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The good kind of hurt

On climbing, calluses, and men knitting you into existence.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Jul 11

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A few weeks ago, I hatched a scheme for a family day at a climbing gym. Just a fun, wholesome activity, mostly for my kid. Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I laid in bed at night seeing all those weirdly-shaped multi-colored holds spread out across a wall of plywood, feeling the push and pull of my outstretched limbs. No ropes, just a wall and a cushioned floor below.

We went back. We joined the gym.

I watched little red almost-blisters form all over my hands and then disappear. And then form again and disappear. I squeezed my feet into climbing shoes with the instruction that they should be uncomfortable. The experienced climber slash salesperson at REI wanted to know: “Just how curled up are your toes? This much or this much?” she asked, using her fingers to demonstrate a pretty fucked-up-seeming curve.

I kept trying shoes on until I found the good kind of hurt.

I’d gotten the idea for the family climb because my kid had been visiting this big rock by his grandpa’s house and learning how to scramble across its face. His grandpa is also my dad, and he took me climbing at the same rock when I was little. My dad took me to do all sorts of outdoorsy things when I was little: hiking, basketball, softball, windsurfing, skateboarding, swimming.

That makes it sound like I was sporty, but I wasn’t, really. “Sporty,” to me, suggests a level of confidence and comfort that often escaped me.

I had a lot of fun. Moments of transcendence, even. I often think back to those outings with my dad as one of the biggest gifts of my early life: they gave me a sense of home and connection in my body and the world.

But I also worried—about skinning my knee, getting hit in the head, skiing off the face of the mountain, just generally getting maimed or dying. My mom stayed home during our adventures, in part because she wanted me to absorb my dad’s sense of ease, as opposed to her own sense of worry, her total lack of ease. I guess I got a mix of both.

I liked climbing more than most of the other outdoorsy activities and I was pretty good at it. During a fifth grade field trip to a climbing gym, I beat all the other girls in my class in a competition to see how far we could climb across a bouldering wall. In fifth grade, being the best at an athletic activity still mostly seemed like it would help my chances with my crush (Adam B. with the perfect mushroom cut). Handball was still a major form of social currency at that point.

This was before it was telegraphed that getting your crush actually meant making yourself smaller and less capable, that it definitely did not mean getting him “out” in handball. This was before I learned that the thing that makes you feel good in your body, and in the world, is a liability.

A memory: When I was a teenager, I used to “work out” at the YMCA because that’s where all of the high school soccer and football players went. Except I wouldn’t actually work out because I didn’t want to get sweaty in front of those cute boys. Instead, I would linger in the stretching room, which was next to the weight room. I would stretch and stretch and stretch, just waiting to see or be seen.

Another memory, decades later, in the early-pandemic: riding my bike up the most ridiculous hill with my kid in his trailer behind me because we didn’t have childcare and, at the time, it was the best option I had to get some exercise and escape. A bunch of dudes in spandex rode by and one exclaimed: “Damn, look at her!” Because I was killing it on that hill while also pulling 40 pounds behind me. Another one of the dudes turned and chastised the dude in the back who, without a kid in tow, was struggling to get up that same hill.

I filed that memory away as a kind of masturbatory material, not literally, but it’s one of those mental gifs I randomly turn to sometimes when I want to feel a non-sexual full-body flush. Satisfaction. Pleasure. Pride. It is a feeling of belonging and approval and acceptance. It’s the feeling of a group of men knitting you into existence.

I dunno, though, how often is a full-body flush entirely non-sexual?

A confession: sometimes, riding my stationary bike (which has a popular branded name that I can’t bring myself to say because I don’t want you to think I’m one of those people who can just say the name and not be filled with self-hatred about it), I call on a particular image to get me through a challenging moment. That image is men cheering me on. God damnit, it’s true. I imagine a group of men cheering me on. Or going, “Wowwww.”

I want to impress these men with my physical competence. I also want these men to want to fuck me. I want them to want to fuck me because they are impressed by my physical competence.

What a fantasy, right? Straight men wanting to fuck strength and ability. Of course, it’s not total fantasy; it does exist. I personally choose to believe that a lot of straight men either want to fuck strength and ability or they are a little bit trapped inside the cultural expectation that they don’t want to fuck strength and ability, that they can only be it.

My return to climbing feels a little bit like a return to that fifth-grade “before,” to that sense of home and connection. It puts me into my body and into the moment. It forces this ongoing multidimensional full-body inventory: the physical problem of trembling muscles, the mental problem of where to move next, the emotional problem of oh no what if I fall.

I want to make something of this recent juxtaposition of calluses and the good kind of hurt alongside the return of that feeling of being at home in my body and the world. There is so much bad hurt out there, so many different ways of disciplining the body and shrinking the self, all because what makes you feel good seems like a liability.

When I am dripping sweat and working through all those climbing problems, I am so consumed I can’t think about seeing or being seen at all, which doesn’t mean that the thought isn’t often near.

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