In the previous installment, we left the French Spider-Man at the top of his game, still nursing a deep need for recognition. Now we’re back in Paris, at the Salon de l’Escalade, where Alain Robert finally explains why he feels such a need to keep talking about his past—even if it gets on everyone’s nerves. The final chapter of our XXL series moves through rock, legacy, and Wall-E. A little scouting for an upcoming Instagram Live © Philippe Poulet A crowd has formed behind the temporary structures at Porte de Versailles. In the middle of the booths, Alain Robert is posing for a photo with Oriane Bertone, a four-time French champion and World Championship silver medalist in bouldering. From up there, the image looks like 40 years of climbing history staring back at us. While the old climber throws up rock-and-roll hand signs, the great hope of French climbing hides a laugh behind her hand. A kind word, a quick hug, and Bertone is gone, leaving Alain Robert surrounded by about 20 young fans who have shown up to get their fingerboards signed. Legacy Past 60, the French Spider-Man still seems wildly popular—even with people in the 18-to-25 crowd. Part of the reason is his closeness to the new generation of urban climbing. When Alain Robert ropes up to climb the Burj Khalifa with Alexis Landot, it’s not just to prove he can still hang. It’s also a way to reach the 1.5 million followers of the 23-year-old solo climber. The godfather of urban climbing also makes sure to appear alongside Leo Urban, the “French Tarzan,” another building climber with more than 2 million followers on Instagram and 300,000 on YouTube. Each of those appearances serves the same purpose: making sure his legend still lands with a young audience drawn to dangerous climbs and high-stakes suspense. Robert knows exactly what he’s doing. He runs his own social media and uses the same codes as the people who came after him: 30-second reels that open on slips, exposure, and titles like, “All of the sudden, I slipped and nearly fell… What the fuck.” The formula works. Alain Robert is now one of the very few climbers with more than a million Instagram followers, far ahead of current French stars like the Mawem brothers, Oriane Bertone, or Mejdi Schalck. “ He can’t sell his rock solos anymore. That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares ” Philippe Poulet But that constant digital presence comes at a cost. At times it feels scattered—at times just chaotic. Thrown into the social media machine, the French Spider-Man seems determined to latch onto anything that moves, spinning his web everywhere and nowhere at once. In interviews, Robert still complains. This time it’s about drones, which didn’t exist when he made his earliest ascents and which, in his view, can never do justice to those climbs when they’re compared with the videos of Alexis Landot or Leo Urban. Before long, he is back on one of his favorite themes: people won’t remember his real legacy—what he calls, in English, “my legacy.” That hunger for recognition is everywhere. It slips between questions and answers, fills every pause in the conversation, colors every digression. Online, it shows up in his Instagram Lives too. Alain Robert repeats his keywords and greatest hits like an alphabet lesson: Pol Pot, La Nuit du Lézard , first 5.13d (8b) free solo—free solo meaning climbing without a rope—and so on. For Philippe Poulet, editor in chief of Vertical , that media sprawl “builds hype.” “It feeds his notoriety. It’s also his business model,” the journalist says. “He needs to keep talking about himself so he can keep landing contracts.” So from Bali, Robert posts constantly. Since moving to the island with his second wife and fourth son, it’s not easy for the climber to live on fresh air and affection alone. And a small partnership with the local Sofitel is not exactly enough to fund a champagne lifestyle. “His ascents still bring in a little money, but far less than before,” Poulet says. “His main income now comes from speaking engagements.” Those talks can bring Robert between €10,000 and €12,000 from major companies that love pumping up their executives with adventure stories. Alain Robert et Alexis Landot au sommet du Burj Khalifa, la plus haute tour du monde © Coll Alexis Landot “I’m not in control anymore. Stop.” To sell himself well, Alain Robert doesn’t really have a choice. Even if he doesn’t love it, the French Spider-Man nickname is what gives him most of his marketing power. The spider is everywhere: his official site, his YouTube channel, his Instagram account. “He can’t sell his rock solos anymore,” Philippe Poulet says. “That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares.” Even if he still works a few stories about climbing on real rock into his masterclasses, Robert always ends up back at the buildings. “That speaks to people more,” says his brother Thierry. “Buildings are the city. They’re the backdrop of everyday life. And Spider-Man sticks in people’s heads a lot more than route grades do.” That also explains why the harder Robert tries to restore the prestige of his rock climbing, the more disconnect he creates. “At the same time, Alain doesn’t really do much anymore besides communicating,” says Laurent Belluard, his biographer. “He has to fill the void, because he’s never going to do anything major on rock again.” “ My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red ” Alain Robert For his 60th birthday, the iguana still tried one more media move: a comeback in the Verdon Gorge, where he hoped to get some footage and show the world he could still make people dizzy on real stone, barefoot and wearing snakeskin. It did not go as planned. Philippe Poulet was there. “He realized he was completely out of his depth,” Poulet says flatly. “He started on a 5.10c/d (6a+) and struggled like crazy. He was maxed out the whole time.” Robert was onsighting it—trying to lead it on his first go, with no prior beta—250 meters above the ground. A friend who had come to take photos got rattled too. “When he wanted to launch into a free solo, I yelled at him and threw him a rope. Honestly, he showed up from Bali with no prep, thinking he could just do the Verdon cold. But come on, man—you’ve gotten older.” The cameras from the TV show Riding Zone , invited for the event, were rolling too. They captured an Alain Robert feeling his way through the climb and admitting on camera that he wasn’t the climber he used to be. “I’m completely out of my depth,” he says in one of the documentary’s most moving moments . Then he ends with: “I’m not in control anymore. Stop.” Three years later, Robert says the episode shook him a little. But looking back, he doesn’t regret any of it. Climbing at his limit has always been one of his rules for living. “My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red,” he likes to say. And behind the wheel of that little car, Alain Robert has no intention of stopping. In 2023, he decided he would climb the Total tower at La Défense every year until the French government’s official retirement age—64, maybe 67. Last time around, he brought along what many consider the best sport climber in the world, Sébastien Bouin. A fun day, with a few slips mixed in. First mud on the climbing shoes. Then a full-blown controversy, as members of the climbing community criticized both men for appearing on the tower of one of the world’s biggest polluting companies. Alain Robert free soloing in the Verdon, at age 60 © Philippe Poulet The Last Flower on Earth That is part of the Robert enigma too. Beneath the rambling and the verbal floods, it’s hard to know where the citizen ends and the character begins. At times, Robert has used his ascents to support political causes—at the Cheung Kong Center in China in 2019, for example, when he unfurled a banner backing peace protests between Hong Kong and Beijing. Ten years earlier, in London, he climbed to warn about global warming. Then, just as quickly, he gets on a first-class flight to go speak at private banks. In a recent profile published by the American magazine The Summit Journal , he is even portrayed as a conspiracy-minded figure who questions whether humans really landed on the moon. “That’s bullshit from the journalist,” Robert says, brushing it off. Part of that image also comes from his public, repeated comments on the war in Ukraine. His analysis often challenges the dominant line in mainstream media, which can easily feed the narrative of “Alain the reptilian outsider versus the deep state.” To defend himself, he points to the work of well-known American academics like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer—people he can quote and discuss for hours. “ Alain is Wall-E ” Laurent Jacob Just like his reckless soloing, his positions, his persona, and his projects will probably always carry some element of controversy. It seems stuck to his skin. Maybe those are the marks left by a man who has spent most of his life trying to get his revenge. “In my view, it goes much deeper than that,” says Laurent Jacob, who appears with his friend in a strange documentary about the keys to self-healing. “What matters most with Alain now isn’t what he is. It’s what he represents: a permanent middle finger. He’s been true to himself his whole life by telling us, ‘I’m small, I’m physically messed up, I’m broken all over, and screw you.’” For the former engine of French free climbing, now a doctor, Robert may not even grasp the scale—immense, in Jacob’s view—of the message he carries. But what message, exactly? “Alain is warning us,” Jacob says, slipping into a more poetic mode. “He’s warning us that we’re at a tipping point, and we need to wake up if we don’t want to end up like the frog slowly boiling in a pot. He makes me think of that little robot who falls in love with the last flower on Earth in a world turned into a dump. Alain is Wall-E.” For now, though, Robert says he sees his art as a way to contest “a society that is increasingly sanitized, protected, and obsessed with security.” In interview after interview, the daredevil urges people to “live their dreams instead of dreaming their lives.” He is convinced that his own battered story proves one thing above all else: it is possible to be “the master of your own destiny.” “A CIA study [sic] showed that 80% of people in the United States didn’t like their jobs,” he says. “I decided pretty early on that I was going to choose what I wanted to do with my life. And I’ve always stayed free.” The facts of Alain Robert’s life can be read as one long series of escapes from control: first from the rope, then from the climbing world, and finally from society itself. That leaves his obsession with controlling his “legacy.” But after four hours of conversation, the French Spider-Man finally seems a little more at peace. “I don’t want to come off as bitter,” he says. “A lot of people dragged my name through the mud, but since then Alex Honnold and a few journalists have given me back my legitimacy.” So what revenge is left to take? Ever since little Alain Robert decided to free solo the apartment building where he lived, he has known shame and redemption, coma and rehab, disgrace and glory, prison cells and the Élysée Palace, Valence and Bali. At the end of the meal, the two Robert brothers return to an old idea: fixing up a barn in La Palud-sur-Verdon and spending happy days there as a family. But not yet. There is a biopic still to shoot—scheduled for 2027—and besides, it would be madness. “I’m good in Bali. There’s no temptation there,” Alain Robert says. “If I moved to the Verdon, I’d go free solo every day, and that wouldn’t be reasonable anymore. I could die there. And the ultimate goal—the one that matters more than all the others—is to stay alive.”

