the one year climbing lull?

i never thought it could happen to me. when i started climbing a little over a yeat ago i came across long-time climbers who talked about the dreaded one year "lull." they'd say things like, "ah, it's your honeymoon" and "this is the best time." i never quite understood. now i do. what happens is that after climbing intensly for about a year it is common for newbies to realize that hitting the crag and the gym regularly can be all-consuming. work, life, love has a way of sneaking up on you and changing your extracurricular priorities. in addition, i think, slowing improvements can decrease your motivation.

over the last two months i've moved to boulder, started a crazy busy job, and cut back on my climbing. that's hopefully changing. i'm slowly meeting new climbers in the area and starting to hit the gym again. getting displaced can mess up your grove. i'm determined to start over.

with that, here's an interesting little passage that reflects on how the risks of climbing might fit into a broader evolutionary story. so be safe out there - "don't f*k it up":

by bill bryson (book: a short history of nearly everything); talking about how through the evolutionary process "you" arrived today:

"...so at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. the tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result eventually, and all too briefly-in you."