acceptable risk has changed over the years. That doesn’t mean that I quit climbing (I tried to several times) or backcountry skiing, I just modified my program to manage the risk, and still have rewarding mountain experiences. I no longer free solo, climb ice or Cutler sandstone. I’m also down to just a few trusted partners. Although it’s extremely hard sometimes, I try not to judge others about what they deem to be an acceptable risk. It’s their choice.

A truly dangerous situation for me is to listen to my ego and think that I’m still the climber I was ten to fifteen years ago. While I may have the fitness and experience to pull off a big day in the mountains, I don’t have the time, dedication, or even the desire to climb at a high standard. With all I have going on in life, I find it difficult to get my mind focused on doing hard routes. That obsession has been lifted. I worry about being too cautious to climb fast enough to avoid a building thunderstorm. I don’t want to be in such hurry to get back home or to work the next day to not back up that shitty rap anchor. I don’t want to rely on my memory and think a given pitch will feel as easy as it did back in the day. Some of my old partners stopped calling, and I pass on a lot of invitations to go climbing. My success as a climber and skier has always been about being on the right route, with the right partner, on the right day. The enjoyment and satisfaction I get from climbing these days has nothing to do with the route’s grade, danger, or the hard man points to be gained. That’s my choice.

But let’s say instead of climbing and skiing my passion was being a cop (I know, that’s a pretty extreme stretch). Early in my career I would want to work in the city where the action was, gunfights and high-speed chases every night and day. Later, having had a few close calls and nothing left to prove, I could move my family out to the country and maybe take that desk job as chief of police. I would still love being a cop, and might even see a little action now and then, but my chances of being around to see my kids grow up would be much greater. Risk verses reward.

Recently, I’ve been taking my kids to the local skate park and started skating again myself. I had my old JFA deck tuned up and bought a shit load of pads and a new helmet. The muscle memory came back pretty quick, but I’m still asking myself if skateboarding is an acceptable risk.

(Photo: Positive Vibrations 2000 by Hans)

1 comment:

daveMay 23, 2011 at 6:51 AM
spike! nicely written and really hits home about how our adventures and willingness to accept risk are a changing thing in our lives...and not just going from bold to conservative as we get older but it reminded me of how we moved our way up the adventure and risk game from conservative to bold when we were young without the benefit of wisdom and experience.

life is just the coolest thing going: always changing and always offering a fair mix of challenge and satisfaction. dave
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Introduction

garage gym

I’ve always been a gym rat. I like to workout. In particular I’ve always been interested in strength and conditioning as a means to improve climbing performance. Bachar ladders, home made fingerboards, pull up bars, and crack machines have over the years littered my garages and lawns. In my thirty years of climbing I have almost always had access to a commercial gym. I have also accumulated a small library of books and articles on fitness and climbing performance. These include a dog-eared, twenty-year-old copy of Bill Pearl’s Strength Training, to my recently purchased copy of Eric Horst’s Maximum Climbing. After an extended lay off due to illness and pursuing other interests, in the fall of 2009 I began to train again.

After a few workouts at a local gym I began to question if it (a machine based circuit) was actually helping me. I was going through the motions. It was boring as hell. A few days later I stumbled upon an article in Outside magazine on GYM JONES the Salt Lake City based gym owned by famed alpinist Mark Twight. Since I’ve always admired Twight’s climbing, writing, and taste in music, I quickly drank the kool aid. The Gym Jones web site was a revelation. A short time later I discovered Mountain Athlete.com, Climbstrong.com and Cross fit. I soon realized that I had been wasting my time, and perhaps I had never really trained with any meaningful level of intensity. In Twight’s book Kiss or Kill Confessions of a Serial Climber he says, “…know the difference between working out and training”.

Since family, career, and other interests take up a lot of my time, I decided I needed the ability to train at home. Fortunately I have a large garage. I started with a pull up bar, fingerboard and a few dumbbells. Later I added kettlebells, a medicine ball, gymnast rings, a small climbing wall, and an Air dyne bike. The information age made it easy for me to find the books, websites, and videos by Paval Tsatouline, Dan John, Neil Gresham and others. Yet none of these training philosophies addressed the specific needs of my friends and myself, i.e. forty-something’s who climb Yosemite’s long hard free climbs and big walls in a day. High Sierra car-to-car, dawn-to-dark missions that combine ultra running/hiking with multi-pitch rock climbs and high ridge traverses (my personal favorite). We also skate ski, backcountry ski, as well as ride mountain and road bikes. Our training combines all these influences into a potent brew. The process is always evolving. We’ll try anything. Then we’ll evaluate it, modify it, keep it, or chuck it. Then try something else. The results speak for themselves.

Mike Davis RN

Truckee, California

Spring 2010