My First 5.12: Uphill All the Way

(Photo: At the final crux on Uphill All the Way (5.12a).)

I know, I know.

It has been a while-- over two years!-- since I published a blog post.

It's not that I stopped climbing. Far from it.

But for whatever reason, my blogging dwindled and then faded away. 

Seems like people don't blog so much any more. But that makes no difference to me. I was never much of a trend follower, much less a trend setter. I have no big platform, nothing to sell. I am ignorant of fashion. I started this blog because I wanted to express myself. I post because I enjoy it.

But over time I have blogged a lot less about every single thing I did, and blogged more selectively, about what seemed like significant events. And I guess over time the truly significant climbing events have become a bit less frequent for me? 

When last we spoke, I talked about how I was hoping to send my first 5.12, before my 50th birthday. I've never been obsessed with numbers, but I have tried to make progress, however glacial, over the years. And finally breaking the 5.12 barrier after well over a decade of climbing seemed like a nice goal. I could have found an "easy" sport 5.12 for this particular milestone, but for me that would not have seemed legit. I am a trad guy, and my first twelve had to be a trad climb, preferably in my home crag the Gunks. 

I thought this achievement would be a great subject for my next blog post.

Only problem was, it didn't happen! I did turn 50-- there was no putting THAT off-- but the 5.12 never came. 

Until now.

At the start of the 2021 season, I finally sent Uphill All the Way (5.12a). I'm over 50, but not by so much. 

I'll take it. 

It was a somewhat circuitous journey. Allow me, please, if you will, to share with you my own "road to 5.12." This is not meant to be a guide for others. If you'd like an actual roadmap as to how to climb 5.12 I think you can skip the rest of this post and follow this advice: try hangboarding. It seems to work.

The first step, for me, was to follow around a great climber like Fredy, who showed me several of the prime 5.12 candidates in the Gunks. He introduced me, as a matter of fact, to Uphill All the Way, in late 2018 (which I discussed in my last post). 

(Photo: Fredy heading up the initial crack in November, 2018.)

As soon as I saw the climb, I knew that this was the one: the 5.12 climb that really fired my imagination, even though it might not have been the most sensible choice for my first 5.12. 

Why might it not have been the best choice?

Because it is hard! It is intricate and complicated, with four distinctly difficult sections.

When I first did the climb with Fredy, I was unable to do two of these four sections. 

But I loved how this short climb was packed with varied and interesting movement. It seemed to build on itself, getting harder and harder with each bouldery sequence. The climbing challenges were not the usual big roofs or blank sections between horizontals we so often see in the Gunks. In a way, the climbing seemed more typical of granite, with delicate foot placements on ripples in the rock and even some vertical crack climbing. And the gear was good, good enough that after our first visit I thought I might be able to attack Uphill All the Way on lead, and feel pretty safe doing so.

So after following Fredy up it just once, I considered it my new project. 

(Photo: Fredy took this shot of me on my first attempt at the climb in November, 2018.)

I went ahead and tried to lead it, with Josh, in May of 2019. It didn't go well. Despite my conviction that the gear was good, I found myself struggling to commit to the moves on the initial vertical crack, the EASIEST section of the route. I took a hang before making it to the rest jug at the top of the starting crack, and then felt too defeated even to try the next bit. I lowered off of the fixed nut and we walked away.

(Photo: Toh took this photo of me trying (and failing) to lead Uphill All the Way in May of 2019.)

This was a setback. Mentally, I wasn't ready yet.

But I wasn't done with the climb. In pretty short order, I had the chance to climb Uphill All the Way again with Fredy. He had narrowly missed on-sighting the climb at the end of 2018, making it all the way to the final move before falling off, and naturally he wanted the redpoint. 

Funny thing: when Fredy wasn't juiced with on-sight energy, he found the climb much more mysterious. When he and I tried the climb for the second time together, in May of 2019, Fredy did not send, and in fact had a lot more trouble with the climb than he had the first time. He had to put some real work into figuring out the moves. He took several whippers at the top, off of the final, crux moves up and around an overhanging corner. Then he lowered, took a break, and offered me the lead. I top-roped up to his high point and led on from there, taking several lobbers off of the crux move. I got no closer to being able to do the move, but I did get more comfortable with the idea of blowing it and taking the whip.

(Photo: Fredy sending in June, 2019.)

Fredy and I went back again in June, 2019, and by this time Fredy had it in the bag. He got the send like it was nothing, and I got another chance to work at the climb on TR and to make some progress. This time I got my beta a bit more worked out, though things were still far from smooth for me. 

At this point, it might be helpful to get into the weeds a bit and describe the challenges of Uphill All the Way, in detail. This is what you came for, right?

