I Finally Hired a Coach
And Sent the Hardest Route of my Career
Expertise can be dangerous.
I’ve been climbing for 26 years and coaching other climbers for the past four. I’ve survived and then recovered from a “career ending” injury that required twenty months on crutches and nearly cost me my leg. I’ve built a full life around all of my climbing and training including a family, community and career. Despite entering my mid 40s, I continue to find ways to improve and the numbers show it.
I’m pretty good at this climbing thing. Good for me.
The problem starts when I (or you?) allow reasonable success to seduce me into thinking that I don’t need help from anyone else. Case in point, I understand the value of coaching, but up until last year had never invested in working with a coach for myself.
Some Background
Coming into the 2024 season, my lifetime ticklist included a number of 5.13s, with a few of them earning a “c” on the back end. A few years ago, a beautiful route went up at one of our local crags that I’ve had my eyes on. It’s long (30 meters) and fairly steep with multiple cruxes separated by mediocre rests. Current consensus puts it at 5.13d. It would be a level up in my climbing, and I needed to put in some work. Certainly, my specific endurance would need to be perfectly peaked. However, even though the cruxes were not above my current level, the sheer number of them and unrelenting nature of the route had me thinking more about strength and power.
Sport climbing is complicated. Sometimes I wish I was a powerlifter or a marathon runner. Actually, I would hate the latter, but the point here is that the training would be so much easier to organize. I think that I’m genetically predisposed to strength/power activities. I’m pretty good at “being strong”. Thus, when I got bit by the sport climbing bug, it was the pump management and endurance element of the sport that got my attention. I got really stoked on, and thus relatively good at, training for and performing on endurance oriented routes. Over the past few years, it’s dawned on me that capacity is not a limiting factor, and probably hasn’t been for almost a decade. So I’ve started to lean more and more back towards the intensity side of the spectrum. More strength/power training. More bouldering. Less total moves/reps per session etc. It hasn’t been easy. Afterall, old habits are hard to break.
Over the winter of 2024, I continued to lean into this new paradigm, keeping any sort of specific capacity work in maintenance mode. Every 3-4 sessions I’d simply do some very easy volume bouldering. My primary short term goal was to improve my bouldering top end gearing up for a month in Sintra, Portugal, where I’d be exclusively bouldering. This of course, played into the bigger picture goal of pushing my limits on hard sport climbs. Again, my operating theory being that any gain in my strength/power would directly translate to sport performance.
Bouldering in Sintra was amazing. The opportunity to live on the coast of Portugal with my wife, our two year old son, and a dear friend of ours was an experience I’ll never forget. I also climbed less than I ever had in over 20 years in the sport. Yes, you read that correctly. For those that have never gone climbing WHILE parenting a toddler, know that it means sessions are far less focused and rarely as long as you would like. Furthermore, most of the stone in Sintra is very sharp coarse granite, so skin limited attempts in a substantial way. While both of these factors were frustrating more than once, the end result was a noticeable difference in my power. Big surprise. It went up.
However, because I completely gave in to the vibes of our family adventure in paradise, my capacity certainly took a hit. Returning home at the end of May, I knew that the Summer would need to be focused on building capacity and specific endurance. Historically, this would mean getting loads of climbing in and building total training volume up. However, my life now is very different than in years past when I was an endurance junky. Family and work take up far more time and there’s very little flexibility in my schedule.
Yes, as a coach, I had a large basket of tricks that could be used to train endurance, but I was feeling fairly unmotivated by any of them. A wise man once said, “training endurance is boring, but having endurance is not.” The need for a coach was becoming fairly clear. Perhaps I needed to talk more with this wise man?
Excuses
This story is already spoiled, as you know that I hired said coach and together we built a plan that led to the hardest redpoint of my climbing career. So before I get into more of the details, let’s zoom out a bit.
I’ve seriously considered hiring a coach more than a few times, but historically opted out. My reasoning always seemed sound and I’d put the conversation to bed for another season.
I like writing program, and I should add that I’m pretty good at it too! My bookshelf is filled with dozens upon dozens of books on climbing and sports science. I’ve been creating my own training plans for over two decades and been pretty successful meeting my athletic goals. Over the past four years I’ve developed and helped implement plans for nearly 100 other climbers of all ability levels.
