Sporting Life: The Power of the Anti-Psych

Without yin, there can be no yank

In my early twenties, I kicked around Rifle, Colorado, in my beige Toyota Tercel “turd wagon,” bolting unseemly choss and then overpowering it with Jersey Shore biceps and remedial footwork. I was a sour, angry young man, prone—like many of the era’s Rifle rats—to eardrum-shattering wobblers and unfettered slander. One day at the Arsenal, a visiting Austrian asked my age. “Twenty-one,” I told him.

“Hah!” he said. “I thought you were 29.” Crap. There it was: proof that I looked prematurely aged and crusty, a burnout only six years into the game, and not one of those perpetually “up,” youthful climbers toward whom others gravitate. Seventeen years later, the situation has only deteriorated. Look up “cruster” in the dictionary, and you’ll see a picture of me: graying stubble, eyes ringed and sunken from abiding unsolicited spray, scowl lines etched into my leathery visage, the angst-knitted brow of one who’s been climbing untold eons yet is too dim to imagine an alternate reality.

So I persist, even as I marvel at just how perpetually psyched others are, especially the twenty-somethings honing today’s cutting edge. To the extent that “psych” once occasionally invaded the lightless gyre of my inanition, I remember the feeling: the yen to climb everything, everywhere. To show up at a crag and tick it right to left, or maybe start with the hardest routes and work down the ladder. The pull to throw the gear in the car and strike out for the next great destination crag. That Christmas Eve feeling when the presents sit tidily unopened beneath the tree, and you flirt with sleep, your stomach braided with anticipation.

Wow. Mega. Super-neato. To feel that again… But wait—is it really necessary? Is it really that critical to always be psyched? For some—or maybe all of us—it might not be.

Because here’s the thing: just as psych serves to keep us in perpetual motion, I posit that “anti-psych” is equally important, by providing balance. And just as there can be no yang (light) without yin (darkness), neither can there be psych without anti-psych.

Anti-psych is not merely the absence of psych, nor is it psych’s opposite. It’s not hating on climbing in order to love it the more when you eventually drag-ass to the cliffs. No: anti-psych means letting the body-mind-spirit rest, free from the pressure of having to perform, with the awareness that you must do this in order to recharge your psych batteries. So the anti-psych is all about downtime, about rest days, which themselves must be taken in a loose, noncommittal, Zen-type way— being too serious about the anti-psych (with things like running, stretching, and visualization) just corrupts it into psych. To wit, the anti-psych is not a “cry in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield” thing; it’s more a “watch TV, eat popsicles, and play Xbox in the dojo, then chortle briefly on the battlefield and flee back to the couch” scenario.

Am I making sense? Here’s an example—the first time I harnessed the anti-psych. Two centuries ago, when I was 17, I had yet to learn about rest days. Desire alone, went the reasoning, would fuel climbing day after day after day, till my tips schralped in the New Mexico heat and my arms felt like lead pipes fired (barely) by noodle nerves. It was around the seventh consecutive day of bouldering when I folded a mere two problems deep at U-Mound, twin hillocks of xenolith-studded blobs above Albuquerque. Two of my partners—Jeff and John— were the same age, and probably hadn’t rested either. But our buddy Lance was a few years older and had wised up. As I lay spat into the gravelly hardpack, near tears beneath some jug-ladder V1 that had, for the first time in months, bouted me, Lance asked, “When’s the last time you took a rest day?”