How my tick list ruined climbing

The Tick List started out innocently enough. I decided that my technical climbing was limiting the number of alpine routes available to me, so I decided to focus on cragging for the summer. Susie and I made plans to live in Squamish for the summer with some other friends, and I started thinking about what I wanted to do. I got myself so confused about all the great routes to do that I figured I oughta write them down.

I called it a Tick List, hung it on the fridge, and it inspired many a good conversation.

I my mind, they were just routes to check out. Things I wanted to go see. Almost all long routes, usually on parts of walls that I hadn’t been on before. There were a couple of things that I had been on before and wanted to redpoint, some I just wanted to swing leads and check out, and some that I figured I would just get towed up.

Susie and the other roommates in our Squamish house got inspired by the tick list and made their own. Our house became a revolving door of hard climbers, many of them compulsive projectors. “Oh no,” said one friend about a tick list that wasn’t even mine, “you can’t tick it unless you’ve sent it.”

Suddenly, I started down a slippery slope. With an innocent enough comment, she had turned my Tick List against me. It was a happy list of Experiences To Have and suddenly it became a list of impossible onsights. Imagine dreaming of “one day going to France” and then suddenly feeling like you have to be elected president.

And all of our tick lists were growing. It became a competitive game inadvertently involving quantity over quality. Susie had simply made a list of climbs she wanted to do – including an out-of-the-way 5-star 5.7 that we’d just never gotten around to doing – and was consequently ticking them off at a stunning rate. Having improved by 8 grades in six weeks also left her with a huge pool of climbs within her ability that she hadn’t done before. People commented. “Wow, Susie has way more ticks than you guys – you got some work to do.” So I started adding things – one pitch climbs several grades harder than I’d ever climbed before.

You see, the thing about me is that I was never any fucking good at kickball, either. I’ve always been a lousy athlete. I’ve improved at climbing at a rate of about one letter grade every two or three years – sending these climbs on my miserable piece of shit Tick List was a pipe dream. I don’t particularly enjoy projecting, I don’t enjoy competition, and I don’t much like falling, either. But I’m being egged on, explicitly and by the conversation of the various people streaming through the house all obsessed by the roof cracks they’re projecting. “Yeah, just keep working them, you’ll get it. We all made fun of Little Mike when he was hang-dogging routes that he didn’t have a prayer on, but now he’s sending that shit.”

Great. I guess I’ll go take another 10-footer onto that fixed pin. I wonder if it’ll blow this time?

And what settled in as a harsh reality was that Susie is almost unquestionably a better climber than me now. I briefly found myself secretly hoping that she’d fall and that I’d send so that I can get ahead of her on the list. We men sure do become pathetic when our egos are threatened.

My little Tick List had suddenly turned climbing into a competition – and one that I was losing at an increasing rate. This was why I liked climbing more than kickball – it’s not a competition. Whether I was competing with other people or just with the damn piece of paper, I didn’t like it. I took it down, but the damage was done. My tick list ruined climbing.