There’s no room in my budget. See above. I’m a climbing coach, not a surgeon. My earnings are humble. There’s just not a lot of disposable income to play around with month over month. Can I really justify another inessential expense?
No one knows me better than myself. My life and climbing career is especially unique. I have a whole assortment of previous injuries, niggles, and a unique taste for what works for me. It would take ages for any other person to even approach any proper understanding of all the variables at play in my climbing.
I’m self motivated. and I’ve never needed someone to help get me psyched to train. In fact, it doesn’t seem like I even have the time to coordinate with someone else to help consult on my climbing. I don’t even like stopping to talk with my friends at the gym. I’m busy!
From where I stand now, it’s obvious that all of this is complete BS. I created a story to insulate myself from change, discomfort and vulnerability - something we all do despite our best efforts!
Reality
So yes, if you didn’t recognize the earlier quote, I did end up hiring Steve Bechtel to help write program and coach me. I chose Steve not just because he might understand endurance climbing as well as anyone on the planet, but mostly because he has lived much of my current life situation before (Steve’s 10 years ahead of me with now teenage kids and a very busy life). I needed a coach who could help optimize my time not just across energy systems but across the complexity of my life.
I took advantage of Steve’s expertise using the Climb Strong “Pay As You Go” option. We set up a monthly 30 minute call and then Steve would spend about 30 minutes updating my training plan. This meant that I was paying for about an hour of coaching time each month. As early as the first month working together, it was crystal clear that I had finally made the right decision. My previous rationale (read: excuses) were dissolving and I was beginning to enjoy the benefits of our expanded relationship.
$155 a month is not hard to find. Trust me, I get it. $155/month quickly turns into nearly $2000 every year. That’s a substantial chunk of change, but if you’re anything like me, you might not be applying this same sort of rigor to all of your purchasing decisions. Let’s break this down a bit differently. $155/month is about $5/day or $37/week. Would you skip that daily latte or weekly splurge at a fancy restaurant if it meant that you would send the hardest route of your climbing career? Let’s be honest here. That’s a pretty easy win. Time and time again I relearn that financial decision making should reflect our passions and values. Yes, I love a creamy latte and fresh baked pastry as much as anyone, but there is no doubt that I savor the experience of projecting and just maybe redpointing a truly challenging route infinitely more than even the most excellent cafe experience. I wager that you would agree with me on that.
I waste A TON of time writing my own program. Clearly, I’m fascinated by performance climbing and athletic training. Historically that’s driven my desire to think deeply about my own training and to build out ever more effective programs that continue to drive my progress forward. I’ve actually been fairly successful doing this, but not without expense! There are many months that I’ve easily spent ten hours researching, writing, tinkering and just generally obsessing over my own training. Ten hours of professional time is expensive. Put simply, hiring a coach offloaded valuable time, energy, and creative strain on someone else.
I know myself TOO well. We are taught to believe that we are special. And yes, every single one of us has unique skills, perspectives, and gifts to offer to the world. Yet, our unique experience can also stifle our growth when we are unable to step outside of it or accept reasonable support. This is why teachers, therapists, and coaches exist. A caring and experienced outside party will almost always provide better insight (in a fraction of the time), because they have the perspective and objectivity to cut through the noise. A talented coach targets the most essential elements and crafts a plan that keeps the athlete moving forward rather than spinning in circles. If you are committed to writing your own program, I can almost guarantee you’re missing something fairly obvious that would be an absolute game changer to your climbing performance. Worse still, you’re likely wasting a ton of energy reinventing that wheel!
My success creates even more need for support. The closer we push towards our potential, the harder it gets to keep moving forward. If, like me, you’ve been climbing passionately for more than a few years, you’ve already developed 80-90% of the fitness you’ll ever develop. That omega point of “what you are capable of” that seems way out there is probably not that far away from where you are right now. It's just that it pushes back on us with a negative charge like negative gravitational pull. Pushing into that last 5-10% requires creative and consistent effort to make progress. Venturing into the final 1-2% is exceptionally challenging. At this point in my career, I’m likely playing with those final couple of percentage points, and I need to bring in some outside perspective to help me supercharge my efforts.
Once I was able to get past my own excuse making process, it was incredibly easy to move forward. Hiring a coach took very little time/energy and as you’ll see, led to some pretty amazing results.
