Four Things I Learned Bouldering With Chris Sharma and Drew Ruana

This article originally appeared on Climbing

Earlier this year, on one of those quintessentially crisp autumn days, I was invited by Trango to go bouldering with Chris Sharma and Drew Ruana in Rocky Mountain National Park.

I was nervous waiting for them in Wild Basin's leaf-blown parking lot. I've been looking up to Chris since 2004, the year I started climbing, when he gave me a model for hard work and perseverance by failing--and then succeeding--on Biographie in Dosage Volume I. But we had never met, never spoken, and it's always a bit frightening to meet your idols. I had never climbed with Drew, either, despite chatting with him about his innumerable news-worthy ascents. Naturally, I was a bit worried about what both of them would think of my performance on the rock.

But I needn't have been nervous. Lesson one, of course, is that both Chris and Drew are nice guys. We shook hands in the parking lot, then headed up to Hamburglar, a classic V8 with a V9/10 alternate finish. I quietly bowed out of this stiff warmup and sessioned on a nearby V2 and V6 with my colleague Anthony Walsh. When we returned to Hamburglar, after less than 15 minutes away from it, the crew had already moved on--Chris and Drew having swung their arms around a few times, yarded on a portable hangboard, and then dispatched the V8 easily. So Anthony and I hustled down a climber trail, hoping we'd soon hear their voices, and found them arranging pads beneath Naked and Afraid, a tall, technical, and very cool V12 first climbed by Dave Graham. We spent the next four hours climbing with them, and during that time I tried to squirrel away as much advice as I could glean.

Here are the four most valuable things I learned.

1. Don't try hard until you know what you're doing

Naked and Afraid is a leftward-trending journey up a gently overhanging panel of beige granite. The first few moves are relatively easy (though not nearly as easy as folks like Chris and Drew make them look). After that, a subtle right kneebar allows you to reach a miserly left-hand undercling. From there you establish a wide drop knee and stand tall to a flat sidepull edge. Move your right foot left, sink a left toe hook that helps you compress against the small sidepull, and steel yourself for a pretty heinous lip encounter.

Although it's a power boulder, there's a lot of beta on Naked and Afraid, and going into the day neither Drew nor Chris knew what that beta was. For that reason, rather than starting from the start and trying as hard as they could, they instead started halfway through the problem, fondling holds, testing feet, pulling into different body positions, refusing to commit to moves that would feel bad, power-spotting through moves they'd already done, and slowly building the sequence that I've outlined above. It must have been 15 minutes before either Chris or Drew even tried to do more than two moves in a row--and that was just on their trial run through the "easy" opening sequence.

By that point, Drew knew what to do. So he took his shoes off and had a snack. Then he gave it his only true attempt of the day, easily cycling through the moves he'd sussed individually, and--because he hadn't tried the top moves, which aren't easy--giving a quiet try-hard grunt before topping out. I've seen a lot of V12s go down in my day. But I've never seen one go quite so easily.

Which brings me to lesson number one: When I asked Drew about his process on Naked and Afraid, he said that when he was younger, he used to put desperate effort into every try, pulling on and going hard until he couldn't go anymore. But since moving to Colorado several years earlier and adopting a schedule in which he climbs outside as many days as possible per week, he'd found it much more effective to conserve skin and energy by targeting his efforts.

Since then, I've tried to include that same technique in my own far-more-humble climbing. For instance, rather than fighting hard to do a problem in overlapping halves before giving efforts from the start, I've been trying the problem in much smaller parts, focusing less on link length than on link quality. When I've got each move or section down smoothly, I then simply try from the bottom. So far it's worked quite well for me--particularly when trying problems two or three grades below my current limit.

2. Chris sizes his shoes pretty comfortably

I should begin this section with a confession: I am a gremlin-toed product of the small-shoe era. Back in the mid 2000s, when I started climbing, my friends and I believed three very dubious "truths" about climbing shoes. First, that you needed at least two pairs of shoes: one pair that was comfortable enough to warm up in, and one pair that crippled your toes. Second, if you could get a new pair of shoes on without using plastic bags, they were too big. And third, that foot pain and toe calluses were things to be proud of, evidence that you were devoted enough to deserve your sends.

Since those heady days I've gradually grown less tolerant of shoe pain, and less confident in the no-pain-no-gain ethos, so I've begun sizing up a bit. But my climbing style is to a certain extent built around generating with my legs and channeling power through curled toes, so even though I value comfort more than I used to, I'm still not likely to wear my shoes for more than a few minutes at a time.

• Also read: “The Tenaya Indalo Is Finally Here. It's as Great as We'd Hoped.” by Anthony Walsh

Imagine my surprise, then, to see that Chris Sharma--the Chris Sharma, the man who quite literally defined "hard climbing" for my numb-toed teenage self--almost never took his shoes off while trying Naked and Afraid.

