Dancing with Fear to Experience Love

I’ve been living in the shadow of these beautiful Flatirons for five years now. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. And what an interesting and transformative five years it has been. More to say there in many dimensions, I’m just here to talk about my evolving relationship with the formations themselves tonight.

Five years ago, I hiked Bear Peak in the middle of the day, probably after a couple intense hours in the CrossFit gym. I had no thoughts of climbing in the Flatirons at all, I guess I wasn’t inspired by them or didn’t appreciate how accessible they were to solo. Then again, I wasn’t about to pick up trad climbing. I remember a classmate asking me if I’d like to go climb the first Flatiron with them, and responding adamantly - ‘oh no, not for me.’

All that quickly changed within a year of living here. I went through the typical Boulder coming of age story, coming here an enthusiastic lift skier and occasional sport climber and quickly transforming into a die-hard backcountry skier and multi-pitch trad climber. Funny how the bubble sucks you in and makes you forget what life was like before living here.

My first memory of wanting to solo the Flatirons was when my then boyfriend went and did the First Flatiron with his coworkers at lunch. It was early spring and one of the first nice, perfect warm days. ‘I want to do that!’ I exclaimed. He wasn’t a fan of the idea and said I wasn’t a good enough climber. This was an opinion he repeated frequently when I mentioned ambitions related to climbing, especially when they involved solo-ing the Flatirons.

Instead, we simul-ed the first and the third. I wasn’t elated, but it was an okay compromise at the time. The risks of simuling were camouflaged for me. I lugged my DSLR camera up in my follower pack and took landscape pictures.

Soon after, the aforementioned boyfriend dumped me and I proceeded to fall into the worst slump of my life. There were months when I could barely eat or lug myself out of bed, and often had to leave class because I couldn’t stop crying. There’s more to say about why such a short relationship triggered such a dark night of the soul period for me, but that’s for another time.

Some time during this messy period of my life, I solo-ed the First with a friend for the first time. I was fine, just like I expected I would be. I wasn’t sure if I was stoked to do it again, but I also wasn’t un-stoked. It felt stimulating but it didn’t feel dangerous. It was the first and last time I did it in climbing shoes for years.

One of the things that helped pull me back out, finally, was the Flatirons. It was spring again - my second in the Front Range - and perhaps the promise of longer days and nicer weather boosted my morale enough to venture outside. The ex-boyfriend’s critical voice was still ringing in my head: ‘you can’t go solo the Flatirons…You just don’t have the experience….’ . I didn’t care. Well actually, that’s not true, I cared a lot. But it was healing to prove to myself that I could do it. That I didn’t have to be limited to his projections of me. It was almost as if I needed to do this to prove something for myself. I started up what I thought was Freeway. It took me about 3 attempts to really learn the route - I was starting way too far right and missing most of the rock.

That summer I met new climbing partners and solo-ed the entire quinfecta (Flatirons 1-5) with him. We wore approach shoes for the whole adventure. I was eager to show him how fearless and competent on the rock I was. I was eager to show myself that, too.

The rest of that year I started doing the first three Flatirons more frequently, it started to become a regular exercise rhythm for me. Looking back on my Strava now, some of the things I did seem kind of crazy and bold - I didn’t have the route on the first memorized, and I remember being off-route in near freezing temps, slowly but calmly moving through the 5.6 slab, dealing with stiff and non-sticky rubber because of the temps. That feels like an unthinkable situation to me now.

By this time, I had learned more of the history and social culture around scrambling in the Flatirons, and had the bug in my ear to try my hand at some speed. It fit my worldview perfectly.

The lockdown of 2020 intensified my interest in the Flatirons. I wasn’t seeing friends, which meant I wasn’t climbing, so scrambling the Flatirons was the best outlet I could find. I started scrambling almost every day - trying new routes and building confidence in my feet and route-finding skills. It was a fascinating new hobby, and it brought me joy. It really paid off for alpine season, too. I got fast. I set a new FKT on the First Flatiron route. I finally felt that I had come full circle in my healing, proving to myself that I really could do this, and it was almost something I was meant to do. As a runner and a climber, scrambling felt almost like destiny.

