Getting Better at Climbing with a Rubber Duck
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
In software culture, there’s a technique that’s as weird as it is effective: you explain your problem to someone who won’t talk back—a rubber duck. In climbing, that same habit of explaining might do what a lot of sessions don’t: turn “this beta isn’t working” into an actual diagnosis. And then—finally—into progress.
You know the scene. A climber falls at the same spot, lowers, pulls back on, falls again, repeats. And as the attempts pile up, the explanations get shorter: “Bad skin.”“No gas.”“Just morpho.”“Not my style.”
Sometimes that’s true. A lot of the time it’s just convenient: it closes the case while making it feel like there was nothing to figure out.
Except climbing isn’t only about strength and skin. It’s a sport made of tiny decisions, stacked fast. Where does the foot go? When do you lock off? What hip angle do you need? When do you breathe? When do you relax? More often than we like to admit, we don’t fail because we’re not strong enough—we fail because our logic is sloppy: a hidden assumption, a rushed read, a sequence we “kind of” decided on without really deciding.
That’s where, in this slightly ridiculous story, the duck starts to make sense. Not as a gimmick. Not as a good-luck charm. As a tool for clarity. It forces you to put words on what you’re doing—until you hear, in your own sentence, the exact point where it stops making sense.
What’s Yellow and Teaches You Something?
“Rubber duck debugging” comes from a book—and from a certain idea of rigor. In The Pragmatic Programmer (1999), Andrew Hunt and David Thomas describe a deliberately low-tech method: when a problem won’t budge, explain it step by step to a third party—not so they solve it, but so the solution shows up the moment you try to make your logic consistent.
The duck is just staging: a perfect listener—silent, available—who makes you go all the way through.
As long as your reasoning stays in your head, it can live in a comfortable fog—feelings, hunches, shortcuts.
The detail that turned it into legend is an anecdote that’s basically canon now. At Imperial College London, David Thomas worked with a research assistant, Greg Pugh, known as an excellent programmer. Pugh carried a small yellow duck and set it on his terminal. When he got stuck, he’d start over from the beginning, sentence by sentence. The duck didn’t answer—but the act of explaining often revealed the contradiction that had been hiding inside his mental shortcuts.
The book is clear about the real point: duck, houseplant, teddy bear—doesn’t matter. What matters is being forced to spell it out.
That’s exactly why the method outgrew office folklore and became a teaching tool. Harvard’s CS50—the famous intro computer science course—explicitly presents it as a debugging technique, right alongside more “serious” tools, because shaky logic tends to give itself away the moment you explain it cleanly. For a while, students on campus even got their own “ddb”—duck debugger. And yes, it’s still sold in Harvard’s online store.
In other words, the duck is a tiny device for rigor: a portable version of a simple idea—if you can’t say your logic clearly, there’s a good chance it isn’t clear.
Talking Is Testing
Why does this work so often—even for very experienced people?
Because putting something into words isn’t just “telling a story.” It forces an idea to meet a standard: coherence. As long as your reasoning stays in your head, it can live in a comfortable fog—feelings, hunches, shortcuts. Once you say it out loud, you have to pick an order, a cause-and-effect, a justification. That’s when the cracks show: an assumption you never named, a sequence that “worked” only because you never really ran it end to end, a “this should go” that collapses the second you try to be precise.
Learning research talks about this under the label “self-explanation”: forcing yourself to explain improves understanding, because explanation doesn’t just create connections—it also exposes gaps.
The duck doesn’t need to approve your answer—it’s there to reveal the moment you don’t have one. The little “uh…”
In sports, there’s a more practical cousin: self-talk. Not the vague mantra meant to hype you up, but short, action-focused cues that keep your decision-making stable when everything starts to blur: “foot first,” “hips in,” “breathe,” “push.” When that self-talk is instructional, research suggests it can support performance by steering attention toward the right signals and cutting down the noise.