As I mentioned above, there are four sections:

1. Moving up the initial vertical crack. Funky moves, thin feet. This section is probably 5.10. At the top of the crack you reach a big jug, and an optional step up left to a rest. 

2. Stepping back down to the crack and making tenuous moves to the right, following a right-facing flake, with poor hands and very thin feet, to another good hold and gear. This is crux number 1. 

3. Moving straight up into the slanted, overhanging corner, to an undercling hold. This move requires balance and strength. This is crux number 2, and it is harder than crux number 1. After you get established in the undercling, there is an easy move up to a horizontal that takes your gear for the final sequence.

4. The true, final crux: moving up and left around the overhanging corner and onto the face. You have to make a big move to poor crimps for the hands, and then a challenging reach to the left as you rotate your body around the corner using bad feet on the arete. 

After working on the route with Fredy, I had the first two sections pretty well worked out. I came up with this nice step-through beta that usually works for the second section. And as for section three, I knew I could do it, though I still needed to work on it. Sometimes I fell and sometimes I nailed it.

But the final crux was still very hard for me. Up until this point I had managed to do the move successfully just once, on TR, and had fallen there many times. I found the move to be very low percentage. I couldn't reliably keep my foot on the arete and I couldn't use the handhold all the way around to the left with any consistency. 

Still, I wanted to try again. This was my 5.12, and I intended to work on it, or so I thought. 

For the rest of 2019, I kept putting myself in position to try Uphill All the Way on lead again. I made sure I was in the Trapps every time I visited the Gunks, and would pick other climbs for warm-ups that were nearby. I would even walk up to the route and put my stuff down, with the intention of climbing it. But then, over and over again, I chickened out. I decided I wasn't feeling it and walked away without trying it. I told myself that this must be part of the process of breaking into 5.12. First you have to work up the courage to try. And I needed more time.

I got a lot more time to sit around and work up my courage when COVID happened. 

I'm hesitant to talk much about COVID and its effect on my climbing. I don't want to sound like I think I am some kind of victim of COVID. I am one of the lucky ones. I have a job and a place to live. No one in my family got very sick or died from the disease. Of course it touched my life, as it touched everyone's. But I have nothing to complain about. I'm grateful to have gotten through the last year with my existence, and my family's existence, more or less unchanged.

Still, my climbing was negatively affected, just as I imagine yours was. The gyms were closed. Like a lot of people, perhaps, I personally went through a cycle in which I exercised like mad to stay sane for the first few months, and then got kind of depressed and stopped exercising entirely for a few months after that. The Gunks opened back up in June (I ran up there on the first day), and an outdoor gym in NYC opened up a few months after that. When I got back to climbing outside, I felt kind of normal, surprisingly. But I could tell that I'd lost something. I didn't have the endurance I took for granted before the pandemic. I definitely wasn't at my best. It would have been truly shocking if I felt any differently.

Nevertheless, somehow I fell back into working on Uphill All the Way in the fall of 2020. One day in September, Will and I were playing around on the 5.10d Ventre de Boeuf direct start, which is right next to Uphill All the Way, and I decided it might be fun to throw a top rope over Uphill again, for old times' sake.

(Photo: Will on Uphill All the Way.)

And what happened was kind of a breakthrough for me. I experimented a bit and worked out beta for the final crux that was much better for me than what I'd been doing. I used a different, higher foothold. It was hard for me to get the foot up so high-- I felt like I was putting my toe in my ear-- but once I did, the move around the corner was really solid. If I successfully got the foot up there, the climb was over.

This was exciting. It meant that I could do every move on the climb. I just had to put it all together. From that point on, I was inspired again. I started tackling the climb head-on, going at it on lead. We returned five more times in 2020. Will patiently belayed me over and over again. It was very nice of him. If he got tired of going to the Trapps every weekend, he kept it to himself. Over these several attempts, I got tantalizingly close to the send, falling off at the last move a couple of times. But I couldn't quite get it done. 

I think, more than anything else, the problem was that I felt weak. I would reach the final crux very tired; I couldn't seem to contrive much of a rest before the hardest moves. And I wasn't able to try the climb more than once in a session. I would be spent after one burn. It was clear to me that the COVID layoff was hurting my chances.

As the fall season ended, I resolved to get fitter. I wasn't sure that I was capable of feeling the way I used to feel. Maybe, at 51, I would have to work really hard just to stay the same. Maybe I'd never get stronger again?

In late December, I did something that was truly radical: I hired a climbing coach. 

I had always been uninterested in "training." Mostly this was because I really enjoyed climbing in the gym, and didn't want to turn it into work. I was afraid I would get burnt out and see climbing as a chore instead of a joyful, fun time. I also feared that I would hurt myself. It seemed like people who trained were always dealing with injured pulleys and the like. 

