You could claim that I am just ripping stories off of climbingnarc, where they have been conveniently compiled for all climbers to see in one place. But I just found several things I liked so much I had to re-post.
1) Jamie Emerson's favorite book is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or at least that is what he says in an interview with Caroline Treadway. This makes me really excited because Blood Meridian is the text I am writing my senior paper on and it is a mind-blowing book. If you ever feel like diving into the deep end of heavy and cerebral contemporary literature, read it. Also, the rest of the interview is interesting read it too.
2) Without getting too personal or sharing too much, my weight and the food I consume are two things I obsess over too much. In the newest Urban Climber Angie Payne talks a little bit about her relationship with weight and how hard it can be to make 'good' food decisions when as a female climber you realize it is easier to pull on crimps when you weigh less. Although I am a long way from being Angie Payne, this statement clicked with me. In the past two years I have been climbing, I have both lost weight and improved my climbing tremendously. When I do weighted pull ups or other weighted exercises I think, "How the hell did I ever climb anything when I weighted 10 pounds more than I do now?" And then I go down the rabbit hole, I think to myself, If I only weighted 5 pounds less I could be so much better at climbing. So I try, I eat less, I actually run, and I climb better for a few sessions. And then I am hungry, tired and grumpy, so I scarf down some sort of greasy crap and get mad at myself.
Currently, I am working hard to stop this cycle. Today I found this post on Allie Rainey's blog that both reminds me as a climber I am not alone in my weight stress and also makes me realize that it is training, not 5 less pounds that is going to help me sent.
Which gets me to my final point, TRAINING! I have never really trained before, but I feel like I need to start being more deliberate about how I use my time in the gym in order not to plateau. I'm psyched, now I just need to do it!
I think you have hit on a topic that most females, athletes and non athletes deal throughout life. Body image and the ideal weight can sometimes be dictated by forces outside of our control. But we can control how we react to these forces.
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