Climbing the Rock Wall of Self-Worth
My journey through classes and competitive rock climbing
Abby Bammerlin
Illustrations by Erin McGovern, photos provided by Abby Bammerlin
“Climber, climber, you may begin climbing now,” the announcer boomed into the gym.
I jumped up from my chair before the voice had finished. I had already tied into the rope, and it dragged along the floor as I turned to face the wall behind me. The rock wall was a 55-foot tall overhang, meaning it angled outward. I hated overhangs.
My shoes were three sizes smaller than my normal size, and they bent my feet into a claw shape. I walked up to the base of the climb on just the outside edges of my feet.
Before I got on the climb, I wanted to double-check that I remembered everything I’d been studying.
I mimed out each move to come. I pretended to climb without getting off the ground, just using my arms. I knew I looked silly to anyone new to the sport in the sea of people behind me, but my mind was focused on the climb and my checklist.
As my anxiety built, I noticed that my left toe wasn’t exactly where it should be, but I didn’t have time to fix it.
Are my hands chalked up? Yes, they’re chalked. Is it too much chalk? No, no. I need the extra right now.
I was about to compete in a sport climbing competition, which was always what my training gravitated toward. This discipline involves using ropes to climb walls between 40-60 feet. Scaling sport walls is an art that relies on endurance and the ability of the climber to follow the path of climbing rocks, also called holds.
In competitions, the routes that exist on the wall are designed to make climbers fall. They get a total of five minutes to climb each wall. Each hold on the wall is assigned a single point. If an effort was made to continue on a route, but the climber falls, they can earn partial points. Once a climber falls, they can’t repeat the route or get back on it. Whoever earns the most points wins.
I was at the second day of the divisional competition. My division was made up of 12 states, but I was only competing against 10 climbers that day. Only six would move on to nationals. The points separating me from the person in sixth place could be counted on one hand.
The divisionals competition was split into two days. On the first day, we had two routes to climb, but on the second we had one.
Today, I would only get the chance to climb that single route.
With all this in mind, I turned to the clock and saw I had 4 minutes and 43 seconds left in my attempt. I took one more deep breath before signaling to my belayer, the man who would be holding the ropes at the bottom of the wall, that I was going to begin my ascent. The judge behind him raised the score sheet and nodded for me to go.
My hands were shaking as I lifted them to the first hold of the climb. I was already off to a bad start.
***
When people ask me how I got into climbing, I usually tell them all the same thing.
“When I was nine, I wanted to have a birthday party somewhere really cool.”
While this was the reason I discovered climbing, that’s not really why I started climbing five days a week, 15 hours a week and 52 weeks out of the year for 10 years.
The real reason I got into climbing was because I’m a younger sibling. I needed to find a way to differentiate myself from my brother, Patrick.
Patrick is three years older than me. Growing up, we had all the same teachers, played the same sports and both joined scouts. I wore his hand-me-downs and even started playing tenor saxophone because he played it.
I simultaneously idolized him and found him insufferable. He was wicked smart and aced any test without studying. He was crazy quick on the football field but was even quicker when he was chasing me because I stole something from his room. He was the model scout, camping whenever he could and going on outdoor trips all over the country.
But I chewed with my mouth open, which annoyed him, and he wouldn’t let me play his video games, so we fought. A lot. Classic sibling stuff.
The fighting and bickering made me more competitive. The constant “Oh, so you’re Patrick’s little sister?” fueled me to stand out from him.
So I used the one thing I had on him: I wasn’t afraid of heights.
I joined the Cincinnati Slopers, a team based out of RockQuest Climbing Center, when I was 10 years old. We had two seasons; August to January was bouldering, which is a more endurance-based form of climbing, and January to June was sport climbing. Practices lasted three hours and were three times a week, but there was an unwritten rule that team members should climb any time they could. Most people climbed six times a week, but I was only able to convince my parents to take me for five.
For the first few years, it was great. I loved competing as an individual rather than a team, and I made it past local and regional competitions to the first day of divisionals every year. My dream was nationals.
In elementary school, I got to tell all my friends about rock climbing. They would gush about how lucky I was, and for a minute, I wasn’t anyone’s sister.
