Another Fallow Year

 
"It's okay", said the ginger beastlette, "sometimes you just need to have a fallow year. Take a step back from pushing yourself, from doing major challenges, from aiming for strong inspirations. Let yourself recover, let the spirit and psyche regrow. It's what serious climbers and actual athletes would do."

And she was right.

I did have to take a step back due to physical and mental health issues. A step away from challenges and inspirations and exciting destinations. A fallow spring and summer - when the weather was hot and everyone was in the shady mountains, I was grumping away at the climbing wall, when the weather was generally nice and people were exploring crags all over, I was day-tripping to grotty sport bollox to masochist myself redpointing. The amount of big ticks that got away was the only big number around, but it was all I could cope with - and I was keeping my activity levels and climbing strength up. God redpointing is bollox, but it does keep you moving and pulling hard.

So come autumn, inhibitive issues had alleviated a bit, and my body was ready to keep climbing, the physical GAINZ from the redpointing bollox paid off, and I had as good a big inspiration / major challenge trad autumn as I ever had (...for the last time, it seems...). So the fallow period did indeed work.

...

The thing is, this was 2018, not 2022. 2022 is another fallow year, but it's a very different fallow year.

2018 was about digestive issues, occasional debilitating nausea bouts, the fragility that left me with (go on a camping trip to the north west with those looming over me?? nope...), and the associated vagal depression - the latter having a clear cause and not being too overwhelming. The rest of my body was holding up okay (including a complete lack of decade-long golfer's elbow that cleared up within a week of the reflexologist I was seeing for my digestion finding "a strong pressure point reaction indicating upper left limb issues") and my physical ability to dick around on the rock in between dangling off bolts was as good as it's been post-DVTs/post-weight-gain. Once the bouts became more sporadic and the increased citalopram and CBT kicked in, I could put that into action.

2022 the digestive issues are not an issue. The perma-injury is, and the associated cumulative depression from that combining with age, perma-heaviness, old mental health issues and new personal issues. Full golfer's elbow from late September 2021 to <checks date> late November 2022 (and counting...) with only a brief respite in March/April, plus LCL injury from December 2021 to March 2022, plus tennis elbows in February/March then May 2022 has meant I've had only the slightest chance to get a meagre period of near-normal climbing strength (March/April), and no chance whatsoever of getting any fitness nor confidence. 

This fallow year is not only about taking a step back from pushing myself, from major challenges, from strong inspirations, it's about taking a step back from the positive physical side I sought solace in in 2018, the side that enabled me to keep going and come out with my climbing ability intact. In fact it's about taking a step back from most of the positivity in climbing in general.... I came out of 2018 with my physical ability probably slightly improved, and maybe my confidence from getting through the fallow year. I'm going to come out of 2022 with almost everything about my climbing worsened, apart from possibly flexibility, which I have managed to "train" a little bit, by not avoiding stretching quite as much as before! Maybe there will also be some benefits to the groundwork I've been forced to do about mental health issues, but that won't be evident yet.

This is a fallow year from which nothing is going to regrow in the foreseeable future...

...

I said a step back from most of the positivity in climbing. Not all. There have been a few very brief moments of strong inspiration rather than treading water waiting and hoping for it all to pass. This was one, by random chance something that was interesting in it's obscurity and challenging in a way which mostly bypassed my injury.

An interesting process and the name just came to me.