But as 2020 ended, I knew I wanted to do something to change my personal climbing trajectory. And then, completely at random, I saw an Instagram post from someone I didn't know, saying they had achieved good results working with a coach named Alice Hafer. I'd never heard of her. There was a link to Alice's own Instagram page, and when I clicked on it, I saw that she offered free consultations. Despite my longstanding lack of interest in training, I thought I had nothing to lose and, totally on a whim, I signed up for a meeting.  

I did no research. I considered no other coaches.

When I talked to Alice, I really liked her, and her fees seemed very reasonable, so I decided to give training with her a shot. And I don't really want to dwell on this too much or turn this post into an extended plug for Alice (she doesn't need my help anyway), but I can say without reservation that my time climbing with Alice has been amazing! She's worked wonders for me. She is really great and if she has space for any more clients you should hire her. 

Alice gave me a fitness test, analyzed my goals and tailored a plan specifically for me. I was worried that working with a coach would be boring, but she gave me all sorts of fun climbing exercises (which I never would have come up with myself), and listened to me when I said that sometimes I'd like to "just climb." Some of the things she's had me doing (like hangboarding) are things I could have developed a strategy for on my own, if I had the patience. But my eyes glaze over when I read these endless blogs and books on training and it has been so helpful for me to have someone to tell me what to do! 

It also helped that I buckled down and put in the effort. I did pretty much everything in the plan Alice gave me. It wasn't that hard to keep up with it, since I was mostly working from home and had no social obligations. There was nothing else to do much of the time but to work out. And it was very lucky, from a climbing perspective, that the governor never closed the gyms again, even though over the winter the state blew past every COVID benchmark that had been set for gym closures. 

Probably the most important aspect of working with Alice, for me, was the realization that my reluctance to "train" was based on irrational fears. I was afraid that if I trained I'd come to see climbing as a tiresome chore. I was afraid that if I trained I'd get hurt. But these fears were unfounded. 

While I was doing all of this training, I kept wondering how I'd fare once the outdoor season rolled around. I knew I was feeling pretty good, much better than before, indoors, but would it translate to routes in the real world? 

I found out pretty quickly once we got into March, and the temperature got high enough for some Gunks climbing. On my first day out I felt a little bit tentative, but as the day went on I cruised a few of my favorite 5.10s. They felt very easy. 

Then on my second day out, on March 13, I went to the Gunks with Richard. We'd been climbing together in the gym before the pandemic, and I knew him to be a strong boulderer who wanted to dabble a bit in the trad game. He was curious about the twelves I'd been talking about so I knew it was time to put up or shut up. We needed to head to Uphill All the Way and see how it went. 

(Photo: Richard on Uphill All the Way. He sent it on his second try on TR, which is very impressive!)

I didn't think I would send it right away, and I didn't. After four or five months away from the climb, I had to reacquaint myself with the moves. I assumed this would be a work session. As I expected, I fell a couple of times on my first trip up. But at the same time I could tell I felt better than before. My crimp strength was better. My flexibility was better. My endurance was better. I didn't feel at all tired. I thought that maybe I could send the climb if I went at it again.

So we rested a bit and I tried again. And then on my second attempt I took a random fall early, in the first cruxy bit! Oops. This was unexpected. I lowered off of the fixed nut and rested. 

And then on try number three it went very well indeed. See for yourself:

You can hear my shock at how it turned out in the video. Even though intellectually I knew I was close to sending this climb, I realize now that somewhere, deep down, I believed that maybe it would never happen. There was a barrier erected in my mind that I had to knock down. 

And now that barrier is gone! I've since sent a second Gunks 5.12, which maybe I'll talk about in another post, and I'm getting close on a third one. 

Looking back over the experience, I feel like I've learned so much from Uphill All the Way. I've learned about trusting my feet on things that aren't even footholds, more like small textures or changes in the angle of the rock. I've learned that sometimes the best way to do a difficult move is as slowly as possible, shifting my balance and keeping my whole body in tension to stay on the rock. And I've learned to experiment and to try new ideas, even if they seem like impossibilities at first. 

And in the time since March, I've just been floating on air. This spring has been a magical Gunks season for me, one like I've never had. I didn't expect to send 5.12 trad on my second day of the season. And now I'm just hoping to keep riding the wave, stay uninjured, and keep sending more twelves. I feel so grateful to be healthy and climbing well. It feels so good not just to work at new levels of difficulty, but to cruise up climbs that used to feel hard. The big thing missing for me now is travel, which I hope we will all be able to enjoy again soon enough. There are so many climbing destinations I want to visit and revisit. Time will tell.

I hope that you, too, are having the kind of fun that I'm having out there. Be safe and climb on, folks. Stay tuned for more reports, coming soon?