The Deepness of Discomfort.

I clung on standing on the small ledge under the arch with the sea lapping less than a meter below my feet. I was the last one left down there, all the others were smiling and excited looking down from the cliff behind to see if I could do what they all had just done a few minutes before. I felt my heart rate climb and that sickly nervous feeling pass through my body as I set off up the first few moves to join them.

I took some big deep breaths and tried to relax, my body would seize up and stop working if I let the nervous feeling take hold. A problem I’ve always struggled with when deep water soloing and one I was quite expecting to have throw me into the sea below on this day too. 

When I first looked down and saw how high I was I realised I was already higher than I’d like to jump from anyway, I had no choice but to keep that fear at bay and keep going up. Somehow with a few more deep breaths and some whoops to let things out I pushed on.

I avoided thinking about the deepness of my discomfort.

I couldn’t afford to.

I had to climb on and either get to the top or let the world pull me into the blue beneath. I reached a place I’d never been before, one I heard about but one I had never previously experienced, a place where fear is set to one side. Fear is shut in the cupboard. Fear is asked to come back when I’m less busy.

Maybe this is that ‘flow’ that always gets talked about. Maybe this is some crazy delusional state of mind. Maybe this is good. Maybe this is bad. Maybe this is the highest feeling of being alive. Maybe this will kill me.

Before I knew it I had climbed through the rest of the increasingly high but wonderful sequence of moves and was stepping across and up on to the grass and safety above. 

I walked around and joined the others on the opposite headland that looked back at the arch and the route we had all climbed, carried away in the weird wild adventure my body and my mind had just experienced.

This was one of many trips up above the waves this past summer. Just the adventure I needed at the time I needed it.

You see, last summer I moved up to live in North Wales for new adventures, more potential on my doorstep for climbs, hikes and bikes. New mountains, valleys and places to explore. Not long later I started seeing a girl who lived back down where I had come from in Pembrokeshire and by the start of this year I was back down where I had started six months or so before.

Of course this is a great thing in so many ways but at the same time I wasn’t sure if it was geographically the place I wanted to be, I hadn’t climbed all those climbs, hiked all those hikes or ridden all those trails like I had planned up in the mountains. I was back in the places I had lived for 20 years and needed new horizons.

Over the winter and into the spring various parts of the climbing world in Pembrokeshire started to merge and create quite the scene. Lots of psyched people getting out on rock very regularly. Then as the summer broke and life warmed up the season for deep water soloing (DWS) came around. I had timidly done a little of this once or twice in the now more than a decade I’ve climbed but never much and never with such a crew around.

I was as timid as usual the first times it was suggested at the very start of the summer. When you have energy and excitement around you however, it quickly rubs off and I found myself getting stuck in like I’d never done before.

It was a slow start.

I got scared a lot.

We kept going.

We kept exploring.

We kept having great little adventures.

I got more confident.

Tried more.

Got more scared.

Fell in.

Fell in a lot.

Had more fun.

It was the exact small but significant local adventures that I needed to fuel the summer.

By now the autumn has hit hard and the season is coming to a close. It’s time to move on to other types of climbing, adventure and different ways of gathering community. We’ll see what the winter brings and dream up plans for when the weather comes back around next year.

Jacob.