In the previous installment , a battered man — the survivor of two horrific accidents — proved he had an extraordinary ability to claw his way back. Stronger than ever, the climber from Valence was now about to stun his peers by rising to the very top of the climbing world. He didn’t know it yet, but the French Spider-Man was already starting to shed one skin for another, turning from rock climber into high-rise lizard. And into a legend. © Philippe Poulet Collection In 1991, Laurent Belluard walked into the offices of Vertical  for the first time. Founded in Grenoble in the early 1980s, the magazine had become the leading climbing publication of its era in France. As Belluard was getting his start at the paper, he had already heard of Alain Robert. He knew enough to understand that what Robert was doing was remarkable. So when the climber from Valence dropped by to see whether a journalist-photographer might want to join him on a new project, Belluard didn’t need much convincing. Alain vs. Goliath “We drove down to Buoux in his car,” Belluard recalls over the phone. “I still remember getting to the tollbooth. When it was time to pay, he poured the coins into his palm and struggled so much that half of them fell on the ground.” The damage left by Robert’s disabilities set the tone right away. Because the project was insane: he wanted to free solo — climb without a rope — La Nuit du Lézard . An improbable line established by Jean-Baptiste Tribout in 1986. It starts with a bulge, then rolls into a slab so slick it might as well have been graphene: 5.13c (8a+), wildly insecure. Pretty much the definition of a route you do not free solo. “When we got near the route, we saw a couple on it,” Belluard says. “A blond German guy, sculpted like a statue, climbing the route while his gorgeous girlfriend belayed him. As soon as we got there, Alain said, ‘Laurent, tell him to pull his rope. We can’t waste time — the sun’s about to swing around.’” In the heat, the friction would drop. “When the German saw Alain show up, all twisted up and bouncing around like a broken toy, he looked at him like he was some bum off the street. Alain did one rehearsal lap, then launched on the route and climbed it beautifully. He struggled a little at the top, but he finished it. I looked down at the German. I’ve never seen anybody so crushed. He probably quit climbing that same day.” “I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope” Laurent Belluard Behind the camera, Belluard never saw that Robert slipped twice off tiny dish holds and nearly died. It didn’t matter. The ascent was done, and one of the boldest free solos in climbing history had just gone down. That year, Robert would put up eleven major free solos, including the world’s first two 5.13d (8b) free solos. He was at the absolute peak of his soloing career. He may have had the strongest head in the world, and plenty of people still struggle to explain it. “I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope,” Belluard says now. For Laurent Jacob, the explanation almost enters spiritual territory: “Those accidents only strengthened his goals and his determination, to the point of making him an absolute champion. It was his destiny. He fulfilled the plan that was already in the seed.” Philippe Poulet, another Vertical  journalist, has a more grounded take: “Alain simply trained more than everybody else and developed physical and mental abilities that were beyond those of his contemporaries.” At the time, though, there wasn’t much debate. Alain Robert got filed under crazy . When other climbers heard he had soloed La Nuit du Lézard , the climber from the Drôme still looked to them like a reckless maniac in a damaged body. “What he was doing was incredibly random,” says David Chambre. “It was right at the edge of what’s reasonable. He does La Nuit , and then two years later he does it again on Pour une poignée de Chamallow  (5.13c/d, 8a/b). To me, that was his high point for commitment. It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds.” Nobody took risks like he did. Even thirty years later, the biggest names in the discipline still bow to that level of boldness. Starting with Alex Honnold, who said in a 2023 interview: “Personally, I always try to leave a margin, to be several grades below my max with a rope, and I want to stay in that comfort zone. Alain was soloing 8b at a time when the max with a rope was 9a, and with very little margin. So he was really at the cutting edge of the sport, right at the limit of human potential at the time.” Alain Robert’s Main Rock Free Solos Buoux Courage fuyons  — 5.12a (7a+), 1990 La Chèvre et le chou  — 5.12d (7c), 1990 Rêve de papillon  — 5.13b (8a), 1990 Cauchemar de l’éléphant  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 La Nuit du Lézard  — 5.13c (8a+), 1991 La Nuit du cauchemar  — 5.13c (8a+), 1991 Cornas L’Abominable Homme des doigts  — 5.12b/c (7b+) Boukouni  — 5.12d (7c), 1987 Au théâtre ce soir  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 L’Abominafreux  — 5.13b (8a), 1990 Pour une poignée de Chamallows  — 5.13c/d (8a/b), 1993 Triptyque  — 5.13d (8b) Verdon L’Ange en décomposition  — 5.11d (7a) Pol Pot  — 5.13a (7c+), 1996 Crac boum hue  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 “I Think I Really Am Crazy, Actually” Watch him ask a waitress for another glass of Champagne with the eager look of a kid, and it’s hard to picture Alain Robert going head-to-head with gravity at its worst. And yet around the table in Paris, everyone says the same thing: they’ve lost count of the scares this 110-pound man has given them on cliffs. For Claude, a friend of forty years, one of those moments came on Pol Pot  in 1996, with Robert’s wife and three children there at the cliff. “I wanted that 5.13a in the Verdon to be my farewell to extreme climbing, and Claude was photographing me,” Robert says. “I was 1,000 feet off the deck and got stuck at the crux because my reach came up short. After what felt like an eternity of hesitation, I pushed off the tip of my shoe to hit the saving hold — but honestly, it was like flipping a coin. I stuck the move, and right away I said to him, ‘Claude, I think I really am crazy, actually.’” Robert stopped counting long ago the number of times he could have flown off. He calls them “white moments,” those instants when even memory sometimes drops out: “You remember the before and the after, but in between, time stops. It turns transparent.” At 63, those mystical seconds have become the beads of a life philosophy he has never betrayed since childhood, when he first read a line from his idol, the Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner: “The greater the fear, the greater the joy.” Coupé-décalé © Philippe Poulet Collection “It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds” David Chambre In the early 1990s, when he first appeared on the TF1 evening news, Alain Robert hesitated between presenting himself as a responsible adult and leaning into the image of a madman. In the end, he did both. One minute he stressed that he was a family man. The next, he was posing for photos suspended above sharpened knives. The character was already mutating. After La Nuit du Lézard , Robert ditched the harlequin Lycra for a reptile look. He started imagining himself as an iguana, plastered to the rock in snake-print clothes that made him look a little like Crocodile Dundee. David Chambre sees a different pop-culture reference: “He reminded me of Gainsbarre .” It fits. Like Serge Gainsbourg’s darker alter ego, Robert seemed intent on giving birth to his own evil twin. Robert, the Rascal “My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.” Up on the top floor of his Paris hotel, Alain Robert is once again sitting in front of a full glass. The fizz of the Champagne mixes with a real trace of bitterness when he is asked to look back on his relationship with the climbing world in the early 1990s. And yet by the end of 1991, he had earned a small measure of revenge. Thanks to a film aired on TF1, Passion vitale , which documented his La Nuit du Lézard  ascent, Patrick Edlinger chose to present him with the Prix de la Performance Sportive . It was a kind of coronation, especially given the contrast between Edlinger — golden-boy angel of French climbing — and Robert, the outsider. “Patrick gave me back my legitimacy because he knew I’d done something important,” Robert says. “He knew because he never managed to do La Nuit du Lézard  with a rope.” Swirling his glass, he wants to make one thing clear: “I always got along well with Patrick, with Berhault, Tribout, and the others. The people who didn’t like me were the mediocre climbers.” Recognition from the best wasn’t enough. Unloved and increasingly sidelined by a sport that was becoming more standardized, Alain Robert kept carrying the image of a wounded, unwanted oddball. So when, in 1994, a watch brand offered to pay him to climb a skyscraper in Chicago, he didn’t hesitate. Even if it meant breaking for good with the climbing scene. “That was the moment competition climbing was starting to emerge and really organize itself,” Belluard says. “In France, the fashionable climbers were François Legrand and Didier Raboutou. On rock, it was all about the race to 9a, to 5.14d. Once again, Alain was completely out of step with the times.” For Belluard, it wasn’t even that the community rejected Robert. It was worse than that: it didn’t care. “What he was doing was looked down on. For them, building climbing was just beside the point.” And yet. By crossing the Atlantic to satisfy watch companies and insurance firms, Alain Robert would change his life. In almost no time at all, the former Bado Sport salesman became a globally known superhero whose ascents were sometimes watched by hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the base of the towers. The public, at last, connected with this lizard-skinned character who seemed as free as he was untouchable. They gave him a name — The French Spider-Man  — and the media turned that name into a legend. They loved the climbs as much as the arrests, since every one of those ascents was illegal. After climbing 250 structures around the world, the French Spider-Man also holds the record for the man who has seen the inside of the most different prisons. The stories sound almost made up: one-arm push-up contests with inmates on Staten Island; the king of Malaysia having him moved from his cell to the royal palace for dinner. Most of all, the “buildings,” as Robert likes to call them, finally gave him a real way to make a living. All driven by commercial deals, those ascents could sometimes earn him as much as €250,000. Spider-Man was having the time of his life, treating his family as he hauled them all over the world, and making a name for himself — a much bigger one than François Legrand’s or Didier Raboutou’s. Alain Robert on the Sears Tower in Chicago (443 meters) © Coll Philippe Poulet “My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.” Alain Robert For David Chambre, though, Alain Robert didn’t exactly invent building climbing. “I think I even did my first building ascent before he did,” Chambre says. “Jean-Claude Droyer had already climbed the Montparnasse Tower, and Laurent Jacob had already done the Eiffel Tower.” But for the climbing historian, Robert had a stroke of genius: “He invented a sport. Where the rest of us thought, ‘That’s kind of cool,’ he fully embraced the whole universe around it. That was his real masterstroke.” And for the purists, Chambre insists Robert wasn’t just doing it for the cameras. Some of those tower ascents were genuine feats. “Just like on rock, 90 percent of what he did has never been repeated. If you take the Sears Tower in Chicago or the Framatome Tower in La Défense — now the Areva Tower — I’d bet nobody’s ever going to put hands on those again.” Chambre even urged Robert to come up with his own grading scale for buildings. The result was predictable: Alain Robert had climbed the hardest towers in the world. At 64, that is now what the French Spider-Man is trying to defend. He understands perfectly well that he probably won’t succeed in rehabilitating his rock career. So he is trying instead to make people understand that his building climbs were not just media stunts. Some people do get it. Alexis Landot, France’s leading young name in urban climbing, considers what Alain Robert did “real feats.” At the climbing expo where the two shared a roundtable, the 23-year-old kept praising his elder. The next day, though, in the middle of an interview, Robert just shrugged. Landot’s praise seemed to slide off his alligator suit like water off scales. So is the Spider-Man frustrated? “Oh no — I really don’t want to come off like some frustrated guy,” he says, jumping at the word the moment it’s left hanging. “My recognition? I went out and got it. And I got it.” How? And from whom? With Alain Robert, as always, the only way to find out is to go everywhere except by the standard route. To be continued in the next and final installment…

Last time , we left Alain Robert in free fall. When he hit the ground, he lost 45% of his blood. He survived—somehow—and then started the long, stubborn climb back to elite-level climbing. Against every sensible prediction. La main de vieux... © Coll. Alain Robert “It happened on a Wednesday,” Thierry Robert says. “I remember because it’s the day the parents aren’t home. I was with my sister when the police knocked. They told us he’d had a serious accident and they’d flown him by helicopter to Grenoble.” Forty years later, Thierry still can’t tell it without emotion: “We had to wait for our parents to get back before we understood he was in a coma—between life and death.” At first, the details are blurry. But once the family reaches the hospital, the picture sharpens fast: Alain has bled out 45% of his total blood volume. The staff at Grenoble’s university hospital (the CHU) has basically never seen anything like it. He’s transfused nonstop for six days. Then, at some point in the night, he wakes up. Another miracle. The Mummy Returns “What saved my life,” Alain Robert says, “were my elbows. They acted like shock absorbers.” He fell headfirst, but he managed to throw his hands out in front of him. After a 65-foot fall, his hands hit the limestone and essentially detonated—wrists and forearms with them. “We call it a bone crush,” he says. “My bones broke into a hundred pieces.” After he wakes up, surgeons spend weeks operating. “They put pins in his forearms—the kind they usually put in the femur of a motorcycle crash victim,” his younger brother explains. Back at the hospital in Valence, he’s treated by a hand specialist, Gérard Hoel. Hoel looks at what’s in front of him and comes to two conclusions: one, he’s never seen hands this destroyed; two, this patient will never climb again. “He told me my wrists were like scrambled eggs,” Alain says. “And that I could forget about climbing.” On paper, for a 20-year-old with a fractured knee, foot, pelvis, and forearms that look like they went through a blender, he’s “lucky.” Alain Robert ou Philippe Candeloro ? © Coll Philippe Poulet After two months in the hospital, Alain goes home. He can’t turn a faucet. He can’t twist a key in a lock. “I felt like I had two crystal flutes instead of hands,” he says, stroking his forearms. “Like if I bumped them on anything, they’d just snap.” Over lunch, he shows his wrists. The left still carries faint marks. The right sits at an angle that would make a radiologist wince. It’s hard to picture that, forty years earlier, Alain Robert decided he was going to rebuild his upper body on his own—openly defying the limits of conventional medicine. “It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head” Alain Robert “I started by filling pots with water and carrying them, one by one,” he says. “Once I could lift all four sizes, I started hanging from my hands—first on a stair railing, then doing pull-ups.” One pull-up. Then two. Then three. “I went with baby steps,” he says. “Every day, my goal was just a little higher than the day before.” To prove to himself it was real, he sets a target: traversing the wall of the MJC in Valence, the community center down the street. He crimps his fingers on the mortar seams between bricks and moves sideways. Every day, he falls. Every day, he tries again. Two years later, he finally traverses the whole thing—about 330 feet. “That wall saved my life as a climber,” he says now. “It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head.” Unbreakable. Because when he comes out the other side, Alain Robert is stronger than he’s ever been. Alain Robert sur le mur de la MJC de Valence © Coll Alain Robert “Do You Recognize Me? It’s Alain Robert.” Gérard Hoel also climbs—casually. One day, he’s fighting his way up something in the French 5th grade range (think roughly 5.8-ish in Yosemite grades) when he sees a shadow move past him. A guy in the next line just eats up the overhang—steep, roofy climbing—like it’s nothing. At the top, the man introduces himself, wearing blue tights: “Do you recognize me? It’s Alain Robert.” “He smiled and told me I’d really worked hard to prove him wrong,” Alain says, still amused. Hoel was wrong. But Alain thinks his case fascinated the doctor—because it cracked open a world Hoel didn’t know existed. A lot of other people can’t believe it either. Like the day in 1984 when, after rehab, a Social Security medical examiner comes to calculate Alain Robert’s disability rating. The verdict: 66% disability. (For context, a paraplegic is around 70%.) Following Alain Robert’s “baby steps” means walking through his philosophy. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he says in interview after interview, like it’s a New Year’s toast you can’t stop repeating. Still, his case stays strange. It starts to gather a kind of mystique. Two years after his coma, Alain Robert is back at his top level. He can do 700 pull-ups an hour. He’s on rock every day. And he picks up right where he left off: a route called L’Abominable homme des doigts —“The Abominable Finger Man,” nicknamed “L’Abo.” Before the accident, he’d failed on it every time. Now, at 22, he finishes it in a few weeks. It’s graded 7b+, roughly 5.12c/d—at a moment when the climbing world has only just broken into the 5.13 range. His comeback starts inside a life that looks almost normal. He gets a job at Bado Sport, a shop in downtown Valence, working the climbing-and-mountain department. On his lunch break, he heads to the nearby cliffs and inhales hard routes. “In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites” Laurent Belluard He keeps that ritual through the second half of the 1980s. One obsession among others: L’Abo. He opens variations. He bans himself from using certain holds. And eventually he promises himself he’ll climb it as a free solo—no rope, no gear, no margin for error. He does it in 1986. From then on, the guy running the department spends his lunch breaks grinding on that chunk of rock without a rope the way other people go play squash. As he gets more confident, the free-soloist stays almost totally unknown. He signs up for the Vaulx-en-Vélin World Cup event in 1986, but his injuries keep him just outside the final. His hopes of doing anything in competition climbing die right there. So there’s the solo. But Alain Robert isn’t alone anymore… Edlinger vs. The Abominable Finger Man In 1982, climbing enters French living rooms through a mid-length film, La vie au bout des doigts  ( Life at the Tips of Your Fingers ). You watch Patrick Edlinger free solo on his Mediterranean cliffs. When Jean-Pierre Janssens’ film airs on Antenne 2, it hits like a bomb. For the first time, climbing in its “purest” form—free soloing—is embodied by a climber presented as chemically pure, too. Handsome, loose, weightless, Edlinger becomes a star. He’s on the cover of Paris Match . That same year, Alain Robert is flat on his back in a hospital bed, watching the train go by. Behind the Edlinger locomotive come Patrick Berhault, Catherine Destivelle, Isabelle Patissier… In the south, there’s also a crew of young climbers who settle in Buoux for half the year. Stage name: the “Parisian gang.” Laurent Jacob, Jean-Baptiste Tribout, Marc and Antoine Le Menestrel—they open routes, harder and harder. David Chambre is part of the group, too. “The first time we heard about Alain, he was basically a curiosity,” Chambre says. “We’d heard about his accidents and a few of his solos, but honestly, we had a hard time believing it.” Starting in 1985, Robert comes to Buoux once in a while. But when he runs into them at the base of routes, he often heads off alone to climb on the west face—abandoned, out of the way. “He didn’t have a place back then,” Chambre continues. “He wasn’t part of the movement pushing free climbing upward, and competition wasn’t really an option because of his disabilities. He chose a solitary life, doing his thing in his corner.” Philippe Poulet, editor-in-chief of Vertical , says the same thing: “He slipped through that era. That’s why he’ll carry this image his whole life—this little troublemaker trying to sneak in through the back door.” Alain Robert wasn’t there at the right moment. And now he simply isn’t where he “should” be. “He’s at Crussol, at Entrechaux, in the Drôme… super hard cliffs, but not the stuff that’s fashionable,” adds Laurent Belluard. For Belluard, it’s also about aesthetics. “In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites.” So much so that you could almost cast him as the anti-hero. Alain Robert can pull on fluorescent, harlequin tights and grind himself into the most extreme routes on his home crag in Cornas—the decade still forgets him. Edlinger keeps shining. Catherine Destivelle stacks world titles. Alain climbs in the shadows, alone. Or under the worried eyes of his wife and two kids. By 1990, the soloist is a family man. And to break the spell of his invisibility, he’s about to throw himself into the boldest solos of his career. Also the most reckless. A slice of the climbing world starts to buzz about what he’s doing, but Alain Robert still looks, to most people, like a sporting-goods store employee who climbs pitches on his lunch break. Until 1991, when he’s going to change scale entirely. To be continued…

As France’s private climbing-gym market struggles, the independent gym network The Roof looks like it’s found another way forward. Built on a cooperative structure and a mutual-aid network that’s unusual in France, these gyms aim for shared governance, capped pay gaps, and deep local roots. This is a look inside a model that’s holding up—somewhere between hard-nosed financial discipline and what its builders call a “sincere utopia.” The Roof team in Toulouse © Julien Petitpierre The scene has become a modern cliché. Stand in the right spot and you can take in the whole mural commercial climbing gyms have learned to paint: stylish twenty-somethings sipping beer in the warm glow of a trendy bar. Only in the back—behind big glass walls—do you finally spot the panels of steep terrain studded with bright holds. Like plenty of others, The Roof’s gym in Toulouse checks the boxes of what people now call a “third place” (a hangout that’s not home or work). People drift through the big entry hall with the body language of regulars. Lots of them won’t climb. They’re here for what the place is —and, sure, for the craft beer and the small plates too. A Good SCOP The Roof Toulouse opened in 2023 inside Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, a former factory turned cultural hub in western Toulouse. Since its makeover, the place has become an institution in the Pink City, drawing more than two million visitors a year. You pass the gym’s terrace—palm trees and all—before stepping into the vast nave that holds the city’s biggest food court, plus a performance venue, coworking spaces, and even squash courts. Planted right in the middle of it all, The Roof feeds off the buzz. On this winter weekend, the gym is even hosting an eco-focused festival with Les Halles, called “Faire écologie,” bringing together nonprofits, activists, and public figures for two days of discussions. That’s probably why Pierre-Olivier Dupuy—co-founder and co-manager of the climbing gym—looks even more slammed than usual. Between scanning people in at the door, pouring pints, and getting ready for classes, he’s also greeting the next panelist and making sure the conference room is set. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong. We didn’t want to become a standard company” Pierre-Olivier Dupuy, co-manager of The Roof Toulouse Somewhere in the middle of his thousand daily tasks, Dupuy sits down to talk about the model behind his gym. He’s 44, and he’s celebrating the start of The Roof Toulouse’s third year in business. He rubs his scalp, glances around, then smiles. “See this festival?” he says. “This is exactly what we wanted here—bringing a bunch of different people together around shared values. For me, that’s what The Roof is. Not just a climbing gym, but a place that actually means something.” A former academic researcher, Dupuy has been nursing the dream of making a living from climbing since 2015. Back then, he was climbing in a club with his friend Aurélien Guesdon, who would become his first business partner. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong,” he says over an espresso. “We didn’t want to become a standard company. At the same time, we didn’t want to stay a nonprofit either, stuck depending on time slots and public subsidies.” The “third way” they landed on was France’s Entreprise Sociale et Solidaire  (social and solidarity economy). That’s where they found the legal structure that, in their eyes, checked every box: a SCOP—a Société Coopérative Participative , essentially a French worker cooperative. It took Dupuy and Guesdon seven years before they could finally open the doors. Linked to the massive redevelopment project at Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, The Roof Toulouse depended on a complex project package, bank negotiations, and plenty of administrative headaches. But since opening in 2023, it’s done fairly well: €1.6 million in revenue, up 14% from 2024 to 2025. That number looks even more striking next to figures recently shared by L’Observatoire de l’escalade , which reports an average 5% decline in revenue for private climbing gyms in France. Today, Dupuy’s company employs 22 people—eight of them are also member-owners. That, he says, is what he’s proudest of. “We decide together,” he says. “That was one of our guiding principles from the start.” Like a conventional company, a SCOP has a general assembly where members vote on big decisions: strategy, investments, pay, leadership appointments, and more. The difference is that in a cooperative, one person equals one vote. “Decision-making is disconnected from capital,” Dupuy says. “Aurélien and I each put €30,000 into the company. Our vote still carries the same weight as someone else’s who put in three times less.” Under the Same Roof The Roof Toulouse’s SCOP bylaws give employees three years to decide whether they want to buy into the cooperative. So far, most of the first wave of staff have said yes, and two more people are expected to join this year. For Dupuy, it’s “a real lever to get involved in strategic decisions instead of just executing.” It’s also how the model’s other pillars take shape: pay gaps capped at 1-to-3 (editor’s note: in conventional companies, the average is closer to 1-to-7), and a required minimum share of profits that must be reinvested in the company—at least 15%. “Most of the value created has to be put back toward the people who actually work here,” Dupuy says. Those choices help explain why The Roof says it sees very little turnover—despite running a gym with 750 square meters (about 8,100 square feet) of climbable surface, plus a yoga and Pilates studio, a restaurant, and a bar. Les deux co-fondateurs de The Roof Toulouse, Pierre-Olivier Dupuy à gauche et Aurélien Guesdon à droite © Julien Petitpierre Still, a SCOP doesn’t protect you from everything. The broader economy hits everyone the same way, and in 2025 it has landed hard on climbing gyms. “We might have good revenue, but we’re barely breaking even,” Dupuy says. With 2,500 members, The Roof Toulouse’s attendance hasn’t dipped. But everything around it keeps rising: food, energy, holds, cleaning—while customers’ purchasing power slides the other way. It’s a tough equation, and it demands strict management if you want to avoid what just happened next door: Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, despite growing popularity, has been placed into court-ordered reorganization. To better ride out headwinds, The Roof Toulouse is also part of a larger network: The Roof France, itself organized as a cooperative—more specifically a SCIC  ( Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif , a French “collective interest” cooperative). The network now includes nine gyms across France: Bayonne, Brest, Poitiers, Rennes, Le Havre, Saint-Brieuc, Albi, Bourg-de-Péage—and Toulouse. “Each gym is completely independent—free and autonomous in its decisions and choices,” Dupuy says. “At a minimum, we share a name—The Roof—a visual identity, and a collective commitment to help each other.” Every Thursday morning, the managers across the network meet in a “co-dir” (a co-leadership meeting) to compare notes. “For a lot of us, it’s our first time building a business,” Dupuy says. “So we all feel the need to share our thinking—our doubts, our challenges, and what’s working.” When Dupuy and Guesdon first heard about The Roof network at the start of their own journey—more than ten years ago—it didn’t take long to buy in. “We’d just gone all-in on the social and solidarity economy, and the people there already shared those values,” Dupuy recalls. “Everyone was trying to build an alternative to the excesses of the standard economic model.” In other words: a whole crew of committed builders—led, at the beginning, by a trailblazer who didn’t exactly plan on becoming the face of a national network. UCPA, Mont Blanc, and Isabelle Autissier The story starts not far from Toulouse, in Durfort-Lacapelette, in 2012. Benoît Lacroix, then a specialized educator at Fondation d’Auteuil, didn’t know it yet, but he was about to fall hard for something besides climbing: the city of La Rochelle. On a weekend trip with his then-partner, the two became so taken with the “Ocean Gate” that they started hunting for local crags to climb. Problem: Charente-Maritime is famously short on real relief. So on the train back to Montauban, they scribbled a wild idea on a scrap of paper: build their own climbing gym. “It was sincere and kind of utopian,” Lacroix tells me over the phone. “We were kids—maybe 23 or 24—but we had a sense of the values we wanted in the project. We wrote that our goal wasn’t to extract value at all costs, but to make sure the value flows back to the people who make the place run. But once you say that, you still have to choose a structure—and we had no idea how.” So they did what most people do when they need help: they called friends. With a small crew in Montauban, they took over a former boat dealership building and built the gym the old-fashioned way—by sheer effort. Along the way, they crossed paths with people from the world of ecology and cooperation, including the sailor Isabelle Autissier. They convinced elected officials and local stakeholders, and soon The Roof La Rochelle opened its doors—in December 2013. The gym took off quickly—and it drew the attention of other local project leaders, first in Bayonne, then in Brest. “That’s when I started thinking the model could be shared,” Lacroix says. “I wrote this document called ‘Recipe for Making a The Roof’ and started supporting other entrepreneurs. And I realized I’d developed a real passion for putting projects together.” The expanded team of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle during El Capp Fest in 2023 © courtesy of Benoît Lacroix Lacroix, it turns out, collects passions. The former Montauban resident also got hooked on solo offshore sailing. “That’s actually what pushed the first Roof gyms toward the Atlantic coast,” he says, laughing. “At the start, I thought it’d be cool to visit them by boat!” He never did, but that sailing obsession led to a meeting that would reshape