The Plan
Steve may be the self proclaimed “worst coach at Climb Strong”, but he’s damn good at what he does. In early May 2024, I sent him details about my climbing and training over the past couple seasons and called out some of the areas where I was confused about next steps or ways to move the needle. I also called out my goal of redpointing the long resistant 13d mentioned previously. Fall seemed like a reasonable target. We jumped on our first call and he hit me with question after question digging up details and taking notes. By the end of our session, he already had a sense for how we could jump start things and start moving me in the right direction.
New strength setup: We changed up the set/rep scheme on a few things - primarily to just keep things “fresh” but also to incorporate some different movements that I had previously not spent much time on. As the months went on, he kept an eye on these sessions and slowly progressed them towards more complex and climbing specific movements. We tested strength at the beginning and the end of the summer. Every metric went up. I’m serious. Every single one.
Streamlined endurance: This was one of the most valuable things that came out of our time working together. Steve helped deepen my understanding of developing and maintaining endurance. The primary change to my program (and my beliefs) was understanding how to use general forms of training appropriately as we ramp up our systems for climbing specific stuff. Steve also helped me to trust that my body would jumpstart energy systems without too much fuss because I’d done so much developmental work on it historically. For the entire summer, I only did one endurance session each week, which really isn’t that much to manage. More importantly, it left plenty of room for strength/power, climbing, and the rest of my life.
Less time training: I love climbing and training and because of this am always trending towards overtraining. My friends know it. My wife knows it. I even know it, but it still happens. Sound familiar to anyone? Steve helped me widdle my weekly volume down by about 20%. It’s not that he had to “convince me” to do it, but rather it was much easier to just do less when I was sticking to a plan that someone I respect wrote for me. 20% less time spent climbing/training meant that I had more time for work, family, and recovery. It also meant that I was fired up for just about every session. Looking at my log, there are very few days that I was anything but psyched. That’s huge.
New approach to volume days: I’ve never needed convincing to include volume sessions in my program, Steve did help me improve the way I implemented these sessions. We began with fairly routine volume work: 10-15 pitches in a session all well below onsight. Just pure mileage. But as the weeks passed, he encouraged me to start pushing the intensity of these sessions in a way I had not done much of in the past. There aren’t many second tier routes left for me within striking distance of my house. I complained to him about this reality. My climbing would really benefit from more access to more 12+ that I could do in a few goes. He asked me how often I went back and repeated 12+/13- level routes, and to both of our surprise, the answer was "rarely, if ever” Boom. Opportunity unlocked. During the peak of Summer heat, I redpointed three variations of a benchmark pumpy 12d in a single session. A few weeks later, I FA’d a 13b/c linkup on the same wall in 80 degree heat. I sent one of the hardest routes of my career in the middle of Summer. Ok, something was definitely working.
Peaking Strategies: As temps started to cool in early September, links came together on the project without too much fuss. I was feeling especially fit, but an actual redpoint still seemed a ways out. The route breaks down into something like 11+ into a physical kneebar followed by a series of V4-V6 boulders with little or no rest separating them. All of the boulders were repeatable in isolation and overlapping links were often going down, but I couldn’t push the highpoint up. The intro climbing and physical kneebar were taking more out of me than I would like despite having them pretty damn wired. Steve suggested I set up a session where I got on the rowing machine at threshold pace and then jumped straight into four back to back boulders at similar intensity to the route. My goal was to “send” this set 3 times in a session. The “prefatiguing” was a simple addition, but one I may not have come up with on my own. I got in four of these sessions and then we pulled the plug to put everything into the project.
The route certainly did not go down without some fights. I spent 12 days on it and tied in about 35 times. Not the longest project of my career, but perhaps one of the more emotionally draining ones. It’s hard to climb hard especially as we age and take on responsibilities. The actual redpoint go was easily one of the most profound climbing experiences of my life. That feeling of perfect execution pushing me just over the edge of possibility is something I will never forget.
The experience leaves me knowing that I have another gear. It will take a mountain of patience and creativity to get there, but it’s there waiting for me. I’ll continue to skip my lattes and enjoy the benefits of having a coach who can help distill my climbing down to the purest expression of what’s possible.