But as I got older, it wasn’t cool to play a sport anymore — it was just an expectation. Everyone around me started picking a sport that they would eventually devote themselves to for the next six years.
***
I turned my hip into the wall to reach the next hold. I delicately placed the tip of my shoe on a foot chip that was no wider than a pinkie finger. I pushed off that leg to reach up with my right hand, grabbing the next hold. I was able to rest my hands on this hold.
OK, this has been pretty manageable so far. No one would have fallen on this part of the climb yet. The hardest part is still coming.
I took that time to look at the rest of the route. The overhanging angle of the wall forced me to crane my neck to see. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the crowd behind me. There had to be hundreds of parents, coaches and other climbers watching me. While there were others climbing around me, my route was in the center of the gym.
I wonder if they caught that I messed up my hand sequence at the bottom. Can they see that my leg is shaking right now?
In the next section of the route, I would be given a huge hold to rest on, but the route moved laterally to the right. Getting there would require me to jump from those larger holds to another cluster of holds, just 8 feet away.
Really? A jump in the middle of a sport route?
I was never a very powerful climber. I relied mostly on technique and strategic body positioning. This was going to be a challenge.
***
As I entered middle and high school, I noticed that the classrooms started to look different. Students weren’t sitting at circular tables shared by five or six of their best friends. Instead, they were in isolated desks with 2 feet of space between each of them. Teachers didn’t assign fun worksheets or have themed days based on lessons; they just stood in front of the classroom and lectured. Tests became more and more important.
I could tell that the other students started to feel the shifts too. In high school, talk of college became even more prominent. These discussions weren’t about just any college either. It had to be the best one — the one that focused on research, the one ranked the highest in a particular field, the hardest one to get into.
Suddenly, classes turned into just a number in our GPAs. If I failed a test, there wasn’t time to analyze every question or understand what the correct answer was. We just moved on. An A meant I was safe, a B meant anxiety and anything lower was failure. Only the highest score was worth praising.
“You don’t know how to do derivatives?”
How come you can’t do this move on that climb?
“How’d you do on that last test?”
What did you place at that competition?
“Did you see the school rankings were out?”
How good at climbing are you really?
The questions about high school and climbing were different, but they were asked with the same intent.
How can I quantify my abilities over yours? Are you better than me? Did you get a higher score? Are you more deserving than I am?
Going to school was anxiety-inducing. Every report card was another confirmation of my inability to understand as quickly or as easily as everyone around me.
I asked myself how I would be able to do another four years of this in college, where the stakes were so much higher. Failing at college means failing to get a good job, which means failing at having a stable income, which means no travel, house or car. Failing now meant failing for the rest of my life. There were no redos or second tries.
Everything was all or nothing, and there was no end in sight.
***
I reached the large holds right before the jump. They were right next to each other, so I grabbed the one farthest to the right, skipping the leftmost one. I looked to my right and locked my eyes onto the next few holds I would have to jump to.
I took a deep breath. After building a little momentum in my feet, I pushed myself to the next two holds. I reached my right hand out and made contact with the first hold, but my foot missed its target.
Just like that, I was falling.
“OH!” the crowd exclaimed below me.
I was quickly lowered to the ground, where the judge met me to go over my score. He pointed to the hold I had rested on before the jump.
“That hold is bridge scored, so you won’t get any points for it,” he said.
“Uh, what?” I asked, my legs still shaking. “Wait, what's bridge scoring?”
“You skipped the hold to the left and only grabbed the hold to the right,” he said. “If you don’t touch both of the holds, then you don’t get points for either.”
I stared at him.
I had competed for six years at that point and had never heard of “bridge scoring,” but I wasn’t in a position to argue. I signed the card to accept the score and walked off into the crowd, hoping I could just melt away in the sea of faces.
Just a few hours later, official scores and standings for my category were posted. I squeezed through the horde of parents, coaches and climbers to find my name.
I was in seventh. My heart dropped to my stomach. It was just one spot away from nationals. I looked at the individual scores and felt tears welling up.
The difference between me and the next highest score? A single point.
One point. One hold. One ridiculous scoring technicality. That’s all that kept me from going to nationals.
