Pay Grade

The other day I was climbing with a friend I’d never climbed with before. We’d done a couple of routes, moving up the grades and warming up, something that becomes more important the older you get. At least it does for me. With age you start to feel when damage is coming.

We came to a 6b and he said, “That’s a bit beyond my pay grade.” That seemed odd, as he’d looked strong on 6a+. “Go on, have a go,” I said. He did, and with only one rest, he climbed it.

This isn’t much of a story, but it does show the difference between climbers who feel stuck at a grade and those who keep moving. Often there’s no real physical difference. They have the same raw material. The difference is that one doesn’t box themselves into a number, a grade, or a style.

If you accept a pay grade in anything—climbing, work, even the hand you were dealt at birth—that’s where you’ll stay. For most people this is enough. They are what they are because that’s what they are. For others, with a bit of fight or self-delusion, what they are isn’t what they want to be. They’re never happy with their wages, so they push. They fight. They try to move up.

In climbing this means leaving your comfort zone. Leaving the place where you know you can do the moves, where you won’t fall, where you won’t fail. To get better you need the pain of trying, the pain of failing, even the humiliation of not being able to do a single move. Out of that, small things begin to grow.

You step back onto routes you once thought hard enough and realise they’re just paths now, holds turning into jugs. Even when the way on looks blocked by strength or fear, especially on trad, you start to see that there is a way.

So how do you do this? The obvious answer is to climb harder routes. Try hard routes that are safe. Top-rope the life out of routes that aren’t. At the wall, pick something you can’t even start and try it anyway. Bit by bit you might succeed. Sometimes success is just hanging on.

Do you think Adam Ondra walks up to a 9b+ and finds he can do most of the moves, or that he can do none of them?

Each session, set aside a small part of the day to try something you think is beyond you. The goal isn’t to climb it. The goal is one move, or even just leaving the ground.

And one day you’ll find you’ve had a pay rise.