Downclimbing: Why Climbing Needs to Slow Down

Higher, faster, stronger. Caught in a growth model, climbing has pulled us into a race that can leave us exhausted and alone. What if we slowed down? What if downclimbing meant putting limits back into a world that keeps pushing us to move past them? The answers are not light ones.

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This article is the fourth episode of Heavy Mental, our series unpacking key psychological concepts in climbing under the weight of performance. It is written by Léo Dechamboux, a mental coach and co-author, with Fred Vionnet, of the reference book Le Mental du grimpeur.

If you have followed the cracks Heavy Mental has been working its way into, you know this series sits at the intersection of several paths, all aimed at talking about climbing performance differently. From self-confidence to resilience to the psychological grind of competition, the previous pieces have tried to go deep on subjects that are often only lightly discussed. For this fourth episode, it felt important to slow down. Or, more precisely, to look at the need to slow down, to doubt, and to rethink climbing’s practices, stories, and players. In short, to talk about the need for a kind of cognitive ecology, and for degrowth. In one word: downclimbing.

Because what could be more urgent than slowing down when social media, competition circuits, sponsorship pressure, and the constant reset cycle in commercial gyms all push us into a frantic logic? You have to progress fast, optimize every detail, push your limits, climb harder routes, package the whole thing for public consumption, and get rewarded for it. It even changes our relationships. First in obvious ways: we now have our mental coach, our trainer, our “community.” Then in more subtle ways: being surrounded by the right people becomes another tool for better performance. All of this comes at a cost: mental fatigue, less joy, isolation. We produce climbing more than we live it.

The Myth of the Endless Route

To understand where this comes from, we have to go back to the 19th century, when so-called “modern” sport emerged around a simple logic: frame it, measure it, compare it, improve it. From there, sports entered the broader model of growth, a model that would also shape how we organize society and live as individuals.

French sport sociologist Christian Pociello showed that this growth model extends far beyond economics and reaches into human ability itself. Put another way, our physical capacities began to be seen through the lens of performance. Through a combination of religious, philosophical, economic, and technological conditions, Western societies turned those capacities into limits to be surpassed. Functional physiological norms became records.

The priority was no longer to understand the altitude at which the human body can function properly. It became watching “superhumans” trained to survive higher than those who came before them. The level always has to rise. Higher, faster, stronger. This is not treated as an occasional event. It becomes the norm.

A V17 boulder problem — the hardest grade in bouldering, known in Europe as Font 9A — was an anomaly in 2016, when Nalle Hukkataival announced the first ascent of Burden of Dreams. Today, that level has hardened into a benchmark that almost feels normal. Since then, the climbing world has been waiting for one thing: a new hero to push the limit again.

But that progression is neither infinite nor self-sustaining. Athletic performance is the product of a system. French economists Jean-François Bourg and Jean-Jacques Gouguet explain it clearly in their work: endless growth is impossible because planetary resources are limited. That means we need to think about sport in a world of degrowth.

Pociello is pointing to the same tension when he describes the conflict between growth and limits in sport. Sport regulates, frames, imposes rules, ranks people. At the same time, it can also produce excess, self-overcoming, and the drive to push beyond the norm without limits. We see it in the optimization and intensification of training methods, in specialization, in the control of bodies and mental resources. The same central idea of capitalism is playing out here: endless growth in a finite world.

Between Resistance and Co-option

Under the cover of the supposed ability to push past athletic limits, climbers dream of summits to reach. The practice follows, propped up by stories in which hardship and failure exist mainly to serve a victorious ending.

And yet climbing has always held a particular place. Like board sports, it developed at the margins of institutions, often against their logic. Climbing, surfing, and skating were embraced as playgrounds rooted in a direct relationship with the environment. Before they became stages for performance, they were spaces of exploration and commitment. The point was less to measure than to experience.

That emphasis on experience — described by Alain Loret, an academic specializing in the future of sport, and embodied by figures such as Dean Potter — helped form a critique of modern sport. In its early form, climbing tested a thesis of resistance.

But like most of these activities, climbing did not withstand market logic for long. Alternative cultures were absorbed, then given economic value. The outdoor industry, tourism, media coverage, and competition circuits reshaped them. Some crags are now overcrowded. Ascents are framed as feats. Climbers become image carriers. What once expressed a singular relationship to the world has been translated into product, content, and spectacle.

This does not happen without tension. Board sports and climbing still swing between two poles. On one side, they still carry real possibilities for resistance: autonomy, creativity, reclaiming time, cooperation. Climbing can still be that place. The discipline can define its own norms and challenge the established order.

On the other side, these practices are deeply shaped by co-option. Measurable performance, standardized routes and walls — from the Kilter Board to the Titan wall — and the mass circulation of images all pull climbing into a growth economy.

The Right Flow

Given all of this, one question remains: what would sport look like in a degrowth society?

The first answers point to a major shift. Practice would no longer be organized around growth, but around restraint, experience, and the collective. That would mean rethinking mobility, competition, and the role of sport itself. In climbing, it would require structural, theoretical, and psychological change.

Because downclimbing cannot only be systemic. It also happens in the way we perceive, interpret, and live our experiences. It starts with a change in perspective: doubt, fatigue, and fear, usually seen as obstacles, can also be understood as signals of our resources and our limits. Taking them seriously means stepping out of guilt and optimization, and building a different relationship to practice.

That means accepting the need to slow down and recognizing that learning is uneven. In this frame, flow plays a key role. Far from an ideal of performance or control, flow is the fine balance between the demands of a move and the resources we have available. It is built on attention to the gesture, less judgment, and presence in movement. It is invisible in a world where performance can be measured, shared, and rewarded.

The right kind of flow can therefore remain quiet, intimate, and unspectacular. Confusing it with absolute performance turns the moment into another productivity demand.

Mental downclimbing also means stepping out of the solitude produced by competitive logic. As we have seen in earlier episodes, confidence is not just individual. It is relational and situational. Revaluing collective practice through cooperative formats based on learning, sharing, exchange, and mutual support can shift the center of gravity away from performance and invite us to redefine success. Not limiting ourselves to numbered goals, and making room for the quality of commitment, pleasure, and understanding of movement, are also possible paths.

These dynamics already exist at different scales. Some climbers are moving away from the classic model of performance and communication to invest in slower practices built around exploration and encounter, as Nicky Ceria, Seb Berthe, and Soline Kentzel have done, while others choose less visible forms of commitment.

Collectives centered on sharing and transmission are also emerging, including Eska Gang, Palestine Climbing Association, and Greenspit. At the level of private gyms, alternatives are appearing through cooperative climbing gyms, for example. Other organizations are finding ways to celebrate climbing outside competition and pure performance.

At the club level, or in youth development programs, this means creating safer environments that recognize mistakes as part of learning. Feedback can value strategy, commitment, and progress rather than only the goal, the achievement, or the lack of improvement.

At the institutional level, it means diversifying practices, integrating well-being and health, thinking seriously about inclusion, education, and the protection of athletes and staff, while also rethinking which pathways are highlighted and how their stories are told.

These are shifts, and they are concrete attempts to bring time, meaning, and collective life back into a practice shaped by the constant pressure to raise the stakes.

Downclimbing does not mean dreaming of a pure version of climbing that never existed. It means questioning the conditions in which we climb. It means putting limits back into a vertical world where everything pushes us to move beyond them.