The Roof network. “I was training for a Mini-Transat and looking for sponsors,” he says. “I’d met the guy who was going to become CEO of UCPA during a climb on Mont Blanc, so I knocked on his door. He told me, ‘Your Mini-Transat doesn’t interest me, but your climbing thing does—I want us in.’” That’s how UCPA—the large French nonprofit known for outdoor sports centers—entered the The Roof France project. And it changed a lot. “They first put equity into the network structure, which indirectly helped finance the creation of The Roof in Brest,” Lacroix explains. “Then we benefitted from their financial backbone, legal support, and expertise.” The First Cracks Years later, UCPA is still there. The organization even holds the presidency of The Roof France within the SCIC. And every Thursday morning, it’s Ludovic Marchant—head of sports activities and events development—who runs those co-leadership meetings for The Roof managers. “We stay humble and at a distance,” Marchant insists. “The cooperative is really run by the gyms. We do have signing authority as president, sure, but the gyms remain the majority.” Marchant calls himself “an administrative link.” But his inbox is where the first membership requests land. He’s also the one who calls the group together when a local project looks promising. Candidates then go through an onboarding path: they present their project to the network and get challenged on it. “We’re not thirsty for growth. We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne By his own account, that structure reassures people. “We’re a big organization, and bankers like seeing that we’re there when it’s time to put together a financing package,” he says. Dupuy agrees. “Without UCPA, we probably wouldn’t have as much room to maneuver,” he says. “Even if, again, you still have to know how to stand on your own.” UCPA was drawn in by the agility and social-economy values The Roof network carried. But it also saw a growing market. Looking back, Lacroix puts it plainly: “I think there was an idea of using the engineering we’d developed with our projects to get a foot in the door. Was that fully clear to them at the time? I don’t know. What I do know is that later on, I was asked a lot to help them think through their own UCPA Sport Nation model.” During a contest at The Roof Bayonne in November 2025 © William Desse Today, across France, UCPA has built five indoor-sports centers, and each one includes a climbing wall. If UCPA gives the network a stronger backbone, it also helps it push through turbulence. In 2016, after UCPA joined The Roof France, things sped up. Toulouse started to emerge. Rennes came knocking. “But those were projects on a totally different scale,” Lacroix says. “Two gyms tied to massive redevelopment programs—Les Halles de la Cartoucherie in Toulouse, and Hôtel-Dieu in Rennes.” Lacroix poured time into it—lots of time—and got pulled under. “Between that, my Mini-Transat project, and other stuff, I think I ended up projecting a kind of instability back onto Brest and Bayonne,” he says. The result: in 2018, Lacroix was voted out of the presidency. A year later, he and his former partner removed their La Rochelle gym from the network. “It was one of the worst moments of my life—hell,” Lacroix says. “But that’s the game. They didn’t want me as president anymore. I knew the rules of democracy. That’s how it goes.” He has since launched another climbing-related project in La Rochelle called Les Cabanes Urbaines . After that rupture, UCPA took the helm and kept supporting the network’s growth in places like Albi, Saint-Brieuc, and Le Havre. From behind the bar noise in his Toulouse gym, Dupuy zooms out. “Like any human organization, being a cooperative doesn’t exempt us from a lot of issues—financial difficulty, management problems, burnout,” he says. He even points to a hard truth: “Overwork is a real issue in SCOPs. You see the same pattern of over-investment from some employees because the work feels meaningful. You throw yourself fully into projects you care about—and it can lead to mental overload and trouble unplugging.” Alone, With People All Around You Every The Roof gym founder says some version of the same thing: you have to learn to rebalance your life, and you often have to give something up. Dupuy says he’s lost friendships. Julien Muller, a director in the Vercors, learned what it means to work 90-hour weeks. In Le Havre, Antonin Salze learned to live on the SMIC—the French minimum wage. Even so, while financial results vary from gym to gym—The Roof Vercors saw a 20% revenue increase from 2024 to 2025, while The Roof Le Havre saw a 17% drop—every gym in the network is at least breaking even. “It’s very solid,” Marchant says. “Every Thursday, I’m surrounded by people who love climbing—but first and foremost, they’re business leaders.” Agile, sincere, and convinced their model can’t survive without a certain amount of hard rationality. “We’re not thirsty for growth,” says Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne. “We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” “We wanted to do social good, so we had to be social all the way through,” adds Muller, whose Vercors gym runs sport-and-health programs and works with local associations to broaden access to climbing. In Le Havre, Salze and his team welcome groups of patients in remission from long illnesses or addiction, as well as children with disabilities. Most of all, none of them say they would have opened their gym without first getting a green light from the nearby clubs and associations. “Those groups became our ambassadors—bringing in more climbers,” Salze says. “That’s the heart of The Roof,” Dupuy says. “These are projects rooted locally. UCPA, the network, the other gyms—they help. But what matters most is what you manage to do with your own local ecosystem.” “In the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Benoît Lacroix, founder of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle For more than a decade now, the independent gyms in The Roof network have been carrying a different model than the big commercial chains. With no outside investors and no promise of double-digit growth, they even seem to be holding up better than their competitors now that the market has flattened out. Dupuy, though, won’t declare victory. “Is our model more resilient?” he says. “Only the future will tell.” Back at the beginning of this cooperative horizon, Lacroix never imagined that an idea scribbled on a train would grow this big. Today, with Les Cabanes Urbaines , he’s careful too. Still, when he looks in the rearview mirror at SCOPs, SCICs, the PACTE law, and the rise of “mission-driven companies,” he allows himself one breath of relief: “Clearly, this isn’t a year where we’ll be handing out bonuses or big raises,” he says. “But in the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Lacroix quotes his business partner, Serge Papin—former president of the Système U cooperative and current Minister for SMEs, Commerce, Crafts, Tourism, and Purchasing Power: “Purpose creates the reason for being, which creates the reason to come.” Proof the model attracts interest: UCPA’s development director says he has counted around a hundred inquiries in his inbox over the last three years. In the summer of 2026, the network is set to welcome its tenth independent gym—in Cherbourg.

We treat chalk like a given in climbing: you slap some on, you stick. But friction isn’t a belief system—it’s a messy equation with a bunch of variables. Depending on humidity (in the air and in your fingers), the condition of your skin, and the texture of the rock, chalk can boost friction… or quietly make it worse. This piece follows the trail of studies that don’t agree with each other and turns the mechanics into simple, usable takeaways: when chalk helps, when it sabotages you, and why “more” can end up meaning “less.” © David Pillet The chalk bag has become a comfort object. You dip a hand into it like you’re reaching back for certainty—especially when you can feel the crux coming. The problem is that between living skin and uneven rock, certainty is a terrible measuring tool. If you stick to everyday experience, the story sounds straightforward: chalk “dries” sweat, so of course it improves grip. But the research literature tells a less tidy story. One lab study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in the early 2000s actually found a drop in friction with chalk. The authors offered a simple explanation: too much powder can form a gritty layer that shears and slides, and drying your skin too much can stiffen it so it doesn’t mold to tiny features as well. A few years later, another study in Sports Biomechanics measured a clear friction gain on a hangboard. More recently, work by researchers at the University of Sheffield adds the missing piece: the effect depends heavily on both rock type and humidity—to the point that, on certain minerals, chalk can be counterproductive. So the question isn’t “Is chalk useful?” It’s “Under what conditions, on what rock, with what kind of skin, and how much chalk?” That’s the thread we’re going to follow: understand friction, and get back to a practice based on reading conditions—not reflex, not faith, but diagnosis. Grip Doesn’t Have a Moral Compass In climbing, friction isn’t a character trait. It’s not a reward handed out to the deserving or a punishment for everyone else. It’s resistance to sliding between two surfaces—contact, materials, forces. Researchers often boil it down to a number—the coefficient of friction—which feels comforting, like you could end all arguments with enough decimals. Except climbing is basically the art of what refuses to stay constant. That coefficient shifts with how hard you pull, how quickly you load a hold, the direction of force, the presence of dust, temperature, and microscopic wear. Most of all, it changes with what you can’t see but that decides everything: an invisible film of water, a barely-there deposit, a surface polished slick by repetition—or, on the flip side, “woken up” by brushing. And then there’s the most underestimated variable: your skin. A fingertip pad isn’t a stable industrial material. It’s living tissue—hydrated, compressible, swelling and stiffening, wearing down and rebuilding, constantly trading moisture with the air. Talking about friction in climbing means talking about an encounter between an organism and a mineral—not a standardized contact between two clean, identical plates. Humidity, the Fake Villain This is where humidity stops being “bad conditions” and starts acting like a double agent. Most climbers know the confusing part: a little bit of moisture can feel grippy, while perfect dryness can turn a decent hold into soap. That only seems like a paradox if you assume the goal is to be bone-dry all the time. Skin that’s too dry loses its ability to deform. It doesn’t mold into micro-textures as well, doesn’t “print” fine features, doesn’t anchor the same way. But add too much water and the physics flips. Past a certain point, moisture doesn’t help contact—it creates a thin interface layer that behaves like lubricant. Your skin isn’t working against the rock anymore; it’s working against a film. Grip gets twitchy. What felt like sticking turns into slipping faster, and the sense of control can vanish all at once. Chalk operates inside that fragile window—not as a talisman, but as a tuning tool. It pulls some water out, stabilizes the interface, and makes the feel more predictable. And that’s exactly why it’s not a universal law: if the air is heavy, if sweat comes right back, if your skin has already stiffened, or if the hold needs really direct contact with the texture, chalk can push the dial too far. It stops correcting an excess and starts changing the nature of the contact. Three Studies, Three Stories, One Reality The science around chalk is interesting because it reads like an investigation: serious results that don’t match, and a truth hiding in the conditions. In 2001, a lab study in the Journal of Sports Sciences— “Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth?” —landed on a conclusion that clashes with intuition: chalk lowered the coefficient of friction. The setup was tightly controlled, measuring fingertip sliding on a flattened rock sample. In that context, the authors proposed two mechanisms that make sense: drying stiffens skin and reduces how well it conforms to texture, and the powder can form a granular layer that sits between skin and rock and shears under load. © « Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth? » In 2012, the scene changes and the movement gets closer to real climbing. Eleven experienced climbers hung from a hangboard-style device while the angle increased until they slipped. This time, chalk clearly improved grip, with measured gains on limestone and sandstone—and with a takeaway that matches what people feel on rock: not all stone offers the same friction, even with the same skin. © The effect of chalk on the finger–hold friction coefficient in rock climbing Then a more recent piece of work arrives and feels like a relief because it finally accepts complexity instead of hiding it: the effect depends on humidity and, crucially, on the rock itself. When you test multiple stones—with different roughness levels—under “dry” and “humid” conditions, you see what many climbers have long suspected: on some textures, especially certain very “bitey” limestones, chalk can become counterproductive. Not because white powder is magically “bad,” but because it changes an interface that, in that specific case, needed more direct contact. The “Third Body,” or How You Get in Your Own Way The most useful concept here is simple: the “third body.” We tend to imagine a straight relationship between skin and rock, but the second chalk shows up, a third element inserts itself. That third body can do what you want—absorb moisture, stabilize, even things out—but it can also turn the contact into something else: a thin film that fills in useful micro-features, a layer that shears, a material that slips precisely because it’s made of particles. © The effectiveness of chalk as a friction modifier for finger pad contact with rocks of varying roughness This is where the most stubborn myth collapses: “The more you use, the better it sticks.” As long as the layer stays thin, chalk works like a small adjustment. When it gets thick, it stops “drying” and starts replacing direct contact. And in a sport where success can come down to tiny texture, swapping rock-on-skin contact for a dusty, gritty layer can make a move suddenly feel inexplicable. At that point, chalk becomes a very clean way to sabotage yourself: something meant to reassure you ends up changing the mechanics at the worst moment. It also explains a familiar pattern: the hold that gets “worse” try after try. That isn’t always the climber falling apart. Sometimes it’s the interface loading up. Your skin heats up, moisture returns, powder accumulates, deposits shift around, the surface subtly changes. It’s easy to mistake that mechanical slide for a confidence problem when it’s really material saturation—a hold that needs to be brushed. Less Reflex, More Reading The takeaway isn’t a moral verdict (“chalk: yes” or “chalk: no”). It’s a way of reading the situation. The real question isn’t “Does chalk actually work?” It’s: Under what conditions, on what rock, with what skin state, and at what dose does it genuinely improve grip? That reframing does something immediately useful: it turns a cultural reflex into an adjustable tool. Seen that way, chalk goes back to what it should have always been: a minimal intervention on a fragile interface. A thin layer can stabilize things and bring you back into a “useful” humidity zone. A thick layer can insert a slippery third body. Skin that’s too dry can lose its ability to conform; skin that’s too wet can start lubricating. And the same action—chalking up again—can produce opposite results depending on the hold, the air, and the skin you showed up with that day. There’s something kind of satisfying in the conclusion, honestly: climbing isn’t just a strength sport. It’s a conditions sport. Chalk isn’t a miracle. It’s a dial.

