C(limb)-ing Double

journal entry, 22nd June 2023

I’m standing in the walkway between the various boulder blocks. Everything doubles then sways, swings and swims around my visual field. I sense dizziness. Feel like my feet aren’t carrying my weight, as my brain is trying deload my entire lower body from this chaos by just shutting off the peripheral nerve supply for both sensation and motion, as if to say, “you idiot, what the hell are you doing here”, you can’t even walk in a straight line or chop vegetables without holding your breath, and you think you can climb?!” then partially paralyzing me from the hips down. This causes even more visual instability as I lose my base of support. I blink rapidly trying to clear the kaleidoscopic blur of colors, depths, dimensions, textures and angles. Everything overlaps and the overlap angle zooms inward and outward as if drawn by a drunken flip book artist after his 10th whiskey shot after 2am. Because of the overlap, everything appears watermarked, which makes it comical to distinguish where one object ends and another begins. Where objects are located in space, what properties they have, even what color they are, are lost to me. There are no edges, no ends and beginnings, no sense of relative location in space, as if the world were a 2D painting whose paint was fading at varying speeds depending on the timing of the doubling and overlapping. I feel a painful jaw clamping and tension headache intensifying as I activate all muscles in my face and body to quiet the din. 

I notice the tension and consciously try to relax, and just be. Problem is, just being brings about my natural state of the moment - in which my head swivels like that of the dog toy ornament in front of the steering wheel. Mine swivels at the rate of 3 side to side turns every 2 seconds. I blink rapidly to compensate, and though the magnitude of the movements eases while I’m blinking, the frequency remains just as high, and the movement simply changes to a rapid nodding instead. In either case, it is impossible to process 3D information around myself in a 3D space - “by just being”. So I choose to tense again because I must, and I instantly feel the physical and facial fatigue piling on. I chortle to myself at how “well” any sort of climbing was about to go in this ridiculous state. If I could even call it climbing at all. Then I chortle again as I discover my body has already trudged up the stairs to the warm up area without my awareness or permission. It seems to be having a laugh at me, reassuring me, “we’ve been doing stupid shit like this for 9 months now, when things were even worse. So come on, you got this.” 

My only goal for sessions like this is to minimize compensatory facial, eye, jaw and body tension, and breathe as best I can. Avoiding breath constricting by tending the diaphragm is impossible, I wouldn’t be able to move or go through life without the extra stability this brings, let alone climb. Paradoxically, since climbing as a goal is so focused and simple, i experience a “flow state” despite discomfort, pain and tension, where at least for a few hours my brain knows what it needs to pay attention to. 

I start the session lying down in front of the moon board, prepared to spend the entire session lying there and just moving my hands and feet from  my hold to hold, if things didn’t improve. This feels stupid since I don’t feel I’m “doing” anything, then it occurs to me that that is exactly the point: to train precision, aim, and judgment of visual distance and direction in the comfort zone. I’ve traversed from the west to east of Oslo just to lie down and point my fingers and toes on pieces of plastic? YES. So I stick with this drill: aiming my hips and shoulders in the same direction as the next hand and foothold I was making contact with, then accepting the full doubling of my limbs as well as the hold, then accepting further that as soon as I exerted arm and finger force to move my hand and latch the tenuous holds, that my visual field would split apart down the middle like the Red Sea in front of Moses and the hold I was grabbing onto would split into two and bounce away from each other as if ping pong balls reflected down the midline of my visual field, that latching on with the hands took so much brain power that the eyes could no longer latch on: teaching my body how to know where it was going, to read from scratch, in adverse conditions where I have to manage the tradeoff between seeing where I’m going, and actually getting there. 

This is not going well. The holds are not stabilizing or unblurring the way I want them to be, the way it sometimes goes on “good days”. I resign myself to this laying down fate for the next 2 hours, and stay a good while here - until I spot a couple twiddling their thumbs and lurking by the moon board. I read the signal as “May we please have a go?” in Norwegian (the language where no word is uttered?) They pounced as soon as I got up. Ok Crystal, time to try some moves on the actual boulders - no matter how stupid this looks and feels. 

I wish everyone could experience how things are in my world, a world where there are double the number of holds and walls, where all the holds move and have no fixed location in space, where the harder you try physically, the further and faster the holds move, where the head and eyes itself constantly moves and has to either be subdued with muscle tension, thus making it a boulder to be climbed even before attempting the doubling, skidding, sliding boulder in front of you.