And for Chris Naked and Afraid wasn't just a 15-minute salvo of efforts. After Drew sent, Chris tried the problem another thirty or forty minutes, mostly trying to find an alternate method for the kneebar, which didn't work for his long shins. Yet I only noticed him remove his shoes once--and that only partially, sliding the heel off to watch Drew send. And I was left wondering whether he'd simply lost feeling in his feet after all these years, or whether he simply sized his Indalo's large enough to wear for a full hour?

I'll let you guess the correct answer.

3. Take it easy

Chris never did send Naked and Afraid, and as we packed up to go to Topaz (V15), I (a verified self-doubter if ever there was one) couldn't help but wonder how that "failure" felt for him. For a decade and a half, from the mid 1990s through the early 2010s, Chris was the unrivaled top dog of American climbing. And even in the decade since then, when international phenoms like Adam Ondra began pushing past him, Chris has continued to progress, sending his second 5.15c, Sleeping Lion, earlier this year, at the age of 41. To this day, only Jonathan Siegrist has come even remotely close to rivaling Chris's track record as an American sport climber--and he's still got a little ways to go. But bouldering, though a discipline Chris has been very good at, has rarely been his main focus. And I wondered what it was like for him to climb with a specialist like Drew, who's half his age yet far more pedigreed as a boulderer, and who dispatched as a warmup a problem that Chris hadn't managed to do.

So I looked for the insecurity in Chris's face...

And I didn't see it.

We went to look at Topaz, which follows a hard-to-see series of utterly unlikely edges out a horizontal roof. Drew was relatively psyched. Temps were decent, though maybe on the warm side. Still, he'd tried it before, and was aware that the climb didn't suit him well, so success was unlikely, which was fine with him. "It'll be a miracle when I send this," he said.

Chris, however, after an hour of effort, on Naked and Afraid, decided to chill a bit. Leaving the rest of us in the cold dark below Topaz, he climbed up onto a huge adjacent boulder, pulled his shirt off, and spent the next hour sunbathing, giggling with his old friend Cameron Maier, utterly unphased by the fact that he'd not sent yet another V12. When I looked up at him--after watching Drew curse and brush his holds, or after failing on yet another two-move link of my own--I sensed that Chris was probably having more fun on top of that boulder than any of us were down below. Maybe, after all this time, he's simply confident in who he is and what he's accomplished. Or maybe he just enjoys climbing and good weather and doesn't feel the need to waste emotional energy comparing himself to other climbers.

For some of us, there's a lot of lesson in that.

4. Use your frustration to... brush the holds

I've written quite a lot about Drew Ruana in the past, in part because he's strong and keeps sending things, but in larger part because I'm interested in his wider goal of doing every boulder V14 and harder in Colorado, regardless of style and quality. When I profiled him about this two summers ago, he explained that he keeps a literal list of these climbs on a whiteboard in his apartment in Golden, adding new ones whenever someone establishes yet another climb in that grade range. "Some of the climbs are inevitably not going to be my style," he told me then. "Some are objectively better or more fun or more aesthetic than others. But to me it doesn't really matter."

Why not?

Because for Drew the list serves as an organizing principle, a way of nesting small objectives inside larger ones and building a sustainable source of motivation and fulfillment.

"I've felt lost in my climbing before," Ruana explained, "where I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Like, sure, I want to climb hard, but what does that even mean? Do I want to send a specific hard boulder or an arbitrary number of easier ones? What does success look like? So for me, it's been really beneficial to have something laid out--in my case the V14 or harder list--something that's constantly evolving and that I can break down into weekly and monthly and yearly subgoals. It's not like, Oh, I want to do this one particular climb. It's a bigger goal than that--something I can continually work toward."

Standing under Topaz with Drew (or, more accurately, struggling on its infinitely easier neighbor), I quickly sensed that Topaz is one of those climbs that Drew doesn't really want to do. While most of the climb feels pretty reasonable to him (indeed, V15 can often be disturbingly trivial for Drew), there's a single foot move he just can't seem to make work.

For about thirty minutes, Drew's shoe picked off that foot. He'd pull on--pick. He'd curse, grab his brush, clean the foot, clean the hand holds, wipe his shoe with his palm, chalk up, then try again, only to pick off in the identical place and repeat the process.

But what I noticed this time--something that didn't translate over the phone--was that his frustration was productive. Rather than throw his chalk bag or cursing himself as a doomed wannabe who'd never finish his list, he instead grabbed a brush and cleaned the holds. In other words, he found a way to externalize the failure, to make it about the foothold not about his future, which gives him emotional permission to feel confident, take agency over his frustration, and try again.

Drew still hasn't sent Topaz. But I'd put money on the fact that he will.

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