Self-taught photographer, purebred city climber, and a perpetually “in-transition” lawyer, Hugo Perez has made a habit of turning climbing’s failures into something worth staring at. Chaos is his latest photo project: a close-up, personal notebook where skin splits, bodies hit the ground, and poetry shows up—happily—right in the mess. © Hugo Perez Climbing is usually sold as an airy dance between holds. Perez is clearly more into the sketchier version: the one where you hesitate, slip, swear, and end up with wrecked fingers and an ego in pieces. With Chaos, this 29-year-old Parisian puts his finger on what’s most moving about climbing: how it can leave you exposed. And honestly, it’s beautiful. The good mess of failure Fifteen years grinding away on the plastic in Paris gyms will sharpen your eye like a razor-thin crimp. Perez came up with that first wave of gym-raised urban climbers. “I was climbing almost every day around Antrebloc,” he tells us, with the easy calm of someone who wore out resin holds before it was cool. Pretty quickly, like a lot of people on that track, he got pulled toward the “sacred forest”: Fontainebleau—the bouldering mecca where you learn to fall hard as often as you learn to move well. No federation certificate, no formal coaching. Perez owns that DIY split without making a big deal of it. “I didn’t turn it into a job, and I wasn’t really trying to,” he says—more interested in working a flash than clipping carabiners. A photo book—without the polish The project started with a public photography class offered by the City of Paris. The assignment: make a photo book. Perez didn’t take long to decide. It would be climbing—but the rebellious version. “I was tired of the overly polished Fontainebleau shots. Sometimes it feels like you’re going in circles,” he says flatly. Instead of chasing perfect movement and squeaky-clean boulders, he points his flash at what usually gets edited out: the repeated failures, the bleeding fingertips, the tight smiles after the tenth fall. “Most of the time, we show the final photo—the nice move, done perfectly. But failure? We don’t really show that,” he explains. And yet, he insists, “they’re still good moments.” Someone had to say it. © Hugo Perez Blur as a choice: when the photographer loses his footing With an unapologetic mix of blur and flash, Perez isn’t trying to gently unsettle you—he wants to knock you off-balance. Where classic climbing photos turn bodies into graceful shapes floating in clean air, Chaos draws different lines: the line of the fall, the uncontrolled skid, the openly owned wipeout. “It was about breaking the lines, creating new ones—especially the lines of the fall,” he says. The approach calls to mind American photographer Chad Moore, known for leaning into blur, raw grain, and the kind of rough-edged poetry that comes straight from real life. Perez builds a joyful choreography where bodies stall out, wobble, and slam down without shame—an ode to gravity, literally and otherwise. A geological—and existential—poetry With the title Chaos, Perez isn’t just going for a provocative vibe. He’s also slipping in a small geology lesson. In the Fontainebleau area, “chaos” can refer to a natural, jumbled pile of boulders—common in places like the Apremont gorges. It’s a fitting image for the way bouldering can feel: a joyful mess. But Perez, committed to the idea, pushes it further. His “chaos” turns metaphorical, even existential: the stubborn, absurd fight of a climber against a piece of rock that refuses to be “conquered.” In a single flash, a plain old fall starts to look almost philosophical. © Hugo Perez What’s next: cliffs—and women in the frame Chaos is already a strong first chapter, but Perez wants more. He’s quick to name what’s missing—“There aren’t any women, for example”—and he wants to widen the project toward outdoor cliffs. Friends even gave him a rope specifically so he can spend hours hanging in space, shooting from the wall. The long-term goal: turn Chaos into a more ambitious book, open to more kinds of climbers, able to speak to a broader audience. In the meantime, he hopes to exhibit the photos in Paris gyms—bringing a little poetry into these modern temples where, too often, only success gets the spotlight. With Chaos, Hugo Perez isn’t just showing the “behind the scenes” of climbing. He celebrates it—with real, giddy swagger. By fully embracing imperfection, he reminds us that climbing, like life, is often a story of beautiful failures and modest wins. With Perez, the chaos starts to look downright appealing. You almost find yourself wanting to fall more often. To view Chaos online, it’s right here.

Muscle fatigue isn’t just that heavy, useless feeling in your arms—it’s a whole neurochemical show run by your central nervous system. Between warning signals and built-in protective brakes, your body is way smarter about effort than we give it credit for. Ready for a delightfully brainy dive into what’s really happening behind the scenes when your forearms are blowing up? Let’s go. We all know that climber: the veteran who casually cruises 5.11d (7a) while practically whistling, then hits you with that half-patronizing, half-dad-voice line: “Don’t worry—climbing’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget.” An infuriating thing to hear, especially after three forced months off thanks to a wrecked ankle. But what if, behind that smug little smile, they’re right? Because while your brain is busy holding onto your credit card PIN and the name of the neighbor you’ve “totally met before,” your body is quietly logging every foot placement, every hip shift, every tiny controlled wobble you saved at the last second. Yes—your body remembers how to climb. And the bad news is, it probably remembers better than you do. Are your muscles smarter than you? Quick spoiler so nobody spirals: your biceps don’t think. Your quads have never had an identity crisis. And no, your forearms are not secretly storing your favorite playlists. What people casually call “muscle memory” is really your nervous system doing its job. When you drill the same movement over and over—methodically, stubbornly, sometimes obsessively—control starts shifting away from the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain doing the anxious, conscious thinking) and toward more efficient systems, including the cerebellum, which helps run smooth, precise movement. The result: you suddenly move in a clean, fluid sequence almost without thinking. Your brain is working in the background. Your body executes. And you’re just there, in the middle, looking talented without being totally sure how you pulled it off. In other words: you climb better than your conscious brain ever gave you credit for. It’s kind of flattering. The brain remodel: when your head gets hooked Every time you repeat the same climbing move, you’re not just pumping your forearms until they feel like overfilled balloons—you’re literally reshaping your brain. That’s not poetic. That’s neuroscience. One study (Di Paola, 2013) found that expert climbers can show an enlarged cerebellum, likely tied to the constant demand for ultra-precise coordination. Translation: the more you climb, the more your brain adapts—sometimes in ways that are objectively fun to bring up at a party if you feel like impressing or boring people. But there’s a catch. Your brain will learn anything you feed it, including bad habits. If you consistently botch a move, you’re teaching that error with the same seriousness as the correct version. Tend to ignore your footwork the second you get stressed? Do that enough, and you’re building it into your default settings. Moral: learn it clean early, or you’ll spend the rest of your climbing life trying to unlearn the thing you accidentally mastered. And here’s the wilder part: your muscles have their own kind of long-term advantage. When you train hard—sets, reps, the whole grind until you’re flirting with that nasty burn—your muscle fibers add extra nuclei. And the evolutionary joke is that those nuclei tend to stick around even after long breaks (thank you, Netflix, delivery apps, and extended couch seasons). A study (Bruusgaard, 2010) showed these added nuclei can persist for months, even years, during inactivity. So when you come back after your “little break” and start climbing again, your strength rebuilds faster than you expect. You think you’re starting from scratch. Your body disagrees. It remembers what it used to be. And suddenly you’re back to form after three sessions—while pretending to be surprised, just to stay humble in front of your friends. Nice little perk, right? Basic instinct Once your movement patterns get automated, you hit the climber’s holy grail: you move on instinct. According to research by Zampagni (2011) , experienced climbers are much better at distributing their weight across all four limbs. Beginners, stuck overthinking everything, often default to hauling with their arms—then wonder why they’re cooked after two moves. The other upside is more subtle: your conscious brain gets freed up from the low-level technical stuff. It can focus on what actually matters—reading the next hold, managing that quiet fear of falling, or, if you’re that type, having a full philosophical moment mid-crux (the hardest part of the route). That’s the real win. When your movement is automatic, you can perform with an ease that feels almost unfair to your climbing partners. And if you’re convinced you’ve “lost everything” after a six-month break? Not quite. Motor memory is stubborn—borderline obsessive. A precisely learned movement can reportedly be reproduced up to eight years after the last time you did it. Eight years. No practice, no reminders, and your feet still know where they’re supposed to go, like some eerie ghost of old beta (the sequence) coming back online. Sure, your raw strength and endurance will take a hit. But your technique tends to return faster than you think. And if we’re being honest, you’ll enjoy it—the quiet, slightly smug pleasure of realizing you still have it. Not because you’re special. Just because your nervous system is doing its job. Three ways to train your brain like you train your body Your body hands you a pretty solid neurological superpower: muscle memory that’s reliable and a little cocky. It would be a shame not to use it. Here are three research-backed tips (that are actually easy to apply) to turn that memory into better climbing. 1) Mix it up (including the stuff that shuts you down) Your brain hates boredom. So don’t feed it the same movement pattern forever. Switch styles constantly: delicate slab, steep overhang, boulders that feel personal, long endurance routes that never end. The more variety you give your nervous system, the richer your movement library gets. Over time, your body becomes a living encyclopedia of climbing options—ready to adapt with an annoying amount of ease. 2) Visualize moves (yes, from the couch) This one is for the fans of “productive procrastination.” Simply imagining a climbing movement in detail activates many of the same brain regions as actually doing it ( Filgueiras, 2018 ). Scientists call it “motor imagery.” You can call it “training without putting on pants.” It’s a legit way to reinforce technique on rainy days, or when your gym is swarmed by an overexcited school group. 3) Sleep like it’s part of your training plan According to Fogel (2017) , the real consolidation of technical skills doesn’t happen standing around after your session or while sipping a protein smoothie. It happens during sleep. Practical translation: sleeping well after training helps lock those movement patterns into motor memory. Thinking about pulling an all-nighter before a session? You might as well try climbing barefoot on broken glass. Your call. The dark side of muscle memory As powerful as muscle memory is, it has a sneaky downside: it can trap you in a very specific comfort zone. If you climb the same style, the same angles, the same types of routes over and over, your body becomes that coworker who orders the exact same lunch every day. Predictable. Repetitive. Not great when something unexpected shows up. The risk is becoming a vertical robot—perfectly smooth on familiar sequences, completely lost the second the route forces a new solution. So build the opposite habit, too: disrupt your patterns on purpose. Seek unfamiliar movement. Put yourself in situations that don’t fit your usual strengths. Keep your motor memory flexible, not locked into one narrow script. Otherwise you’ll spend your entire climbing life playing the same tune—about as spontaneous as an elevator stuck between floors. Your best ally: you After this brainy (slightly irreverent, but scientifically grounded) trip, here’s the takeaway that’s both comforting and mildly unsettling: your body remembers your favorite foot placements better than you remember the name of your last climbing partner. Muscle memory, paired with the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself. Put those two together and you get the climber’s real superpower: moving better, moving smoother, moving without overthinking every micro-decision. Your brain adapts. Your body stores the pattern. You end up with a built-in motor intelligence that’s always quietly running. So next time someone tells you climbing is just about strong arms and brute force, smile—just a little—and say, calmly: “Sorry. Climbing is mostly about a brain that knows how to talk to your muscles. And mine’s wired up just fine.”

