Whether on plastic or granite, I am a stickler about sending. If you hang around the gym, you’ll hear a lot of talk about sending this or that route. At first glance, some of these tales will surprise you. (ex: Johnny only started climbing a few months ago, and he just sent his first 5.12!) If this hearsay arouses your suspicion, you can rest assured that all is still right with the world. Johnny is using an incorrect definition of sending.
I don’t mean to diminish Johnny’s excitement, pride, or love for climbing. I’m psyched that he’s psyched! And yet, despite my efforts to ignore it, Johnny’s story bothers me like a tilted frame. It’s great that he feels accomplished, but his statement is incorrect.
Clearly, we need to establish a definition for “sending”. It’s more formal than other jargon like “shredding gnar”, “thuggy”, or “run out”. To borrow from Wikipedia, “to send” means “to cleanly complete a route. i.e. on-sight, flash, redpoint”. If those terms are unfamiliar to you, these definitions are helpful. For even more context, this thread offers a thorough discussion of the jargon.
After pondering the standard definition, a careful reader may notice that there is some wiggle room in the definition: “sending” can technically be accomplished on top-rope or on lead. In practice, sending is generally considered possible only on lead, except for in exceptional circumstances like team ascents of mammoth big walls [1]. In the sport climbing community, which cares the most of about these distinctions, sending assumes lead climbing. If you ask around the crag, most climbers will echo this opinion.
I’ve talked with some folks who don’t agree with attempting to define the terms at all. Why not let everyone climb however they want and leave them alone? To be clear, defining terms is totally disjoint from people’s enjoyment. You can climb however you want, and you can label those climbs however you want. But climbing, like any sport, uses established rules to make sense of achievements. Everyone is allowed to play soccer by picking up the ball, but most people derive meaning from it by playing within the rules [2].
And playing by some rules is harder than playing by others. Leading is harder mentally and physically than top-roping. Finishing a route without breaks is harder than with them, and doing that on the first attempt is even harder. These objective truths are the seed from which terminology is born. As climbers aim to capture and compare their achievements, they invent jargon to distinguish one climb from another.
I subscribe to the rules of this game and play it to the best of my ability (which is relatively mediocre) to keep climbing interesting. Otherwise, it starts to resemble my past athletic hobbies like running and weight lifting. The goal becomes maintaining fitness, and that isn’t incentive for me to commute to the gym. Sending instills purpose into my workouts. Projecting (repeating a route many times until finally sending) creates the illusion that my climbing is actually going somewhere.
I call this an illusion because anyone who asks “why” enough times will realize that their climbing is not actually going anywhere. A talented few climbers will learn that “why” even erodes explanations like money or fame. These “whys” try to bog climbers down in a nihilist depression, so everyone needs their own armor against them. For me, giving mystical significance to sending compels me to get out and touch some rocks! I’m open to other methods, but empirically this one appears the most successful for climbers over time.
Induction into the cult of the send isn’t a guarantee for happy climbing. Weighing a project too heavily can actually make climbing less fun and more stressful. I use most of my time off for climbing trips, and I sometimes reflect on the absurdity of calling a few days of fatigue, nervousness, and wild excitement a vacation. These trips require a delicate balance of two juxtaposed ideas: intense desire for the goal and the journey as an end in itself. I enjoy the exercise of managing my expectations, and I don’t really have a choice. Removing the pressure from climbs morphs it into a beach vacation, which quickly leaves me bored.
My point is that if Johnny ever starts to lose interest in climbing by his own rules, sending can be a tool to reinvigorate him. Partaking in the sport as defined by the community can fuel focused training that would be foolish for a casual climber. If the carrot is personal accomplishment and the stick is getting to the gym, then sending is the biggest carrot I know. At your next session, if you notice Johnny acting aloof, mumbling about his skin, and miming crimp movements in a trance, then you’ll know that he has joined the cult. Never mind his newly acquired symptoms of enlightenment.
[1] For example, professional climber Kevin Jorgenson top-roped some of the easier pitches of The Dawn Wall, which he and fellow professional Tommy Caldwell sent together. Whether this style is truly a send is contested, and this (somewhat immature) thread debates that question.
[2] The soccer analogy is not my own; it was described by Chris Kalous, author of The Enormocast, in a contentious thread on the topic.