Climbing tunes the mind to win uphill battles both on and off the rock.
Illustrations by David Hollenbach
Ariana Ortega’s first time climbing outdoors was on the Virginia side of the Beltway, in Springfield. Lodged between housing developments, the approximately 20-foot-high rock was graffiti-scrawled and littered with glass and other potential hazards. She and her fellow climbers cleaned up the landing zone, readied their crash pads and set out in the frigid morning air to solve the riddles posed by the rock’s surfaces.
Ortega, 35, of Woodbridge, has been climbing for more than a decade. She’s a manager of member relations for a higher-education technology not-for-profit who began the sport a year before embarking on her current career path: first as an office manager for a college in Washington, D.C., and then as a registrar before switching to the vendor side, where she sees strong potential for upward mobility.
She says problem-solving and managing fear are aspects of climbing she applies to her daily life.
“There’s a lot of problem-solving that happens while you’re physically dangling from your fingertips, and in some cases your ankle,” she says. “There’s also usually a moment on a problem when I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, I don’t know if I can do this; I didn’t realize this was going to happen.’ Then I make a move and it sticks and it’s the best feeling.”
Matt Londrey, another vertical devotee, has been climbing since he was 8 years old. “I would be very surprised if climbing wasn’t the reason that I enjoy being in an environment where there’s lots of stuff going on,” he says. “That’s just too much of a coincidence.”
The 26-year-old Richmond resident is a scrub tech at an area vascular center and a first-year nursing student at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is also a nationally competitive indoor climber, recently helped coach the U.S. youth national team at the 2016 Youth World Championships in China and coaches young climbers part-time at Peak Experiences in Midlothian.
“With climbing competitions, you might not guess that on any given day the strongest person doesn’t actually win,” he says. “In the end, it has more to do with who has the mental capability of performing the best in the moment.”
He says climbing has helped him learn to concentrate on one thing at a time.
“My experience with nursing is you have, for example, five patients and each one has a different problem,” he says. “You have to focus on the patient in front of you. That’s the same way when it comes to competing. You have to focus on the task at hand, and do your best in the moment, then move on.”
Vivek Puri aspires to be the best, and the biggest: “Both,” he emphasizes.
At 42, he’s married with three children and runs his family’s business, Classic Homes, which his father and uncle co-founded in Arlington in 1983. The company specializes in taking existing structures, tearing them down and replacing them with custom-built dream houses.
The builder is the second largest of its kind in Northern Virginia, says Puri, and gunning for No. 1. “The idea is do a good job first, and do well as a result of that,” he explains. “Not the other way around.”
To that end, Puri’s first order of business each morning is to scale a wall.
“One of the ways climbing helps me is it gives me a way of focusing my energies on achieving something physical, rather than financial or anything else,” he says. The 5:30 a.m. routine—at a time when most people haven’t even climbed out of bed—he says, “also gives me structure in the day.”
Far from living on the edge, Ortega, Londrey and Puri are three Virginia professionals who find climbing helps them bring their A-game to their work.
“Mostly what I’ve seen in my personal practice is folks who have another primary day job—like a lawyer or a doctor or a businessperson,” says Dr. Keith Kaufman, a licensed psychologist specializing in sports performance who has offices in Fairfax and Washington, D.C. “They may climb on the side, and may climb relatively seriously, as a way of balancing out their lives.”
While Kaufman eschews labels, climbers, because of the more extreme ends of the sport, often get stereotyped with the psychological tag “sensation-seekers.”
“Oh, adrenaline junkies,” says Ex Pow-anpongkul, 32, director of Earth Trek’s new climbing gym in Crystal City. “That’s a misconception that I had even when I got into the sport. I was a chemical engineer and a huge computer and videogame dude and didn’t really work out that much when I first started. I had no upper-body strength, couldn’t do a pull-up; I wasn’t fit. I was not an adrenaline junkie.”
Climbing gyms (there are currently about 30 in Virginia) originated as a place to train or exercise when weather didn’t permit an outdoor rope climb or bouldering, but they’ve since become a popular destination in and of themselves, says Pow-anpongkul. He has witnessed sharp growth in the past five years.
And while the state’s well-traversed outdoor climbing routes advertise themselves with enticing names, such as “True Grit,” “Romeo’s Ladder” and “Bushwhack Crack,” he notes that they have to compete with a large recurring support group at the gym, and its conveniences.
But back to the brain—specifically the brain on rock—or polyurethane, depending on what one is gripping. Our professionals report specific mental benefits from climbing. But is it more than just a subjective feeling?
Ortega, in her day job, must make sure her organization’s members report an exceptional user experience. High expectations can mean work may be stressful or seem overwhelming at times, she says. She credits the mindset developed by climbing as helping her in those moments when she feels stuck.
“I might be flattering myself, but I feel like, because of climbing, you can take a step back, look at a situation, assess the different options and problem-solve the situation the same way you problem-solve a climb,” says Ortega.
Virginia Beach career coach Amy Walton, herself an avid hiker of Virginia’s mountains, can see the connection. She says the concepts of breaking large tasks down into manageable chunks and learning to appreciate a process, rather than just the end goal, are as applicable to business or any other serious task as they are to climbing.
Beyond the anecdotal, though, what does science say about climbing’s ability to hone the brain?
A lot of the existing research focuses on the physical toll climbing takes on the body, or comparisons of the associated risks (for example, ice climbing is more dangerous, not surprisingly). Less studied is the impact that climbing has on brain activity and mental fitness. While numerous studies have found outdoor and physical activities to be generally good for body and mind, an Italian study showed little difference in improvements for climbers in psychophysical measures compared to those who participated in generalized training (“vigor” actually ranked lower for climbers).
Yet, other studies indicate climbing may improve certain mind-related health conditions, including depression and, among children, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. A study released by the University of North Florida in 2015 looked at the benefit of proprioceptive activity (lifting, pushing and pulling heavy objects, including one’s own weight) on the brain; after subjects performed complex tasks that involved strength and bodily coordination, combined with at least one other element such as route planning, evidence suggested the activity improved working memory.
Kaufman says he sees the main mental boost to be had from climbing as the release that comes when a strenuous task is performed out of intrinsic motivation: “I think the real benefit comes from the exertion.”
For Puri, the value of climbing is more profound than just serving as a steam valve: He is living with Parkinson’s. He was diagnosed with the progressive disease when he was 38, and uses Sportrock Climbing Center in Alexandria to help his mind counteract the neuromuscular disorder.
So far, he says, the therapy is working.
“I may be on a wall, and I have to make a move with my left leg, and it doesn’t engage the way I want it to,” Puri explains. “What I do with that is I try to work around it, whether it’s willing that muscle to engage, or to compensate and find a different way to get to the top.
“It’s almost like challenging Parkinson’s to a duel, and showing that you can actually win the battle.”
The Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale is a subjective test a doctor administers to measure the progression of the disease. When a doctor first diagnosed Puri, his score was an eight. It rose to a 12.
“Most recently, I was at 3 ½ ,” he says.
But Puri is also a pragmatist. He has groomed a group of his employees to run the company, giving them greater ownership and distributing the managerial workload. In doing so, he says, he’s created a more robust and competitive organization that can continue to thrive without him.
“It’s kind of the working-around-it solution,” he says. “I’m the left leg in that analogy. The right leg and the arms could be the rest of the people in the company.” SportRock.com, EarthTreksClimbing.com, PeakExperiences.com
