“I live in my van / I travel from one climbing area to the next / I live out in nature / It’s a passion, and you work at it / Motivation matters more than training.”It’s 1982. Patrick Edlinger lays out his climbing philosophy, almost like a mantra, in the film Life at Your Fingertips. More than 40 years later, those few voice-over lines, delivered over footage of “the Blond” in his van, still shape climbing culture. Climbing is a passion, a way of life. What matters most is the motivation to climb and the joy it brings. It’s easy to see the appeal of that romantic vision, but it can also become a demand: To count as a climber, you have to be passionate, make climbing part of who you are, and never let your motivation waver.
Still, loving something doesn’t always mean you’re free to choose how you engage with it. What happens when it’s hard to take a rest day, accept failure, or imagine a life without climbing? When something that helps make us who we are ends up defining us? The climbing lifestyle has blind spots. They show up in the shift from balance to obsession, in our athletic identities, and in climbing careers that blur the line between commitment and obligation.
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Identity Check
Climbing alone doesn’t make us climbers. We become climbers by adopting a culture, a set of behaviors, and shared standards for who belongs. “At the base of the climb, the climber is quick to shed all the personal traits that define them in everyday life. To participate […] together, we start by leaving behind anything unrelated to the activity,” wrote French sociologist Antoine Hennion in 2009. In other words, to be part of the group, we set aside our individual differences and take on the role of a climber. According to authors such as Olivier Aubel and Guillaume Dumont, athletic identity is built around passion, autonomy, integrity, personal progress, and physical and technical skills. It also rests on shared norms, codes of conduct, and a sense of belonging to a culture that includes travel, mobility, and exploring new climbing areas. As the sport becomes professional, financial stakes enter the picture, while competition pits rankings against personal fulfillment. This identity is therefore shaped by tensions between passion and money, autonomy and institutionalization, authenticity and media exposure.
Our relationship with climbing is shaped both by the identity we build through the sport’s norms, codes, and practices and by how we define ourselves as people.
In sports psychology, athletic identity has a different meaning, one that gained prominence with a 1993 paper titled “Athletic Identity: Hercules’ Muscles or Achilles Heel?,” by Britton W. Brewer and his colleagues. They define it as the degree to which a person identifies with the role of athlete. It isn’t about whether you climb, how hard you climb, or whether other climbers see you as one of them. It’s about how much importance you give your athletic role in defining who you are. When someone asks who I am, how quick am I to answer, “I’m a climber!”? A strong athletic identity can take different forms along a spectrum. At one end, it can be integrated into the rest of your life: Climbing matters a great deal, but it coexists with other roles, making your commitment both lasting and flexible. At the other, that identity can become exclusive and rigid, leaving you struggling to define yourself as anything other than a climber.
That’s what makes athletic identity a double-edged sword. On one side, it can be your greatest strength, encouraging commitment, perseverance, motivation, feelings of belonging and competence, and self-confidence. On the other, it can become your Achilles’ heel: It can narrow your identity to a single role, tie performance directly to self-worth, make you more vulnerable to athletic burnout, make an injury feel like a threat to who you are, and make it harder to navigate transitions or career changes.
The Trouble With Passion
Our relationship with climbing is shaped both by the identity we build through the sport’s norms, codes, and practices and by how we define ourselves as people. In the stories the sport celebrates, passion is central to what it means to climb. A group of North American researchers whose work has become a key reference on the subject published an influential paper in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology in 2006. They define passion as a strong attraction to an activity we consider important and devote time and energy to, to the point that it becomes part of our identity. But they show that passion takes two different forms. One is harmonious: We remain in control of our climbing and can fit it alongside everything else we want or need to maintain—work, school, friendships, romantic relationships, family life. In that case, climbing doesn’t feel like a psychological obligation. The other is obsessive, with more conflict between different parts of life. Climbing can then start taking up too much space.
Climbing and the people who love it would benefit from making room for more than one identity. You can be passionate and committed to climbing—even make it your career—and also be a musician, a parent, a student, a friend…
But this isn’t a simple divide between a healthy passion and a harmful one. In 2025, researchers Brent D. Oja and Géraldine Zeimers were already offering a more nuanced view of these two forms of passion in the sports workplace. Their study shows that the experiences of sports-industry employees don’t always fall into two separate categories. They describe harmony and obsession coexisting, with the balance changing over time, depending on job demands and people’s ability to manage their commitment.
