Sporting Life: Sole Fusion

I'll just say it: The only way to improve at climbing is to hone your footwork. All the campusing, manual reading, dieting, periodization, system boarding, hangboarding, stretching, mental gymnastics, colonics, cross-training, yoga, animal sacrifice, visualization, endurance laps, juggling of flaming clubs, tea-leaf readings, Santeria, and so on will come to naught if you have crap footwork. If you can’t attach your feet to the rock and push off them to make the next reach, you will never, ever improve at rock climbing. Bottom line. Ask any A-lister or just watch them climb: Sure, they’re as strong as oxen, but the main piston driving their send Hemi is the feet, which inform the core, which informs technique. Boom: harder climbing in a nutshell. Thank you: That will be $500.

This is why I was so elated, while on a recent visit to the New Age mecca Sedona, Arizona, to encounter a “footwork guru”: one Dr. Sole, who’d opened a “footwork ashram and toe-focused energy retreat” in late 2004. As we sat on his sunny, tapestry-strewn floor, he related how he’d turned “wasted years of being that hyper-ripped specimen who, for no reason other than sloppy, inefficient footwork, can’t seem to progress beyond 5.10” into the cultivation of master-class toe dancing. Sole had had an epiphany in 2001 on a ball-bearing slab near town. As he slid down the red rock yet again, leaving dueling skid marks, a voice emerged from a celestial energy vortex: “Keep your feet on,” the voice commanded. “Keep your damn feet on, you idiot.”

Sole picks up the story: “As I hung there, studying the pocked, ragged concavities and delaminating rubber along my soles, having sewing-machined off yet again, a little lightbulb popped: Yes, why not keep my feet on? Instead of doing my standard pull-up-and-paddle-foot, why not point my big toe with stern, careful pressure and come into balance over my hips before making the next reach? The solution, perhaps, had been before me all along, but was such a thing—so perfect in its simplicity— actually possible?”

Shortly thereafter, with nary a word to partners or family, the climber traveled to India, returning a few years later with nimble, Nureyevian footwork, a blossoming 5.13 résumé, and a new nickname: Swami EdgeSmearHeelHookananda (American translation: “Dr. Sole”). Sole had gleaned the mystical secrets of the East and applied them to climbing. In the seminars and publications he soon initiated, he codified five principal tenets of good footwork. Below, he shares his teachings. May they likewise guide your quest. Namaste.