Partner getting

Jed Brown and I near the summit of Aiguille Noire on the first of three nights spent on the Peuterey Integrale on Mont Blanc. Jed led every single pitch of the whole route.

I'm the one eating.

photo (c) Jed Brown

It has become something of a running joke in my life that the one thing that I truly excel at is surrounding myself with talented people, and tricking them into doing all the leading. I've written a couple of little diatribes on the subject, and these will be my next couple of postings. This one I wrote for the VOC journal:

As far as I can tell, Nick never has to take a shit.

He only eats once per day, he never gets cold, never gets blisters, always has his harness on before I have mine out of my pack, never gets tired, never gets pumped, and never gets scared. He’s the perfect partner, if low self-esteem is your thing.

But it is my thing. I’m the best partner getter I’ve ever even heard of – Conrad Anker is at least a competent climber. Good climbers, I mean really good climbers – veterans of Fitzroy and the Infinite Spur – have offered to go climbing with me, without me even asking. But if you’re not careful, being around unbridled excellence all the time can really start to tear you down. The only time I feel good about myself is that fleeting moment at the end of the day between when someone who asked what route I’ve just done gives an impressed “whoa” and the moment that I remember that my partner led the whole thing, and that I had to pull through on all the cruxes.

Sometime I should try climbing with someone worse than me. Someone who’ll look at me with humility and barely-suppressed terror flashing through their eyes and say “I dunno, dude, I think you better lead this one.”

Of course, then we’d have to bail.