A climber who can get away, if only for a day or so, at frequent intervals, to rocks small or big behind his house or on convenient hills, secures the best training for his balance, his nerves and his muscles, not by attempting extravagant gymnastic problems, but by practising, and always adding to, the number of his sequences of familiar climbing movements. He must learn to perform these with such facility that, finally, their execution becomes subconscious. On a long climb ten out of every twelve situations will be familiar to experience. Suitable training will enable him to meet these ten with the right motions, without conscious effort, automatically. The nerves and the will-power are thus economically kept in reserve for the remaining two.
Nerve.
Many of us take a day or two at the beginning of the season to get back our ‘nerve.’ We boggle at a bold reach, or feel inclined to crawl where we know we should stride. This is not due to any fine new sensitiveness to mountain danger, acquired during our civilized sojourn in the plains; it has nothing to do with vertigo or effect of height. It is simply lack of condition. By inaction we have allowed sets of automatic motions to become unfamiliar. The will has, therefore, to take charge, and does so tentatively, like a professor of metaphysics left in charge of a class of elementary school-children. The nerve communications are sluggish from disuse; the muscles are out of control, and distrustful of what the arbitrary will may ask of them. We become ‘nervous,’ and potter. This can all be avoided by reasonable and light practice. Regular exercise of the heart, the lungs, the muscles and the nerve-lines of communications, with occasional repetitions of our groups of familiar subconscious motions, will maintain a general level of fitness even out of training. If the machinery is kept working smoothly, we can soon get it going at high pressure again, and can return to top condition without any local strikes or nerve signals. The final tuning up to meet the call of the mountain holiday will then proceed easily, of itself, in action. For a man whose system is set, and who practises a consistent habit of living, the amount of actual exercise required during the intervals to preserve his elasticity is usually small, and tends to diminish. This is one of the compensations of advancing years.
Height and Reach.
No man by any pleasing afterthought can add to his height; although by suppling his shoulders and lengthening by exercise his trunk muscles he can extend his apparent upward reach. The stride of the tall man before us over soft snow; the long-armed man’s careless caress of a salvation hold well beyond our reach; the inimitable and perpetual rhythm maintained by the Agile Gibbon of the Zoological Gardens, on the security of his four whiplash limbs,—these are natural advantages, whose injustice we may challenge but not compete with. Their regretful contemplation suggests, however, the possible usefulness of a warning, and some consolations.
A man of great reach, whose span from toe to upstretched finger approaches or exceeds eight feet, has one undoubted advantage on difficult rocks, where holds are rare and precious. If his legs are long enough to allow him to sit across the smooth sheer walls of a chimney or to straddle it on small footholds, he has yet another. But he must expect to suffer from the drawbacks incidental to height. A tall man may be weak in the body muscles, with less suppleness and ease of balance, or, if he is muscularly developed all over, his weight is apt to increase with time out of all proportion to the suspensory power of his fingers on small holds. If he is tall, slight and sinewy, his strength of arm and hand is rarely proportionate to his greater weight, or equal to the greater expenditure on leverage which height requires of arms in balance climbing. If he is tall, muscular and heavy, this weakness pursues him in the same ratio. If chimneys are narrow, he is too long to ‘bridge’ them securely; if the holds are tricky and slight, he finds greater difficulty and effort in ‘folding up’ so as to use them, and in keeping his centre of balance well in and above his feet. It is a consolation for a short or slight man that great experts in climbing are to be found among men of every build, with a preponderance in favour of those of medium height and of sinewy and supple rather than of big muscular development. The outside feats of rock climbing, the abnormal climbs made by a few men in recent years, undoubtedly require abnormal strength of finger and arm, not seldom accompanied by great size of hand. But these men have also possessed an equal development of strength and rhythm in body and leg; their all-round design has been abnormal. When, as in one or two cases, their exceptional physical development has been assisted by great height or great reach, without loss to rhythm or balance or to the sterling quality of supple sinews, the perfection of the climbing machine has been attained.
For the normal climber to imitate the performance of these men is to incur a proportion of danger, the measure of the interval between their abnormal reach and power and his own, expressed in terms of all too distant or too indefinite rock holds, such as no sane man has the right to risk from any emulative or competitive feeling.
Every climber has to recognize that there is an absolute upper limit to that which it is physically possible for a body of his design, when developed to its utmost, to perform. If he concentrates upon an even and efficient training of his own measure of power, and climbs always well within his confident capacity, he will have the gratification, as time goes on, of finding that his improving knowledge of himself, added to his increasing experience, enables him, little by little, to reduce the margin between his own achievements and the humanly impossible.
By a pleasing accident in rock structure, rock is either utterly impossible, smooth or stratified at gigantic intervals, or its cleavages and intrusions, and consequently its holds, occur at intervals within the average man’s reach. While a tall man has, therefore, a greater choice of holds, qualified in his case by a greater effort in using them, a shorter man has only to perfect his skill, and to profit by his lightness and balance, to be able to keep level with him in performance on all normal rock. Again I except the superman climbs, which are climbs made by exceptional men upon exceptional accidents in rock structure.
As a further compensation, peculiar to advancing years, a lightly built man who lives healthily finds less difficulty in recovering a condition of hard training and in keeping up his standard of achievement. Failure in wind or increase in weight may make the process of recovery longer each year by a few days, but he has not the handicap to contend with which threatens the big or heavily muscled man, who requires constant and intensive exercise to check the local degenerations which increase with time.