I kept my fitness up all through the summer, counting down the days until the Third opened and temps cooled down, my eyes set on snagging that record too. I never got the chance to go for it, though.

That September I had a major climbing accident where I fell doing the very activity I was calling destiny for me - scrambling. It wasn’t in the Flatirons, but it was on 5.3. It was the day I learned I wasn’t as invincible as I thought.

I made a quick comeback, and as soon as I was released from the steel grip of my back brace, I hobbled back up to the base of the first Flatiron and proceeded to climb to the summit. It wasn’t joyful, but I had something new to prove. A couple months later, I pushed myself to go for a winter quinfecta. It was icy and dangerous. When I luckily made it off the 4th Flatiron unscathed, I finally gave up. I wanted to show the world that this hadn’t changed me, that I was ‘fine’ and making a full recovery, but the truth was that inside I was not.

I was entangled with guilt and fear and grief and confusion, and a whole wad of shoulds. It took me years to unwind what all of it meant - I mean, I’m probably still unwinding - but the shoulds were simultaneously about how I should continue scrambling, and also why I should not.ˆIt all felt very externally driven, because that’s where I derived my value.

I didn’t know which was true, because I didn’t know which I wanted. All that was clear to me was that it wasn’t fun anymore and I was living in a tight ball of fear.

I lived in this wad of energy for the next two years. There was a lot of grieving to do. It was a more prolonged, but less intense period than the ‘breakup’ had been. Sometimes scrambling, sometimes not. Sometimes scrambling but in climbing shoes. Sometimes only scrambling certain routes or with certain people on certain days of the week. There was always an element of bargaining. Bargaining with myself, bargaining with the slab gods. When I felt scared, which was most of the time, I didn’t know how to lean into it because I didn’t know what I wanted. I froze on the rock, over and over, which is the absolute worst thing you can do. I looked at the Flatirons every day - longingly, with a melancholy feeling, wondering how a thing could paradoxically bring me so my joy yet also be so downright existentially terrifying to me. I never wished they weren’t there.

Recently, I started to notice that despite all the self-development and healing work I had done, this fear-based energy was seeping into aspects of my life that I valued. I realized I’d ended up in a place where no kind of climbing was fun. While I wanted to go climbing, I’d show up with my pack filled with the same stressful mix of ‘what-ifs’, ‘probability of foot slippage’ and ‘worst case scenarios,’ creating an aura of hyper-vigilance, even when sport climbing. I realized I did the same thing on dates. No choice or action felt safe, and I was triggering my body into a state of extended-freeze repeatedly. I wondered if I actually had PTSD. I looked out my truck window at the Flatirons one day, and realized that perhaps it was time to revisit a few things.

I wasn’t going to logic my way out of being scared. I wasn’t going to re-analyze the risks and come to a new, groundbreaking conclusion. That part was clear to me. But I always had the choice to decide if I wanted to dance with the fear or not. One of the concepts one of my coaches likes to say - the idea of making decisions out of love or out of fear - floated to my consciousness. It was so clear when I felt the frequency in my body that all my decisions about scrambling (and other stuff) felt in the frequency of fear, not love. Fear of the what-ifs. And looking at the Flatirons every day and feeling that frequency was really anchoring me in.

I realized if I continued to abstain from scrambling because of fear of getting hurt, that was a frequency I would continue to embody. It would be totally reasonable to abstain from scrambling to experience any of the many other things this world has to offer. But that wasn’t what I was doing. The fear was objectively stopping me from fully living. On a meta-level, it was putting me in a codependent relationship with trying to make meaning out of the universe (try to make sense of that one). I knew in my heart that most loving decision I could make was allowing myself to dance with that fear.

Almost five years after my first defiant simul-climb of the rock, I stepped onto the Third Flatiron. The rock felt slippery today. Maybe I shouldn’t do this yet, I thought. I intentionally connected with my breathing - fast in, long out, fast in, long out. I knew what I wanted now, finally. I took a few steps upward. Several time on the face, I paused, frozen. Each time, I connected with my breath to take myself out of my conscious, fear based mind back to the present. Back to why I was here. It wasn’t about proving myself anymore, but about allowing myself to experience the full spectrum of joy, abundance, and play. I knew scrambling was a muscle just like any other, and it would come back with time if I allowed it to.