By Guest Contributor, Cat Salvatore

• Cat has a Substack: Indoor Outdoor Cat

• Cat is on IG: indoor_outdoor_cat

Stop what you are doing and take a moment to look at your hands. Really look at them. Do they remind you of a parent’s or family member’s? How have they changed since you started climbing? Personally, I have several rings I can no longer fit over my knuckles since I began climbing over a decade ago. A small price to pay for the amazing mechanical wonders that are my strong fingers. They hold onto edges that are less than the thickness of my phone, without its waterproof case, which incidentally is also excellent at keeping chalk dust out.

They are great, until they are not. Until I load then twist my fingers on the crux hold and my tendons produce an audible POP-POP to everyone watching me attempt my project. Our bodies are amazingly adaptable and resilient, until they are pushed past their thresholds.

Of course, any climber can tell you that certain injuries feel harder on the ego than the body.

We fear the perception that we are not trying hard enough, when in reality, we need to keep the intensity of a session on the lighter side to help facilitate rehabilitation. Rehabbing an injury takes a high level of both patience and restraint. We want to be back to our regular range of ability as soon as possible, but those tendons take time to heal. As do rolled ankles, broken bones, and recovery post childbirth.

There are, for the most part, at least vague timelines to recovery for various injuries, depending on severity and your sworn allegiance to systematic rehab. A broken bone potentially requires surgical intervention, x-weeks in a cast, and x-weeks of physical therapy and reconditioning of the muscles and ligaments. For a pulley injury it can take just as long to return to your previous baseline as a broken bone, depending on how badly it’s been injured. This can devastate a whole season of objectives, or if it’s on the milder side, put you back several weeks, but not several months. I’ve watched a lot of friends and acquaintances slowly return to climbing after giving birth, and for each person the timeline is different. There are too many factors at play, some of those factors cannot yet be left to do so unsupervised, but they are a joy to watch as they start to explore the world around them.

But what about timelines to recovery that are even harder to quantify, like grief?

Whether it be the end of a relationship, a job, or the loss of a loved one or pet, the toll these can take on us are significant, and often affect our climbing.  It can be hard to admit at first. You want to maintain your routine, see your friends, not let your climbing partner down by bailing on the regular Saturday session. But inevitably, we might need to admit to ourselves that stepping back, however briefly after a major life event, could be beneficial. It’s okay for climbing to take a different position of importance when life demands our attention be placed elsewhere. For climbers who are ambitious, regimented, and use the sport as a source of sanity— this is the hard-to-swallow pill.

Am I a climber if I’m not climbing (insert grade, discipline, or frequency here) right now? The answer is yes. You are, but you’re also a human with a complex life. Some folks need a prolonged break, while some need just a few days or weeks. If you’re showing up and only have an hour in you, you still showed up. Maybe that was all you needed that day. It can be especially difficult to deal with hidden injuries, health issues, and personal stresses that don’t present themselves in a way that compels instant visual recognition and compassion from others.

And what about those of us who feel the need to double down when times are tough? For some of us the only source of sanity when our worlds are upended is the routine we create around moving our bodies. After telling a climbing friend recently more of the details of my own multi-year illness, his reply was, “But I always saw you in the gym!” He did see me, and there were days when physically I wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep instead. But mentally I felt so unmoored that the only thing making me feel like myself was maintaining my routine. I was struggling to grasp the threads of normalcy that were unravelling from my world.

When I hadn’t figured out yet exactly why I was so tired and dizzy, I chalked it up to my own failings at nutrition or sleep. I thought I was pushing through when I was really neglecting symptoms and avoiding finding the root of the problem. For the last decade, climbing has been at the center of my life and has steadied me throughout many storms. What would I do if I physically couldn’t climb? A terrifying thought. My baseline shifted slowly, then quickly. What I once took for granted, like a long walk or a weekend of sport climbing, became a challenge and outright extreme feat.

Yet, I felt as though I had to hide that I was sick, or that maybe I wasn’t sick at all and just imagining it. Doctors later confirmed that I was indeed sick, although I suspected as much months before things snowballed that something was wrong. We are taught that being sick means everyone can see it, and if you yourself can’t see it, what does that mean? I constantly felt the need to overcompensate or explain why I wasn’t living up to the progress I’d been working toward.

“I slept bad again last night.”

“I shouldn’t have skipped that session because I was tired.”

“I must not have eaten enough yesterday.”

“I should have tried harder.” But it felt physically impossible.

Anyone who has experienced a prolonged health diagnosis, chronic illness, or pregnancy can tell you about “shifting baseline syndrome.” Some days you’re feeling pretty good, and others you’re not. As time goes on you learn to accept your limitations, but those limitations can change, and you’re required to accept new limitations. Before you know it things you took for granted feel more inaccessible. (Any mom can tell you about attempting to tie their own shoes at eight months pregnant.)  In the best cases we move slowly and steadily through our cruxes until we find ourselves relieved at the chains of our problem. A diagnosis and medication or an improved treatment and lifestyle changes. And in the happy case of a pregnancy, a new family member and lots of encouragement while you recover.

I think part of the reason I never stopped climbing throughout my nearly four-year illness was because I needed the community and I needed climbing to give me a sense of agency when so much felt outside of it. I needed the distraction of an arbitrary goal to take my mind off my worries.

I needed to feel the continuity of moving upward at the gym to counteract the gravity of what was going on with my health.

During this time, I still tried to train and goal set, much to my own physical and mental exhaustion. Yet, I couldn’t bear to let it go. There was the usual tired from a session, a tired I knew like an old friend, and now there was this new tired. And this new tired scared me like the runout from a missing bolt. I could manage it, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to be there.

Finally, after surgery last August, I found myself “free and clear.”  During a conversation with a friend in the weeks after, they said, “Now that you’re feeling better, you can plan to train and become the strongest you’ve ever been!” They didn’t say this to pressure me, we had been talking about training, and they knew I had my sights set on several goals that would require it. I hesitated in my response. For the first time in many years— I didn’t actually want to train. I wanted to relax. I wanted to enjoy climbing and seeing what my baseline would shift back to. Was that wrong? It didn’t really feel that way. After so many years of stress and pain, I sort of just wanted to— enjoy myself?

I'd almost forgotten, that was the whole point: to enjoy the imperfect machine that is my body and whatever it can do on any given day. Instead of focusing on what I wanted to do that I couldn’t yet accomplish, I would focus on what I could now do, in my state of recovery and see where it took me. I'd done a lot with so little mental and physical energy, where could I go without having to overcome that hurdle anymore?

Almost a year out from my surgery, I haven’t done a single training cycle. I’ve enjoyed bouldering outside with friends, started intermittently lifting again, bought a walking pad for my home office, and finally gone on some of my first bike rides in about three years. Now that was something I’d completely underestimated missing. I may try to train again so I can finally put some outdoor projects to rest, but I don’t think it will look like the training I’ve done in the past. After missing out on so much, I want to enjoy everything I can.