8a.nu . Social Boulder. Private gym comps. Federation circuits. Competition has swallowed climbing whole. And yet everyone still says the same thing: I climb for myself.  So why the constant one-upmanship? And more to the point: what’s the psychological cost? Luka Potocar, dans le dur, lors de la Coupe du monde à Chamonix, été 2025 © Jan Virt / IFSC This is the third installment of Heavy Mental, our new series breaking down key psychological concepts in climbing under the weight of performance. It’s written by Léo Dechamboux , a mental performance coach and co-author (with Fred Vionnet) of the french reference book Le Mental du grimpeur . I’ve been around competition climbing for more than 20 years. From crags to gyms, from my work as a mental performance coach to my own days as “just another climber,” I’ve heard it—and I’ve said it myself: we climb “for the beauty of the movement.” Even in competition, we like to measure ourselves against ourselves, against the route. Not against anyone else. And yet: competition is everywhere now. Between major national and international federation events, friendly “for fun” comps at private gyms, big-name private events with international reach, and platforms like Social Boulder or 8a.nu , comparison feels baked into the walls. Wherever you are, the message is the same: faster. stronger. farther. So let’s ask the question plainly. If everyone insists they climb for themselves, why does competition feel unavoidable? That’s the point Mental performance coaching has two goals: help you get better, and help you stay balanced and well. Where those overlap, you find the stuff that actually makes a practice sustainable—psychological well-being, motivation, and goal-setting. We pointed out how neoliberal thinking has reshaped psychology by pushing a more individual, performance-driven view of people. Psychology ends up helping produce the “entrepreneur of the self”—someone focused on constant optimization. Key researchers like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan describe three basic needs that support long-term motivation: autonomy, social connection, and competence. That’s the foundation of self-determination theory. They also show how goal-setting shapes motivation, and they distinguish between two broad goal types: mastery goals and ego goals. Mastery goals are about your own progress—strategies, useful behaviors, collaboration. They tend to support intrinsic motivation. Ego goals are competitive by nature: comparing yourself, trying to “beat” someone, making sure nobody beats you. The problem with ramped-up external motivation—or goals that lean too hard on ego—is that they can drive anxiety, self-sabotage, avoidance, negative emotions, or quitting altogether. They’re also heavily shaped by your environment: the motivational “climate” created by the people around you, plus the broader social context that influences how you think, feel, behave, and relate to performance. And this is where competition can start to cut deep. Modern sport took shape in the 18th century alongside industrial capitalism. That shift came with the commodification of people, environments, health, and education. In From Ritual to Record , American historian Allen Guttmann argued back in 1978 that this period also brought standardized measurement: stopwatches, regulated distances, uniform rules—and with them, the concept of the record. For the first time, international comparison became straightforward. Performance became measurable, exchangeable, sellable. It also turned into something like personal capitalism: optimize your body, make it “pay,” celebrate the self-made man and the “good” athletic body—defined against the one that isn’t. Free climbing emerges in that world, and it quickly plugs into the same logic: performance as product, body as capital, your “project” as a narrative investment. Tick lists—lists of “sends,” the climbs you’ve done, your personal scorecard—mixed with social media, instant communication, and sponsors, turn the climber into a thing to be packaged and valued. British sociologist Nikolas Rose described this dynamic in 2008 with the idea of “biocapital”: training becomes a rational production plan. The body becomes a machine. Progress becomes a value. Earlier in Heavy Mental , we pointed out how neoliberal thinking has reshaped psychology by pushing a more individual, performance-driven view of people. Psychology ends up helping produce the “entrepreneur of the self”—someone focused on constant optimization. Sport doesn’t escape that. The pressure ramps up: performance becomes an economic value, and “mental strength” becomes something you’re expected to monetize. In 2024, a report titled “ Navigating Neoliberalism ,” published in the Journal of Sport for Development , described how some sport practices line up with efficiency logic and continuous evaluation. Mental performance coaching can slide into that same frame—sometimes aiming less at personal growth than at productivity-driven optimization, with athletes treated like performance units. When the setting shapes your head Last September, in an interview with Grimper , a journalist asked me a blunt question: isn’t my job, basically, helping climbers survive in a toxic environment—competition? It’s true that competition comes with real psychological constraints that can leave long-term marks. But what’s often more problematic is how  we approach performance and competition. Mental performance coaching should help climbers thrive in this world if they choose it—without it swallowing the rest of their lives. Competition isn’t inherently toxic. But it can become toxic if we ignore the mechanisms—and if mental coaching becomes nothing more than “helping you tough it out” instead of building a healthier, durable relationship with performance. The issue is that we rarely talk about the psychological “set” of competition—the environment that shapes how we feel: how important the result seems, how uncertain it feels, the anxiety it creates, the expectations (internal or external, real or imagined). In 2017, sport psychology researchers Christopher Mesagno and Jürgen Beckmann showed that “choking under pressure”—a drop in performance when the stakes feel high—shows up especially when athletes lock onto the outcome rather than the task. In climbing, that’s what happens when you’re climbing not to fall , not to disappoint, when every attempt turns into a performance for other people. Competitive demands amplify those patterns. Bigger events mean more distractions. Rankings push ego-oriented motivation. And once you’re stuck judging yourself through that lens, it can drag down emotions, thinking, and behavior. Flip the format—make it more about learning and exchange—and motivation tends to swing back toward mastery and competence. That’s the direction the broader research points to when it looks at instructions, motivational climate, and the framework around athletes. These aren’t abstract effects. They show up as less enjoyment, injuries driven by urgency, identity narrowing around “being a performer,” anxious chasing of results, overtraining, burnout. Competition isn’t inherently toxic. But it can become toxic if we ignore the mechanisms—and if mental coaching becomes nothing more than “helping you tough it out” instead of building a healthier, durable relationship with performance. Recognition, gamification, and micro-fame For a long time, the competition frame in climbing was simple: a date, a wall, a deadline. Now the ecosystem has grown into something sprawling. Between federation circuits, gym comps, hybrid events, and platforms like 8a.nu or Social Boulder, competition has fractured into endless micro-scenes—each with its rules, rewards, and visibility. That isn’t unique to climbing. A study by Rob Franken , Hidde Bekhuis, and Jochem Tolsma on digital sports culture shows how platforms—Strava especially—reshape sporting norms by creating what they call “spaces of constant evaluation.” You’re no longer trying to be seen as a person. You’re trying to match a valued image. Your worth starts to depend on being visible, validated, and ranked. Design matters here. Gamification—the use of game-style design in sports apps—often does increase engagement, motivation, and consistency . But it’s not cleanly positive. For people with lower self-control—meaning it’s harder to regulate behavior in response to social cues—gamification can also feed comparison and dependence on feedback. These digital spaces also create new social statuses: micro-celebrity in sport. Researcher Theresa Senft, writing about micro-celebrity culture, describes visibility itself as a resource. A noticed “send” logged on 8a.nu , a well-edited Instagram clip, a #1 spot on the monthly Social Boulder leaderboard, a cameo in a private comp aftermovie—these things can produce “micro-stars” whose recognition rests less on athletic value than on cumulative visibility: fast, consumable, and fleeting. That shift creates a new kind of competition: continuous, and often invisible. You’re not measuring yourself only at one event. You’re measuring yourself every day—through what you post, what you like, what you log, what you “send.” (To “send” is to complete a climb cleanly—your personal stamp of “done.”) That diffuse competition shapes how you train, how you compare, how you judge yourself. Competitiveness seeps into how you climb. And the broader context directly shapes how we approach climbing, progress, performance, and well-being. A competitive environment can satisfy those core needs and feel energizing. It can also frustrate them—by squeezing autonomy and competence under external control. So it’s reasonable to hypothesize that this always-on competitive climate—fed by a broader environment that commodifies bodies, progress, and performance—helps generate a psychological need that feels especially modern: recognition. We know recognition matters for self-esteem. But sociologist Axel Honneth argues that the pursuit of recognition hits a wall when it stops being support for self-worth and becomes a condition for legitimacy. It can creep into the core of our needs, reshaping them without us noticing. Philosopher Nancy Fraser adds another layer: when recognition becomes a kind of “social currency,” it stops being relational and becomes an expectation. You’re no longer trying to be seen as a person. You’re trying to match a valued image. Your worth starts to depend on being visible, validated, and ranked. In sport—and in climbing—that slide is easier to miss because performance is so easy to display, count, and compare. Psychological needs can get artificially “filled.” External rewards can feel like autonomy while quietly steering behavior. They can mimic competence while really just handing you approval. They can imitate connection while actually running on constant comparison. Recognition stops being just a human need. It becomes an identity requirement—a proof of existence, sometimes even a duty to perform. Another way to put it: competition, now everywhere, doesn’t exist without person-to-person evaluation, and that evaluation feeds the hunger for recognition. That hunger stops being one pillar of self-esteem and starts behaving like something closer to a basic need—warping autonomy, competence, and connection. You still hear the old lines in climbing spaces: I climb for myself—alone, facing a problem to solve.  Those lines keep echoing because they’re part of climbing’s symbolic culture. But the spaces have multiplied, and the environment has changed. When every move can be quantified, every climber can be ranked, every send can be filmed and uploaded, competition stops being an event. It becomes a condition. And it threads itself into our needs—turning recognition into an identity requirement that quietly redraws what it means to exist as a climber.

In a world where dinner plans became Zoom meetings, friend groups became WhatsApp threads, and “community” is curated by an algorithm, something has slipped: our shared sense of direction. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called it anomie —a state of social drift, when common norms break down and nothing solid replaces them. (cc) Redd Francisco / Unsplash So here’s a question: somewhere between a bouldering session and a post-climb beer, could climbing gyms and crags be stitching some of that fabric back together? Picture the end of a workday. The subway’s packed. Your phone keeps lighting up. You’ve spent hours on Slack and Teams, double-tapping stories, reacting to memes. And then it hits you: you haven’t looked anyone in the eye for more than ten seconds all day. A few blocks away, a climbing gym is filling up. People walk in wearing chalk on their hands and rubber scuffs on their shoes. Someone passes a brush. Two strangers trade beta—route advice on how to solve a sequence. Someone sits down next to you on the pads. You nod. Next week, you’ll recognize their face. No one’s worried about whether it’s “professional” to be on a first-name basis. You’re just there. In a space where gravity is real, and so are the people around you. That contrast sits at the heart of a question Durkheim was already asking in the late 1800s, long before Instagram: what happens when the big collective structures—religion, extended family, village life, trade guilds—stop organizing daily life, and nothing stable replaces them? He called that in-between moment anomie . Hyperconnected modern life has only sped it up. We’ve never been more digitally linked. We’ve rarely felt more socially untethered. That “emptiness” people talk about isn’t just a mood. It has structure. And that’s where climbing becomes interesting—not just as recreation, but as a small-scale attempt to rebuild rules and relationships in a world that feels short on both. Welcome to Anomie For Durkheim, anomie wasn’t a rant about “kids these days.” It was a diagnosis. Societies go through phases where the norms that guide behavior weaken. The rules get blurry. The promises of modern life—progress, mobility, success—don’t match reality. The result? Frustration, isolation, rising depression, self-destructive behavior. In Suicide  (1897) , Durkheim described what happens when individual desire is left without collective guardrails. Sound familiar? Today, job insecurity is normal. Families are scattered. Cities keep losing free gathering spaces. Digital platforms organize our relationships through metrics and monetization. We’re told we’re free—but that freedom often feels like low-grade anxiety: Where do I fit? What am I worth? Who notices if I disappear? Anomie isn’t the absence of rules. It’s too many conflicting ones. Be productive but chill. Competitive but collaborative. Independent but always available. Authentic but polished. We play different roles in different settings and start to lose track of which one is supposed to be “us.” In that fragmentation, sports aren’t just hobbies. They’re spaces where ways of being together get replayed—and sometimes repaired. Climbing, with its tight-knit gym and crag communities, holds a particular place in that landscape. A Gym Is More Than a Gym A modern climbing gym is a strange hybrid: part fitness center, part café, part town square. People show up for the workout, sure. But they stay for something else. From a Durkheimian angle, it’s a small lab for social integration. First, there are rituals. Monday night sessions. Wednesday crew. Friday night under the lights. We don’t go to church like we used