My foot slumps onto the acclerator, as I come through the Llanberis Bends, they are my favourite collection of bends in the world. I think most locals have intimete knowledge of them, the racing line. Most days I am just cruising totally in control, enjoying playing with gravity, the feeling of G on the body, as I throw the car the car round the corners.
To a certain extent most adults have that need for excitement, for some it is just driving a little fast from time to time, for other they need to drive everywhere on the very edge of oblivion, a fraction of a point of the co-effiecent of friction away from disaster.
I heard of the legendary climber John Bachar’s death a few days ago, a fall whilst soloing. His body found at the base of the cliff, alone. I read a few threads on him, and one post that stand out was that ‘our sport is so unforgiving’. I have to agree, having seen the darker side of our sport when things go wrong, I can only agree with that statement.
However I am not sure many of us would climb if that wasn’t the case, football, rugby, tennis, cricket, just aren’t life and death affairs; whilst climbing and other extreme sports are. Anyone who’s shocked by that probably shouldn’t be climbing. People who are starting out may think they are safe on the ‘easier’ routes, but statisitcally you have a greater chance of an accident and injury. One that is backed up by Life Insurance policies costing less if you climb above E3.
There is some research into ‘risk-taking behaviour’ some of it looks at unsafe sex, some dangerous driving and others have looked at the reasons behind participating in high risk sports. One of my favourite piece of research was that women who had been attacked or abused were more likely to have a car accident, the hypothesis was that they can’t get sympathy for the actual event as to reveal the truth of where the real hurt happen is to emotionally difficult and social taboo, instead they enage in risk to gain sympathy for a more socialably acceptable form of pain.
There are common themes, two of which come from what is refered to the auto-regulation of emotions. This proposes that there are two possible hypothesis. One says that we engage with lifethreatening situations because we don’t feel much achievement in our day to day lives, so climbing helps fulfill a feeling of accomplishment and achievement. A darker side to climbing is that it is used as a outlet to forget about lifes worries. Where people with high than average levels of anxiety and worrying thoughts use climbing to divert there thoughts away from them. By risking everything they can forget about there mortgage, job worries or any other worries they have.
This form of using climbing as an escapist activity, helps keep people on the level emotionally, however it can be argued that they need to address the underlying problem, rather than be unneccessarily reckless, as ‘our sport is so unforgiving’.
Anyway, John was no doubt out engaging in risk for his own reasons, sadly this hero of the climbing world found out that climbing can sadly bit back.