On the nature of sport: climbing in focus

When I claim that climbing is not a "pure sport," one would be greatly mistaken to think that I mean this in any diminutive sense, i.e. as saying something like "climbing is merely an activity not a true sport."  I say this because climbing is more than a sport.  If anything, it's more like war.  I'm not trying to say that climbing is war, either.  I just mean you could die doing both.  Both necessarily involve the risk of death and/or grave injury.  No matter how cautious you are being as either a climber or a soldier, you can always just die for some reason beyond your control.  I grant that one can die playing a sport, but hey, let's face it, it doesn't happen that often.  It's a difference in kind, not degree.  Both climbing and war evoke primal survival instinct.  Perhaps some athletes can conjure this kind of adrenaline in intense situations, but it sure is easier when your life actually is on the line.  This makes climbing into a somewhat paradoxical activity: the more you put yourself at risk, the better you will perform.  You simply must.  You'll die otherwise.  Hard to feel like that on a tennis court.  But of course the more you put yourself at risk the higher the chance you'll die, so it kinda turns off the appeal of climbing harder.  People who improve as climbers–who "climb harder"–have the strange ability to be dumb enough to try riskier and riskier moves, but smart enough to know deep down their bodily capabilities.

Sport : Exercise - Carrot : Stick

Fitness, lightness, agility, poise—these are some of the shared norms of sport and exercise. But sport has something exercise does not—fun. This is not to say that exercise can’t be pleasurable. I do not deny that people derive great pleasure, if not intense happiness from pushing their bodies through the disciplined forms of experience that constitute proper exercise. However, what I do want to argue, is that exercise is not fun. Thus, I take the notion of ‘fun’ rather seriously, for I feel that this is an important point.

More specifically, exercise does not involve play. It involves repetition. No matter how complex of a routine, progression, or program of exercise one comes up with, it will never be fun in its systematicity. Exercise can be rigorous. It can be exhilarating. It can make one feel intensely alive. But exercise is not playful, and thus cannot be fun.

The analogy in the title above is meant to convey the idea that sport and exercise are both valuable, just as the carrot and the stick both represent valuable, albeit different, ways of getting things done. More precisely, the respective sides of both analogies represent different ways of valuing certain ends. Sport can, and often does, involve many of the same pleasurable features of exercise. One punishes oneself by digging down a bit deeper in the final minutes of a game, or during the final repetitions of a set. One feels vigorous, powerful, and intensely alive after an exhausting competitive event. Furthermore, sport and exercise can both essentially involve pleasure derived from competition. One can feel competitive with both oneself, or with others, during both sport and exercise. Nonetheless, sport and exercise are not co-extensive when it comes to normative features, despite overlapping in significant ways. The essential difference between the lived through processes that constitute the actual movements of sport and the actual movements of exercise differ insofar as the movements of sport are playful, whereas the movements of exercise are repetitive, and—if pushed to a logical extreme—masochistic.

To me, this explains why sport is so preferable to exercise on nearly every occasion. Both can be pleasurable, but sport offers real fun.