C. Thi Nguyen on finding a beautiful new game in the most unexpected of arenas

Rock climbing saved me. I was in a miserable season of my life – staying up late every night, trying to dredge more work out of myself. I was anxious, consumed with self-loathing. I needed something to change. A friend suggested that I try rock climbing, that it was a “technical balance sport” for people who loved solving puzzles. This seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Rock climbing was for thrill-seeking adventure bros. Rock climbing was muscling your way up a wall while you rage-screamed. And I was a clumsy nerd.

It took me about half an hour in my university’s ratty little climbing gym to see that I’d been completely wrong. I’d been failing, over and over again, on one specific move. I was supposed to reach over to a hold way up left; every time I’d go for it, I’d lose my balance and fall. I was ready to give up; I was just too weak. But then another climber explained the proper technique: I could kick out my leg all the way to the right, as a counterbalance, and then the rest of my body would just float up to the left, to the next hold. It felt amazing; my whole body was suddenly a fluid, coordinated thing. I felt, maybe for the first time in my life, like I was moving elegantly.

My friend was right, it turns out. Climbing isn’t just about adrenaline and brawn. It’s problem-solving. It’s staring down a set of impossibly tiny holds and inventing intricate sequences of careful movements to make it through. Climbing is solving physics puzzles with your body, in the alphabet of yoga.

I’ve played games my whole life. Games offer me the joy of complete absorption in performing one clear task in a precise, well-defined world. They banish the nauseating complexity of ordinary life. They give me the refuge of clear rules and clear goals. In their restrictions, there is freedom.

Up until that point, I’d only played mental games: chess, poker, computer strategy games. I hated my body, which was a sludgy and uncooperative thing. But climbing asked me to devote the whole of my attention to the precise relationship between my body and the rock.

Sometimes a climb would demand that I carefully balance myself on my tippy-toes on a tiny dime’s edge of rock, and then carefully ease my centre of gravity over. Sometimes a climb asked me to drive myself up with an explosive twist of my hips. Climbing demanded a deep understanding of how the parts of my body connected, of how a movement flowed through me.

I met Sherwood at that ratty university climbing gym. He was a beautifully perverse climber. He loved nothing more than to get stuck in some awful, contorted position on the rock – one leg over his shoulder, the other leg trapped under an elbow. He’d groan and curse, rocking back and forth in a tangle – and then suddenly find a way through in an ecstatic burst of motion. He had cultivated a climbing style that gave him precisely his desired ratio of joy to masochism.

We were climbing in Joshua Tree National Park one weekend – climbing real rock, working on tricky, delicate problems. I’d been climbing for a couple of years by then, and I was trying to break through to the next level.

Every established rock climb has a difficulty grade attached – a rating derived from community consensus. For the dominant rockclimbing culture, this difficulty rating basically serves as a scoring system. Your primary score is the difficulty rating of the hardest climbs you can do. The climb I was trying was the next level up of difficulty from anything I’d climbed before. I wanted that next number so badly; I wanted that level-up. And the more desperately I wanted it, the grosser my climbing got. Sherwood saw my desperate flailing, shook his head, and said, “Man, you gotta just savour the movement.”

We were climbing for different reasons. I wanted to get to the top any way I could – anything that would count as a victory, that would give me that next number. Sherwood would climb a route, get to the top, frown, and mutter, “Well, OK, but that was pretty ugly,” and then keep climbing it over and over again until the movement felt beautiful to him. His comment – that I had to savour the movement – got stuck in my head over the next few months. It changed my whole relationship to climbing.

I started to pay more attention to the sweet joy of the movement – to lavish loving attention on the microscopic adjustments, the explosive hip twists. At night, I would dream about how it felt.

A lot of the time, we don’t know the real reason we’re doing something. I had been telling myself that climbing was making me fitter, and that I was learning some skills. But in retrospect, what I actually loved was how it felt to be climbing. It was an experience of my own grace, a rare taste of loveliness flowing through my bones and fingers. And it was the fact that my life suddenly had rowdy road trips and drunk bonfires in it. I came back from climbing weekends cheerful, refreshed. Climbing made me feel complete.

And here’s the strangest thing: What I truly loved was a feeling, a loving involvement with the difficulty of the physical world, that went far beyond the simple goals of climbing. But I also couldn’t have found that feeling without that scoring system. The game of climbing has a very specific definition of success: You have succeeded if you get to the top. And the scoring system also tells you, over the course of a climbing life, that you should be trying to climb evermore difficult climbs. This gave me a focus. It shaped a very specific kind of activity; without that goal, I would never have paid enough attention to my body, never would have refined my movement enough, to discover a pure joy in movement.

This is an extract from The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game (Allen Lane, £25) by C. Thi Nguyen. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here. 

A Drink with the Idler

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