to, but we do have our weekly service at the wall. Same time. Same faces. Same chalky air. Second, there’s a recognizable community. The regulars. The setters—the crew who design the problems. The front desk staff you joke with. It’s not total anonymity like the subway. It’s partial anonymity that slowly fades as you keep running into each other in climbing shoes. Third, there are clear shared rules. Don’t walk under someone climbing. Don’t sprint across the pads. Check your partner before you lead—clip the rope into quickdraws as you climb up the wall. These aren’t just technical guidelines. They’re social glue. Following them means taking care of other people. Where anomie blurs expectations, the gym clarifies them. You know why you’re there. You know how to act. You know roughly what you can expect from others. It’s not a grand political vision. It’s a small daily compass. Sociologists talk about “third places”—spaces that aren’t home or work, but where people build belonging: cafés, bars, community centers. Climbing gyms have quietly become third places for a lot of urban adults. You might walk in alone. You rarely stay alone. In a world where so many interactions are screen-mediated, simply sharing air, watching someone work a project—an ongoing route or problem they’re trying to send—and sitting in silence before a crux, the hardest move on the route, matters more than we admit. A Promise That Holds For Durkheim, anomie also comes from a mismatch between desire and reality. A society that promises everything and delivers less breeds frustration. Climbing does the opposite. It promises very little—and delivers exactly that. A 5.10 (roughly French 6b) doesn’t claim to be a shortcut to success. It says: here’s a specific problem. There’s a start, a middle, an end. You’ll need time. You’ll fall. You’ll try again. That’s it. The scale is clear. Your body is the metric—not your résumé, not your salary, not your follower count. After a day of abstract tasks and endless emails, climbing is blunt. Grab the hold. Push through your feet. Manage the pump—that forearm burn from hanging on too long. Fall. Get back on. You’re not optimizing your life. You’re trying to link three more moves. You could call that escape. Sometimes it is. But it’s also coherence. The question shifts from “Am I winning at life?” to “Have I improved on this style since last season?” Progress is local. Feedback is immediate. That kind of clarity works as a counterweight to social drift. It doesn’t solve structural issues—inequality, loneliness, precarity—but it creates a field where effort makes sense and results are visible. And then there’s falling. Falling is part of the deal. You learn to trust the pads. The rope. The belayer—the person holding your rope and managing your safety. Risk isn’t abstract. It’s human-sized. You face it. Together. Vertical Communities Durkheim insisted that what holds us up isn’t just psychology. It’s collective structure. Climbing clubs—public or private, indoor or outdoor—function like mini-institutions. There are authority figures: setters, coaches, the strong locals. There are rites of passage: your first lead, your first 5.11 (around French 6c), your first multi-pitch. There are shared stories: “Remember that winter project?” There’s informal solidarity: carpooling to the crag, lending gear, advice after yet another tweaked pulley. For many, this fills or supplements forms of belonging that have eroded elsewhere. Maybe you’re not joining a political party or a church. But you’re deeply invested in a climbing community—with its quiet values: help each other out. Stay humble in front of the rock. Don’t humiliate beginners. Falling is allowed. It would be naïve to paint climbing as conflict-free. Gender dynamics, class, race, and power show up in gyms and at crags, too. Not everyone feels instantly welcome. The codes can be intimidating. Still, compared to many social spaces, the symbolic barrier to entry is relatively low. Shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of shoes—and soon you’re on the same wall as a surgeon, a server, a college student, a city worker. Worlds that rarely overlap elsewhere share the same problem and the same gravity. That co-presence is a partial antidote to anomie. It rebuilds fragments of common society in a time when neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces are increasingly siloed. Even the most “solo” send has a crowd behind it: setters, belayers, friends who yelled “You’ve got it!” at the right moment. Clear Limits in a Blurry World One of anomie’s quiet effects is the feeling that everything is negotiable, that standards don’t hold. Climbing isn’t negotiable. The wall doesn’t care about your LinkedIn profile. If the hold’s too far, it’s too far. If you don’t know how to clip, you don’t lead. You can fake it in a meeting. Not on a 45-degree overhang. That clarity shapes more than muscle. It teaches patience—progress is slow. Responsibility—your mistake affects your partner. Self-awareness—today might not be the day for that project. Durkheim talked about the moral function of the collective—not moralizing, but orienting. Climbing offers a small, concrete code: don’t text while belaying. Don’t toss your crash pad wherever. Share the wall. Respect the crag. In a time when big ideological compasses feel worn down, these embodied micro-ethics matter. They provide direction, even if it’s temporary. Cure or Commodity? There’s an uncomfortable question here: does climbing heal anomie—or sometimes package and sell it back to us? Private gyms aren’t monasteries. They’re businesses. They need members, retention, “community.” Belonging is real—but it’s also monetized. Social media complicates things further. What felt like refuge can become a stage. Posting sends. Sharing trip footage. Building digital clout. The offline emptiness can creep back online as comparison and pressure: Am I strong enough? Cool enough? Doing enough? Again, Durkheim’s lens helps. Any community that doesn’t reflect on its own norms can slide into its own form of drift: unspoken expectations to be strong, stylish, fun. Silence around burnout or mental health. No real space to talk about harassment, sexism, racism, or labor conditions inside gyms. The question isn’t whether climbing is “good” or “bad” for contemporary emptiness. It’s under what conditions it truly builds connection rather than just simulates it. Do we welcome newcomers? Do we address what’s broken? Or do we stop at the Instagram-friendly version of “after-work send sessions”? Durkheim wrote that society isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a force that shapes us—and sometimes crushes us. Anomie names the moments when that force misfires and leaves individuals adrift. Climbing won’t fix deindustrialization, urban loneliness, mass precarity, or climate crisis. But it offers a practical space to try something other than drift: concrete ties, explicit norms, mutual commitment. In a moment when many people feel like they “have no hold” on their lives, climbing doesn’t promise salvation. It offers something smaller—and in its own way, powerful: real holds to grab, real bodies breathing next to you, real communities you can choose to belong to.

“So what do you do?” You’ve probably noticed that this question—almost automatic everywhere else—rarely makes it through the door of a climbing gym or out to the base of a crag. Nobody leans over between burns on a route and asks about your job title. Nobody sizes you up by your résumé before offering beta (route advice on how to do a sequence). Why is that? Maybe it’s because climbing creates the conditions for something the French sociologist Bernard Lahire calls the “plural actor.” Let’s unpack that—and look at what climbing does to our sense of who we are. (cc) Sean Benesh / Unsplash The 9-to-5 Identity Trap It’s almost funny when you think about it. Leaning against the fridge at a party, stuck between strangers at dinner, chatting with the neighbors—no one ever asks if you climb 5.11 (roughly French 6c/7a). No one asks if you’re a solid cook or a killer chess player. But in most social settings, one question dominates: “So what do you do?” Modern Western societies are fixated on what happens between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. That question shapes introductions, small talk, even first impressions. It flattens people fast. And yet, those same societies are deeply differentiated. On any given day, most of us move through a handful of social worlds: family, work, friends, sports, volunteer groups. We should be identity chameleons, shaped by all those environments. Instead, we’re pushed to present as one thing. A job. A degree. A background. A single, tidy version of ourselves. Lahire has spent much of his career breaking down that illusion. In The Plural Actor, he argues that we are made up of multiple “repertoires of action”—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting shaped by different social contexts. Each context leaves a mark. Those layers don’t cancel each other out; they stack. We are plural by construction. But socially, that plurality gets compressed into one dominant identity—usually professional. Lahire describes a tension between what we are (multiple, layered) and what society expects (coherent, unified). That tension can hurt—especially for people who move between social classes and feel pulled in different directions. Pierre Bourdieu, two decades earlier, showed how sports themselves are distributed along class lines. Working-class sports emphasize contact, endurance, physical sacrifice—boxing, soccer, rugby. Upper-class sports lean toward control, technique, distance from impact—tennis, golf, swimming. Sports reflect and reproduce class dispositions. Climbing sits in a more complicated spot. Why Climbing Feels Different Climbing demands raw strength—holding tiny crimps, pulling through steep terrain—but it also rewards precision and movement quality. You don’t just muscle your way up; you solve sequences. You manage pump (forearm fatigue), read the crux (the hardest move), and refine beta. But what really sets climbing apart is social. Knowledge flows sideways, not top-down. You trade beta. You talk through foot placements. You break down a sequence together. The dynamic isn’t coach-to-athlete or opponent-to-opponent. It’s peer-to-peer. Lahire points out that context has the power to activate or inhibit parts of our past. In simple terms: different environments bring different parts of us online. At work, your professional habits kick in. With family, other patterns take over. In leisure spaces, different dispositions surface. Climbing—because of its structure—can temporarily quiet the identities that dominate elsewhere. They don’t disappear. But they stop being the main lens through which people see you. On the wall, your paycheck doesn’t matter. Your job title doesn’t matter. Your LinkedIn doesn’t matter. The wall calls up other parts of you. Bernard Lahire Taking the Fold Every regular practice leaves traces in the body and mind. Climbing does too. The void—whether you’re 20 feet up in the gym or higher on a sport route—shifts from pure threat to something you learn to manage. Effort changes meaning. Failure stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like process. You fall, you lower, you try again. You project (work a route over multiple attempts) without shame. Belaying—managing the rope for your partner—creates a rare kind of trust. It’s literal interdependence. You’re tied in together. That’s not common in most modern relationships, which tend to be more transactional. Sharing beta builds a cooperative culture. You’re not hiding information to win. You’re helping someone else send (complete the route cleanly). Over time, you develop a physical vocabulary—a sharper sense of balance, body tension, timing. All of that becomes part of your repertoire. Saying “I’m a climber” doesn’t erase “I’m a teacher” or “I’m a parent.” Those identities stack. Lahire borrows the idea of a “fold”: each socialization creates a fold in us, layered over others without flattening them. We’re less like a solid block and more like laminated layers. That’s not abstract. It shows up in real life. A stressed-out manager might rediscover a slower sense of time while climbing—and carry some of that calm back to work. A manual laborer who experiences horizontal respect in a gym—where their beta counts as much as an engineer’s—may incorporate that into how they see themselves. Someone used to being marked first by their origin might find that, on the wall, what matters most is whether they stick the crux. These are transfers between contexts. Climbing adds flexibility to the system. The Limits None of this means climbing escapes social reproduction. Access costs money. Gym memberships, shoes, harnesses, travel. It also requires cultural familiarity—the idea that spending weekends chasing routes is normal. Social networks matter too; many people get into climbing through friends. The demographic data reflects that. In the U.S. and Europe, climbing skews urban, college-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class. The aesthetic codes—technical puffy jackets, Sprinter vans, outdoor slang—signal that background. So yes, climbing can soften dominant identities inside the space. But the door into that space is still filtered. That doesn’t contradict Lahire’s framework. It sharpens it. He distinguishes between contexts that reinforce our existing dispositions and those that create partial misalignment—spaces where different parts of us can emerge. For those with access, climbing can be that kind of space. Not a revolution. Not a total reset. But an interstice—a gap in which a secondary identity gets room to breathe. Conditions for Flourishing Lahire goes further and asks a political question: under what conditions can people actually express their internal plurality? The more social worlds you move through, the more varied your dispositions become. If you’re confined to a single world—by economic constraint, geography, or culture—your repertoire shrinks. Climbing can create what Lahire calls favorable conditions for the plural actor. It opens a context where you’re not reduced to your administrative or professional identity. You’re a body moving on stone. A mind solving problems. A partner in trust. But as long as access remains uneven, that function stays partial. Internal plurality isn’t total freedom. Lahire rejects that kind of romanticism. Your past, your upbringing, your resources—they still shape what’s possible. Climbing doesn’t magically free you from social structures. What it does offer is margin. Another fold. Another set of habits. Another way of being that can coexist with the rest. A Different Way of Being Seen Back at the fridge. At dinner. With the neighbors. That same narrowing question waits: “So what do you do?” Climbing doesn’t eliminate that pressure. But it shows, in miniature, what it feels like to step outside it. On the wall, you are not primarily your profession or your background. You are the sum of what’s activated in that moment: your strength, your balance, your problem-solving, your trust in the belayer, your willingness to fall and try again. For a pitch, a session, a season, another version of you gets airtime. That version doesn’t cancel the others. It folds in. It expands your range. And maybe that’s the quiet power of climbing—not that it erases identity, but that it multiplies it.

