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5 LINES: Describe an occupation, sport, or hobby that requires extreme concentration. Why is concentration important?

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VOCABULARY: optimal, potential, preemptive, nix, degrade, preparatory, progression, cascade, modus operandi, precision

5 Strategies to Sharpen Concentration and Climb Better!

Knowing the importance of concentration to effective risk management and optimal performance, it’s essential that you step onto the vertical stage armed with techniques to fortify mental focus. Developing unbreakable concentration, however, takes a long-term commitment to gather and maintain focus every time you climb. In fact, improving concentration requires a comprehensive effort to reduce distractions and properly direct focus in all aspects of your life. You can’t just turn on a high level of concentration while you climb; you must also learn to wield your concentrative powers at work, at school, and in doing all other important tasks.

Here are five techniques for enhancing and maintaining concentration before and during a climb—although you can also apply these strategies in the quest to improve your focus in everyday activities.

 1. Deal with Potential Distractions Before You ClimbThe first and most obvious step to improving concentration while you climb is to preemptively deal with possible distractions before you even start up the route. For example, knowing that noise on the ground or a talkative belayer often disrupts your concentration while leading, you can address this matter as part of your preclimb ritual. Express to your belayer (or spotter) the importance of his attentiveness, and kindly ask other climbers to limit their movements and noise until you complete the boulder problem or climb.

Same goes in trying to marshal maximal focus at work, school, or elsewhere. Turn off cell phones and nix any distracting background noises; predetermine that you won’t check e-mail or deviate for any reason from the task at hand until a certain point in time; and since your eyes often lead your focus, go somewhere that shelters your eyes from environment distractions or other movements.

An interesting research finding is that listening to classical Baroque-style music helps deepen concentration and improve focus, especially when faced with a large amount of information to process. The musical pulses common to Baroque music, such as Bach, have been shown to affect brain waves in a way that may enhance creative thinking, problem solving, concentration, and learning. Some university professors now play Baroque music in the background during lectures and tests, and countless others (including this author) have discovered the benefits of playing classical music while writing, reading, and studying, as well as during mental-training exercises such as visualization.

What about other styles of music—do they have the same positive effects on concentration? Perhaps. While faster-paced music and pop songs with lyrics do hold great potential to change your mental state and engage you in the moment of the music, they tend to make concentration on complex tasks more difficult. For example, I’m sure that you can sing along with a song on the radio (or talk on the phone) when driving in steady traffic on a familiar road. In trying to navigate a chaotic traffic in unknown city, however, I bet you have found it sometimes necessary to turn off the radio (and cease a conversation) in order to concentrate your complete attention on figuring the next turn and staying alive. The same is almost certainly true in climbing or performing any other complex task—subjecting your

mind to engaging music or conversation will degrade concentration, whether you recognize it or not.

2. Use Rituals to Narrow FocusUse of preparatory rituals is a natural, and powerful, way of narrowing focus before you climb (or engage in any important activity). By engaging in a sequence of steps and procedures in the hours and minutes leading up to a climb, the conscious mind is given a series of operations on which to target focus. For example, going through a progression of physical warm-up and stretching activities followed by a familiar sequence of preparing your gear and examining the route, the mind becomes engaged in task-relevant processes and is less likely to stray toward external distractions or internal, nonproductive thoughts.

In this same way, you can develop rituals to help focus your mental state in a wide range of life activities. Given the complexity of the world we live in and the ease of getting distracted, using rituals that deflect distractions and narrow focus will not only improve your concentration in all you do but also elevate your mental state in a way that increases the effectiveness of your actions. It should be no surprise, then, that peak performers in sports, business, and elsewhere habitually employ well-refined rituals to narrow focus and shelter their eyes and ears from irrelevant cues and potential distractions.

3. Use Self-Talk to Direct the Conscious MindEarlier you learned the harmful effects of negative self-talk to your conscious state and ability to concentrate. It is obvious, then, that proactively directing positive self-talk is an indispensable tool for maintaining a focused, effective mental state. Examples of beneficial self-talk include simple instructions such as Relax, Stay in the moment, Keep breathing, Focus on footwork, and Soften the grip, as well as encouraging statements like I can do this move, I love adversity, Keep going, Hang on, and One more move. By filling your conscious mind with copious positive self-talk, it makes it difficult for outside distractions or negative thoughts to enter your stream of consciousness.

An important distinction in directing effective self-talk is that you never state the effect or outcome that you don’t want to happen. Saying to yourself, for example, Don’t feel nervous, Don’t fall, Don’t blow this move, or Don’t feel scared brings the unwanted outcome into your conscious mind and thus makes it more likely that you will experience the very state or outcome you hope to avoid. This is often called the pink-elephant effect, since if you say to yourself, Don’t think of a pink elephant, you will instantly see a pink elephant in your mind’s eye! Such reverse polarity self-talk might be viewed as a form of self-sabotage, and it’s actually a common bad habit of internal dialogue for many people. Make it your goal to forge

a new habit of thinking. Strive for a greater awareness of your self-talk as well as better quality control in the words you speak to yourself.