It wasn’t just disappointing. It was infuriating. The score didn’t take into account how long I had trained, my strengths or weaknesses, how I felt the day of the competition, the injuries I was working through or really anything else. Sport climbing only provides competitors with one harshly scored chance.
I see the irony now. It’s exactly how I felt in school.
One test determines a score that can keep you from going to your dream college. A single exam can determine your grade in a semester-long course. One presentation can fail you out of your major. There are no redos or chances for constructive criticism. In some cases, you don’t even get to know what you did wrong. You just have to accept it and move on.
That day, I quit climbing. But I couldn’t exactly quit school. I felt trapped and helpless.
***
About a year after the competition, I was sitting in my room listening to music. I was an angsty teenager.
My dad came in and sat next to me on the floor. He asked me about school and some of my friends, and I shrugged it off. A cool silence fell over our conversation.
“Are you ever going to climb again?” he asked.
I hesitated, surprised at the question.
“Yeah, yeah of course,” I said.
I felt tears streaming down my face and looked away from him with embarrassment. Now, I’ve never asked, but I think he knew exactly what I was feeling at that moment. The thought of going back into that rat-race of competitions made me feel nauseous, but the feeling of needing to be the best at something pushed my answer out. After a moment, he offered up a possible solution.
“Let’s do it together,” he said.
That very next week, we climbed together. It was the first time I had been back in over a year, and it was rough. All the strength I once had was pretty much gone. My body felt heavy and clumsy where it once felt light and delicate. I knew I wasn’t fit to compete anymore.
So where did that leave me? A washed-up athlete at 17?
I wasn’t climbing as skillfully as I once had. I felt embarrassed to be seen climbing by my old teammates or coaches. But I climbed anyway. My dad cheered me along, and I laughed at myself barely being able to climb what would have been just a warm-up for me before.
After a few weeks, the clumsiness faded back into the carefully choreographed dance that made me fall in love with rock climbing in the first place. I’d fall off a hard climb and get right back on, unafraid. I even went rock climbing outside for the first time just for fun, which never would have been allowed during competition for fear of injury.
I sort of competed with myself to climb more challenging rocks outside. Slowly, I made some new friends who didn’t ask, “How hard do you climb?” but, “How did you get that move?”
Over the next few years, I became more than a number, more than a position on a podium, more than a younger sibling. I began seeing myself as an individual with strengths, weaknesses and everything in between.
I was no longer driven by my fear of not being the best anymore. What I felt was personal ambition.
***
When I came to Miami University, I arrived with the same ambitious mindset I had as a high schooler. I was going to be the best: the best writer, political scientist, journalist and student. I had my four-year plan for what classes I needed to take and what internships I should have to guarantee the best job.
College will let you plan out your entire life if you allow it to. Or you can open a different door.
When I was a first-year, I was incredibly lucky to have professors who opened that door for me. They encouraged me to ignore my grades. They asked me to produce my best work and defend it against their critiques. They asked me to take care of myself and my mental health over completing any assignments. They asked me to consider the material and form my own opinions instead of parroting their own or trying to appease them.
Those professors gave me the gift of being able to fall and get back up to try again and again and a hundred more times until I not only understood the material, but I could also argue and defend it.
After that first year, I could have gone right back into that “hunker down and focus on school” mindset, but I didn’t. I carried what I learned from my first year through all four years at Miami. I don’t put much value into my grades or how they compare to others.
I didn’t get an internship after my first year, and I didn’t take all the classes on my list. I studied abroad and traveled all over the world, something that was definitely not in my initial four-year plan. But it made me happy, and I learned so much more about the world than any class could have taught me.
Putting my self-worth into my falls only allowed me to see a small fraction of the journey. The true measure of a person is their ability to take that fall for what it is and continue pushing on and learning.
It wasn’t until college that I finally connected the dots between climbing and my own journey in education. I’m not addicted to the competition.
I’m addicted to the feeling of being driven toward a goal.
I’ll continue being a lifelong learner, just as I’ll continue climbing until my body falls apart. To make it even better, I’m no longer doing it to get an A or a medal on any podium but because I genuinely love it, even when I come in last place.