The duck just takes the same logic to its strictest version. It doesn’t let you get away with a single keyword. It demands the details. And details have one ruthless benefit: they don’t tolerate hand-waving.
That’s why it can make you better.
The Climbing Duck
Climbers already know the idea of “getting your thoughts out of your head”: route reading. You watch, you anticipate, you tell yourself a plan. But that story is often the short version of us—a fast summary that skips steps and assumes your body will “figure out the rest.” You announce an intention (“hit the jug”) without laying out the path (“with which foot, what hip angle, what timing, what relaxation”). You confuse a direction with a strategy.
The “climbing duck” is the opposite. You describe the sequence like someone else needs to understand it. Not to play coach. Just to force yourself into something rare: clarity.
Start with a blunt question: where is the complexity, exactly? The crux? The top-out? Managing fatigue? The read? Fear? Coordination?
Then you walk through it move by move, naming what actually organizes the action: how hands and feet relate, where your hips need to be, where your eyes go, the rhythm, the breathing.
And you add one simple, brutal follow-up:
“…for what?”
“I put my foot there… for what?”“I lock off here… for what?” (Locking off: holding a bent arm position so you can move with control.)“I switch hands now… for what?”
This isn’t rhetorical. It makes every move accountable to an intention. The duck doesn’t need to approve your answer—it’s there to reveal the moment you don’t have one. The little “uh…”
In climbing, that “uh” is often more honest than the fall. It marks the spot where the sequence wasn’t “too hard.” It was just misunderstood.
Testing isn’t repeating. Testing means changing one identifiable variable and watching what happens.
Without turning your session into an audit, simply talking it through tends to surface three classics—not “mistakes,” exactly, but very normal mental traps that are extremely good at sabotaging improvement.
1) The goal bug: thinking you’re searching for the most efficient solution, when you’re really searching for the one that costs the least discomfort. On paper, those look the same. In your body, they’re not. You call a risk-minimizing strategy “beta” (beta: the planned sequence of moves), then act surprised when it fails on a route that demands the opposite—commitment, positioning, accepting a moment of instability.
2) The cause bug: blaming the hold—“it’s bad”—when the real cause happened three moves earlier. A foot placed too early, hips left out, a lock taken at the wrong time, breathing cut off. Verbalizing forces you to rebuild the chain, and once you have a chain, excuses are harder to keep.
3) The everything-at-once bug: changing three variables at once, succeeding once “because it went,” and naming that “the right beta.” You didn’t understand it—you got lucky. And luck has one huge flaw: it doesn’t repeat. The duck pushes you back toward a harsher discipline that pays off: isolate one variable, test it, learn.
A Hypothesis, Not a Novel
The key moment after diagnosis is how you manage your attempts. The duck is useless if you go right back to lottery mode—pulling on and hoping your body magically does better this time.
Testing isn’t repeating. Testing means changing one identifiable variable and watching what happens.
One burn (burn: a try that doesn’t send) for a foot placement—not “everything with my lower body.”One burn for timing—not “be more dynamic.”One burn for hip orientation—not “get positioned better.”One burn for a micro-rest—not “manage pump.” (Pump: that forearm swelling/burning that makes you feel like you’re losing grip.)One burn for breathing at the right moment—not after you’ve already been holding your breath too long.
This kind of minimalism is frustrating because it’s slow—almost too plain for a sport where we often confuse intensity with efficiency. But that’s exactly why it works: it produces knowledge, not just fatigue. It makes improvement traceable. It turns progress into understanding instead of a vague memory (“I did it once”).
At the end of the day, the duck doesn’t add strength, skin, or courage. It adds something rarer: a way to stop lying to yourself. It turns failure into information, and information into progress.
In a sport that loves to romanticize “instinct,” the duck offers a simpler, freeing truth: you don’t get better just by trying again. You get better by trying again with an explanation. And when your explanation collapses, that’s not a disaster.
It’s finally a starting point.
