With my left toe hooked and a firm grip on my right, I lunged my left hand for the next hold. I reached, missed, and gravity threw me onto the cushioned floor, kicking up a cloud of chalk. On my back, I stared at the empty wall and groaned dramatically into the bouldering gym.
I rolled over just as two kids, no older than 10, entered the bouldering area. I pulled myself up and moved to the spectator area to grab some water. They sized up the same climb I just struggled against. It included a long overhang section, a difficult climb by any measure, but especially hard for someone with less strength. One kid started to climb.
As the climber struggled in the same tricky section I failed, the friend suggested: “try a heel hook.”
The climber swapped the toe to a heel hook with immediate results: “Oh, that’s much better.”
I thought to myself: I should try the heel hook.
After struggling on a difficult section and losing steam, the climber jumped down. Fist bumps and encouragement greeted the young climber. I signaled a small golf clap.
Watching the young climbers got me thinking: bouldering might be the best individual sport for teaching people how to handle failure.
All sports teach some degree of perseverance, perspiration, practice, teamwork, and dedication, but if I had to pick a single skill to learn from sports, it’s the ability to deal with failure. It enables someone to get up and try again, because life will inevitably knock you over.
Each action in bouldering embodies a tight feedback loop. You either get past the current hold or you can’t and the consequences are apparent—you fall down. There’s a visceral feeling in the body when you face a hold that could lead to your tumble. Staying put does no good, either, as you’ll eventually run out of muscle endurance. Press forward or fall from the wall.
Despite being a solo sport, the community feels like a big family: friendly, open, and helpful. Climbs are even called "problems", so it creates a science-like collaboration in problem solving. Between climbs, the community is observing, encouraging, sharing, and discussing suggestions or improvements with complete strangers. Regardless of whether you want to work with others, your success and failures are broadcast publicly. There is a spotlight effect to bouldering: only one person can climb a section of wall. As a new entrant to the sport, it is daunting to be on the wall when a bunch of foreign eyeballs are on your back. Intimidating at first, over time, this builds comfort with learning and failing publicly. I felt self-conscious while climbing the first few times and now, I hardly think about it. I suspect this is where the supportive bouldering community derives: everyone knows how scary it is to get on that wall and fail in front of others, so we support each other since we all empathize with that sensation. Failure is an expected byproduct of progress in a bouldering gym.
Compare these traits to other popular solo sports like running, cycling, and swimming. There is no feedback loop with each stride, pedal, or stroke. On any given day, an endurance athlete will always be able to perform these motions, so what constitutes failure? It's not always clear.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from these sports (I was an avid cyclist for years) and I know other individual sports contain great lessons. But, against the metrics of rapid feedback loops and openness to failure, bouldering scores high.
To take this a step further, bouldering also teaches the vital concept of fallibilism. In David Deutsch’s book “The Beginning of Infinity” he states: "fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors." He argues this funny sounding word along with creativity, are the keys to human progress.
The overlap between the ability to deal with failure and fallibilism is large, minus one specific detail: authoritative knowledge. Fallibilists don’t look to authorities for knowledge, resulting in a willingness to disregard the status of a source in exchange for the truth.
Bouldering exemplifies fallibilism in a physical way. We improve through a simple cycle of falling down and getting up because we believe the errors can be corrected. You learn from the climbers in the gym regardless of their physical appearance: younger, older, man, woman, or child as I learned at the start of this essay. There’s a lesson to be learned from observing another climber, regardless of their background.
This culture of open feedback welcomes public failure to teach an important life lesson: climbing up a wall will result in failure, but it’s worth the challenge. Like any sport, it helps when it’s a ton of fun and you’re surrounded by supportive people.