Passion isn’t just about climbing; it’s about climbing being part of who we are. The distinction between harmonious and obsessive passion helps us examine how that identity plays out. Climbing can be equally important to two people’s identities, yet their relationships with it can be very different. Someone with a harmonious passion can put a great deal into climbing while still being able to step back, spend time on other projects, preserve relationships, or accept a period of rest. For someone whose passion is obsessive, those same situations can create tension. Missing a session, scaling back, or failing becomes hard to accept because those experiences can undermine their sense of who they are.
Individual tendencies aren’t the whole story. The environment, the broader context, and the education and support athletes receive also help determine whether they develop harmonious passions and identities that leave room for multiple roles. Governing bodies, climbing gyms, media outlets, instructors, coaches, and families all shape how people approach the sport through what they say and how they act. A coaching staff that values only results, for example, can strengthen the link between performance and self-worth. A governing body that encourages specialization rather than versatility limits opportunities to develop a range of identities. A film festival that showcases only extraordinary feats and resilience leaves little room for other ways of being part of the sport.
Climbing and the people who love it would benefit from making room for more than one identity. The point isn’t simply whether your athletic identity is strong or weak, or your passion harmonious or obsessive. It’s whether you can move among different roles in your life. You can be passionate and committed to climbing—even make it your career—and also be a musician, a parent, a student, a friend… These other parts of your life aren’t distractions; they’re resources. Making sure athletes can have a life beyond climbing and performance needs to be a priority. That’s especially true given that the same patterns show up in the workplace, particularly in careers built around a passion.
Turning Passion Into a Career: A Dream Come True?
What happens when climbing stops being just a passion and becomes your job? Everything that makes climbing enjoyable can also change your relationship with work. Getting to work in that world is an incredible opportunity. It gives your work meaning, boosts motivation, and deepens your sense of belonging. It can also make your job more fulfilling and enjoyable, and help you get through demanding stretches at work. But that attachment can blur the line between your professional and personal lives. That’s the paradox of doing what you love for a living.
In their 2014 paper, “When Passion Meets Job Insecurity in Knowledge Work,” Magali Ballatore and her fellow sociologists examine this contradiction. They argue that passion fosters creativity, autonomy, and fulfillment, but also encourages personal commitment, availability, and emotional investment. Employers’ pursuit of workers with those qualities can push employees to accept unstable contracts, inadequate pay, or excessive workloads, making their livelihoods less secure. Passion then becomes a tool organizations use to exert indirect control. The same tension appears in Oja and Zeimers’s qualitative study of employees at sports organizations.
How do you say “no” when you’re meant to feel lucky to have the job and your identity is inseparable from your work?
These dynamics can show up in climbing careers, too. Just as a climber can define themselves entirely through the sport, a coach or instructor can build much of their identity around work. So can a routesetter, who designs the climbs, or someone working the front desk at a bouldering gym, where people climb short walls without ropes. That can make it hard to step back, refuse a task, or recognize unstable, insecure, or difficult working conditions for what they are. How do you say “no” when you’re meant to feel lucky to have the job and your identity is inseparable from your work?
In some workplaces, especially those driven by capitalist priorities, that personal commitment is a resource organizations benefit from because it contributes to the value they produce. Because they see the work as a calling, people working in climbing make sacrifices even when no one explicitly asks them to. Someone might accept work hours that keep expanding, for example, because they love the job. That sacrifice is praised as proof of motivation and commitment. Gradually, it becomes an unspoken expectation, and setting personal boundaries gets harder. Passion encourages a kind of self-exploitation: We impose demands on ourselves so we can keep doing our jobs—and hold on to our sense of who we are. This research doesn’t establish that everyone working in climbing experiences these dynamics. But it does invite us to shift our focus: Protecting passion also means examining the conditions under which people pursue it.
The problem, then, isn’t loving climbing too much. It’s having to prove that love over and over. Gyms, governing bodies, employers, and the media need to make room for stories that aren’t all about limitless devotion. Stories in which resting doesn’t mean you aren’t motivated, having other interests doesn’t mean betraying your community, and setting boundaries at work doesn’t mean you’re failing to do your job. Make climbing a way of life? Sure. As long as there’s still room to live.