In the climbing world, “being engaged” is something you can now perform in a steady stream of Instagram stories and posts. But under that activist-looking gloss, there’s an uncomfortable question: when we say we’re committed, who’s actually taking a risk—and who’s settling for outrage that’s socially rewarding and professionally safe? Kelowna / Canada (cc) Jeremy Vejgman  on Unsplash Some nights, scrolling social media, you get this weird sense you’re watching a separate competition—a quiet little contest where the goal isn’t to hold a razor crimp, but to prove, post by post, that you’re on the right side of things. The holds aren’t bolted to the wall anymore; they’re bolted to words: “safe,” “inclusive,” “committed,” “feminist,” “eco-friendly.” Everyone takes their moral burn (a try where you give it a real go), some more dramatic than others, some supposedly higher-stakes than others. Except there’s a detail that starts to itch: in a lot of these cases, the risk is mostly rhetorical. Sure, you can “take a fall”—but it’s rarely the kind that breaks anything. Worst case, someone corrects you back, you lose a bit of standing in one circle, you eat a rough day in the comments. In other words: a cushioned fall. Let’s call it what it is: comfort activism. A way to be “on the right side,” loudly and visibly, at a low real cost. The kind of commitment that picks fights where the ground stays solid and the consequences stay manageable. What It Looks Like in Real Life The scene is almost ordinary. That’s exactly why it’s worth sitting with. It’s a climbing gym’s marketing campaign. The object of outrage? A poster that means well but botches something—an awkward phrase, a symbol, a word choice. Nothing scandalous, nothing involving victims, legal proceedings, or an actual power-abuse case. More like a misstep: debatable, fixable. And the gym itself? It generally has a good reputation. It pays its setters (the folks who “set” routes and problems) decently. It’s not known for macho-brutal management. It tries, genuinely, to do better on accessibility, mixity, prevention, welcoming people in. This isn’t some cartoon tyrant-owner situation. Not the kind of club that protects a violent coach. Not an institution sweeping serious cases under the rug. And yet: that’s where the lightning hits. Suddenly it’s story after story. Public call-outs. Subtweets. Screenshots. The message is simple: it’s not enough—and, most of all, it’s not “aligned.” Meanwhile, in the same ecosystem, everyone knows there are other stories. The ones that don’t fit into a story slide. The ones that involve power, and real blowback, and social cost. The ones where “speaking up” isn’t “correcting,” it’s putting yourself on the line. How Comfort Activism Picks Its Targets Comfort activism often works like this: it doesn’t start by asking, “Where is the worst harm?” It starts by asking, “Where can I hit hard without getting hurt?” Targets get chosen the way you choose a boulder problem: you look first at the commitment it’s going to demand. If the target doesn’t have much ability to retaliate—if it’s already “one of the good ones,” and therefore has to respond carefully—then it’s game on. If, on the other hand, the target is actually powerful—real influence, real network, real ability to shut doors—then everything goes very quiet, very fast. That dynamic is exactly what two American philosophers, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, describe as moral grandstanding . In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk  (2020), they lay out the moment when people use public moral language less to move an issue forward than to present themselves as especially virtuous. Climbing—already a culture that knows how to stage performance—doesn’t escape that logic when it turns toward its own demons. The mechanism is straightforward: I post, I denounce, I correct. And yes, I can be sincerely attached to the cause—nobody has to be faking it for this to be true. But part of the motivation is also what that post says about me. I’m not just a climber. I’m on the side of justice, safety, equality, ecology. I’m the person who “dares to say it.” But “daring to say it” doesn’t mean the same thing when you’re saying it to someone who can actually hit back… versus someone who can’t. In a lot of cases, the ego is fully protected. You’re not risking your job. You’re not jeopardizing your spot on a team. You’re not blowing up a major contract. You’re not confronting someone genuinely intimidating. You get mad at the level your social circle can absorb. You look brave—so long as bravery doesn’t get expensive. Low-Cost Outrage This kind of activism loves the gray zones between supposed allies. It’s easier—and sometimes more flattering—to scold the person who agrees with 90% of the diagnosis but “messed up” the last 10% than to take on a system that denies everything outright. It’s more comfortable to correct a visual than to support someone through a long, uncertain, exhausting process. More tempting to put a “mostly decent but imperfect” organization on trial than to go after the ones with real leverage: money, reputation, gatekeeping, hiring power, access. In that framework, outrage becomes a low-risk act with a high symbolic payoff. It produces results immediately: reactions, applause, belonging, recognition. And that’s where Tosi and Warmke help again, because moral grandstanding is also a status economy—a way to convert moral posture into social capital. The problem isn’t being visible. The problem is when visibility becomes the goal and actual impact becomes secondary—when the moral act is built to be seen, shared, praised, and above all, to not cost anything. The Collateral Damage This isn’t only a moral issue (“doing it for yourself more than for the cause”). It’s also political in the plain, practical sense: it reshapes the terrain. When you multiply low-stakes controversies that generate lots of noise, you get three ugly side effects. First: mental overload. When every wording choice and every small organizational detail becomes a dramatic public dispute, it gets harder to tell the difference between fixable sloppiness and structural harm. From far enough away, it all starts to sound the same: an awkward sentence and an organization protecting serious misconduct end up on the same volume level. Second: moral language gets cheaper. If everything is “unacceptable,” then nothing really is. If the same vocabulary is used to call out a clumsy design choice and to talk about assault, the words lose weight. Here again, moral grandstanding is a good lens: when you keep waving morality around like a trophy, you wear it out. Third: it undercuts the people who take real risks. Calling out a violent coach, an abusive boss, an organization that covers for people—that isn’t decorative outrage. That’s accepting concrete losses: partners, clients, friends, sometimes your mental health. For those people, watching the word “courage” get claimed by safe, consequence-free call-outs can feel brutal. Let’s be clear: the issue isn’t the causes themselves. Fighting sexist and sexual violence in climbing, looking honestly at power dynamics in gyms, taking the ecological stakes around crags seriously—those aren’t just legitimate. They’re necessary. Critiquing certain postures doesn’t mean you’re joining the people who want everyone to shut up. What’s exhausting isn’t the fight. It’s the comfortable version of the fight—the tendency to turn serious causes into ego workouts, into spaces where you prove you’re “one of the good ones” without ever going where it costs. Real Activism Means You Might Lose Something You could reduce all this to “hypocrisy,” but that’s too easy. Most people caught up in comfort activism aren’t waking up thinking, How can I use a cause to polish my image?  They really do care about justice, equality, respect. Some have lived through domination or violence themselves. They’re also, like everyone, trying to balance what they believe with what they’re willing to risk. That’s where the question gets interesting: when can you say you’re actually doing activism? In climbing, as elsewhere, the answer probably comes down to one simple thing: concrete risk. Not the risk of a bad day in the comments—that’s background noise now. The risk of losing something tangible: a relationship, a contract, a role, an opportunity, a sense of safety. Real activism isn’t picking the most compliant target. It’s accepting that the person or organization you’re calling out can genuinely harm you—and doing it anyway, because staying silent would feel worse. Sometimes it means turning down a deal. Writing an email you know could blow up. Sticking with someone all the way through a process that will drain everyone involved. Sitting down in an office where nobody asked you to be. And that’s where moral grandstanding becomes a tool for clarity: if your public statement brings you a lot and costs you nothing—if it makes you look good and never puts you in a difficult spot—then you at least have to consider that it might be more about positioning than commitment. Changing the Route So what do we do with that in the small, vertical world of climbing? Maybe it starts with a simple move: treat our activism with the same honesty we bring to training. Correcting a clumsy phrase, pushing a gym to adjust a visual, pointing out a bad turn of speech—call that what it is. It’s correction. It’s education. Sometimes it’s necessary cleanup. It can be healthy. But it isn’t, by itself, bravery. Supporting someone who speaks up. Standing up to toxic leadership. Refusing a sketchy partnership. Documenting structural patterns. Accepting that you might take real hits—that’s where real commitment begins. That’s not moral performance. That’s not just narrative. At bottom, comfort activism forces a question that’s unpleasant but necessary: who is this kind of “engagement” actually for? Is it mostly for other people—the victims, the most exposed, the ones without access to the mic—or is it mainly a way to secure a role, a place, a comfortable identity? We won’t change climbing culture with low-cost outrage. We’ll change it with people who sometimes commit without a clean exit, without applause, without instant payoff—and do it anyway.

You can stick a boulder and still know—deep down—that you didn’t really own  it. It goes today, sure. But try it tomorrow and it’s a coin flip. In software, Martin Fowler popularized a word for this: refactoring—rewriting the internal structure without changing the outcome, so it holds up over time. On the wall, the idea is simple and slightly annoying: progress isn’t always about getting stronger. A lot of the time, it’s about reorganizing a move until it’s stable, clear, and repeatable. (cc) Tofan Teodor et Walkator / Unsplash - Montage Vertige Media It’s Tuesday night. The gym is packed, the music’s too loud, people keep brushing past each other. A boulder that “goes” eventually lands in the sent column: three tries, a grimace, one last move yanked out, and then that quick smile halfway between relief and self-belief—the one that says you barely got away with it, but you’d rather tell yourself it was under control. It looks clean on the scorecard. In your body, it feels… questionable. You won it with tension more than understanding. So you do it again. Not because you’re a masochist—because something feels off. This time you prop a phone on the ground and film the whole thing. On screen, the diagnosis is instant: shoulders creeping up, hips drifting out, feet tapping  instead of settling, a chain of tiny panic-corrections. A system that survives. And that’s exactly the problem. This is where Fowler’s refactoring mindset —built for code—turns out to be a useful method for climbing. Refactoring, in the most practical sense, isn’t “doing more.” It’s making the structure readable. And readable climbing is often worth more than extra strength: you can repeat it, you can use it elsewhere, and it holds up when conditions aren’t perfect. You sent. So what? There’s a stubborn misunderstanding in climbing: people confuse success  with solidity . Success is an event. Solidity is an architecture. An architecture can be wobbly and still stand—until the day something changes: you’re tired, your skin’s thin, you’re stressed, the humidity’s up, the move’s just slightly different. That’s when the “it goes” style shows what it always was: a stack of compensations. The trap is that this kind of climbing validates itself. Since it worked, it becomes your method. Since it paid off, it pushes you to add another layer: a little more power, a little more core tension, a little more stubbornness. Strength becomes a patch—effective, immediate, rewarding. And deeply misleading. Because what we call “getting better” can just be getting better at compensating. The mistake isn’t fixed; you’ve just increased your margin for slop. Then one day the hold isn’t as positive, or your focus is off, and the whole thing falls apart—not because you “lost your level,” but because you built up too much debt. Refactoring Without Changing the Score In software, Fowler’s idea is almost provocative in a speed-obsessed world: refactoring means changing a program’s internal structure without changing what it does from the outside. You’re not shipping a “new feature.” You’re making it possible to keep shipping without everything catching fire later. It’s a promise to your future self, not a present-day fireworks show. On the wall, it’s the same. You redo the same boulder—but differently. The goal isn’t a harder grade. It’s the stable version: the one that survives repetition, fatigue, and surprises. The one where you can say—without lying to yourself—“I can do that again.” In a sport obsessed with “I sent” (send, meaning you climb it clean without falling), that shift is almost subversive. Refactoring is the difference between a momentary win and an actual skill. One is a fluke you can’t bank on. The other is something you can carry. If you want progress that lasts, you need structures: readable code, readable movement, readable climbing. Feet: The Forgotten Syntax A lot of climbers think “strength” when they should be thinking “syntax.” In plenty of failures, the issue isn’t weak muscles—it’s a badly written sentence: a foot placed too late, hips left out, a path that wastes motion, a breath held at the worst moment. You pull to cover for positioning that never happened. Then you call it “I’m not strong enough,” when what you’re really missing is structure. In climbing, your body is a language. Your feet are the grammar. Ignore them and it’s like writing without punctuation: the message might get across, but everything becomes expensive, violent, and sloppy. And that cost gets mistaken for “power.” It’s hard, so I need to get stronger.  Not necessarily. It’s messy, so you need to get clearer. Refactoring here is painfully concrete: place the same foot differently, weight it earlier, accept losing half a second to save three at the crux (the hardest part of the problem). Spend less emotional energy “trying hard,” and more attention placing things correctly. That kind of attention eventually produces a rarer kind of strength—the kind you don’t notice, because it lasts. Movement Debt “Dirty” climbing is climbing on credit. You borrow from your skin, your tendons, your headspace, your confidence. You borrow from the future to pay for the present. In the moment, it works: you get up, you tick the box, you move on. But the debt piles up quietly, with no immediate receipt. Then one day you stop improving and you reach for a noble explanation for a basic problem: plateau, no motivation, bad style.  Sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes it’s just the bill coming due. Refactoring is about paying down that debt instead of chasing more power. It’s not flashy. It asks you to redo problems below your ego, to replay sequences without the dopamine hit of novelty, to let a session feel like a workshop instead of an exam. And, most of all, it asks you to give up a piece of identity—the part built around this is how I climb. But it’s also the only road that doesn’t end in a crash. In climbing and in code, what matters isn’t sending once. It’s building a system that keeps working when conditions get worse. And they always do: fatigue, stress, cold, pride, age, life. The Protocol: Same Boulder, New Architecture Refactoring isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice. Pick a boulder you can do “with tricks,” the one you can muscle through when you have to. Then impose a quality constraint—not an outcome constraint: quiet feet, hips in, steady breathing, fingers placed exactly where you want them. Do it again. Adjust. Do it again. Same result. Different structure. One thing almost always happens: for a while, you get worse. The patches stop working. The compensations get rejected. The little cheats disappear. That’s normal. A new internal logic often feels fragile before it feels efficient. Then, without warning, it goes—with a calm obviousness. Not the loud kind of obvious that says watch this , but the quiet kind that says yeah, that was it. And in that moment, you get something strength doesn’t always buy: margin. Margin that makes your climbing steadier. More transferable. More durable.