4. Keep Your Eyes on Task-Relevant TargetsWhether concentration narrows or divests in a given moment often depends on where your eyes are pointing and what you choose to focus your vision on. Suppose you are lead climbing and glance to the rock or ground below you—in shifting your eyes downward, you open the door to visually engaging some distraction on the ground or perhaps even pondering the exposure of your current perch. In doing so, you sever task-relevant focus on the move at hand, in addition to blocking out important proprioception (sensory nerve endings in muscles) of body tension, muscular tension, and your center of gravity. The performance impact of this lost focus is decreased efficiency of movement, increased mental tension and anxiety, and an unfortunate increase in the chance that you will lose your nerve, pump out, or fall.

The best climbers avoid this cascade of distractions by locking their vision onto task-relevant targets and allowing their vision to stray only when they are at a good stance, rest, or ledge. Knowing this master skill, you gain a powerful insight on how to gather and maintain focus as you climb—direct your eyes only at objects that are relevant in the moment! Specifically, your eyes should target only the holds you are about to engage, the gear you are placing, and the rock immediately around you. Make this your modus operandi—and avoid straying eyes as you climb—and you will discover a new level of concentration that quickly boosts your climbing performance.

One vital task-relevant target that many climbers fail to focus enough on is foot placements. A common problem is focusing the eyes and mind on finding handholds, and allowing the feet to find the holds with only quick glances or peripheral vision. Once again, you can learn an important lesson by observing how elite climbers turn their face and lock their eyes on each foot placement. Rarely do they feel for holds; instead they see each hold as a target and place the foot onto the target’s bull’s-eye (that is, the best part of the hold). This entire process might only take a second or two, but it’s a distinct step in the process of performing each move with utmost precision and economy.

Perhaps you are now thinking that you can make this process of targeting each foot placement into an excellent practice drill. Absolutely—do it! To best improve your footwork with this drill, see each foothold as a target onto which you narrow your focus, observing it vividly, and then place your foot precisely on the best part of the hold. Similarly, you can go beyond just seeing a handhold as a place to grab by consciously zooming your vision onto

the details of each hold. By seeing the unique shape, angle, depth, and texture of each hold, you will be able to engage it with optimal positioning and minimal force.

One final tip: When you are struggling to maintain concentration on a route, simply narrow your visual focus to the hand- and footholds before you. Pause for a moment, and direct a tight, yet relaxed focus on the hold you’re about to engage next. Observe the minutest detail of the hold and marvel at its novelty. This simple five-second exercise will erase distractions and create a powerful focus to continue climbing onward with high efficiency.

5. Keep Your Thoughts in the MomentKeeping your thoughts in the moment, detached from judgments and thoughts of outcome, is an immensely powerful Zen-master-like mental state. It’s important to recognize that your body can only be in the present, so the invaluable mind–body synchronization that gives birth to peak performance is only possible when your mind is also in the present moment! Thinking about anything in the past or future makes mind–body integration impossible and peak performance elusive.

Engaging in meditation or prayer before you climb is an excellent way to quiet the mind and get in the moment. When you quiet your mind and eliminate distractions, your attention will naturally focus on the most important matter of the moment. On the rock, this single-pointed focus will shift effortlessly from hand- to foothold, or to gear placements and risk management, as needed. In being in the moment, the potential outcome of the climb, as well as people around you, wield no power to distract—you will climb onward as if you are the only person in the world.

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5 LINES: What would you like to be the world’s best at? Or Describe what (out of everything you do or know) that you are the best at?

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MONDAY, JULY 29, 2013

Training Secrets from the World's Best Rock ClimberChris Sharma may be 32, but he’s still pushing the sport’s limits as a pioneer of deep-water soloing.By: IAN LANDAU

VOCABULARY: decades, aerial, gauge, supplements, catalyst

Chris Sharma keeps on pushing the sport forward at the age of 32    Photo: Courtesy Miguel Riera

Chris Sharma's Vital Stats

Age: 32Height: 6'0"Weight: 165 poundsHometown: Santa Cruz, California

Watch Chris Sharma Climb

Sharma climbs his longtime project First Round First Minute.

Chris Sharma has been dominating the sport of rock climbing almost since the day he took it up at the age of 12. In 1996, at 14, he took home top honors at Bouldering Nationals. A year later he became the first person ever to complete a 5.14c climb in North America (Necessary Evil in Utah’s Virgin River Gorge). And just this March, a month before turning 32, he became just the second climber to conquer the 5.15c climb La Dura Dura in Spain, currently the hardest sport climbing route in the world.

After nearly two decades at the top, Sharma is far from done. His latest venture is bringing the thrill of deep water soloing to a competition format. To that end, he’s organized the new Psicobloc Masters Series competition, the first of its kind in the U.S. 

Held July 31 to August 2 in conjunction with the Outdoor Retailer summer show in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Psicobloc event features climbers going head to head on a custom-built wall perched over the 750,000-gallon freestyle skiing aerial training pool at Park City’s Utah Olympic Park. “I think in a lot of ways it could be a before and after for competition climbing,” Sharma says of the new highly accessible and thrilling format.

It’s Not Supposed to Be EasyAs climbers, we're always looking for something that’s just past our level. Sometimes we get frustrated because it’s too hard, but our goal is to try to do something that is beyond our limits. If it feels easy then we’re not actually at our limit.

Go Out and Climb. A LotI’ll usually climb four days a week. Other times when I’m just having fun and climbing a little more recreationally, I’ll climb six days in a row.

Ditch the GymI’ve never actually trained. I’ve always just been a climber. Some people like to work in the climbing gym or follow a program and then they’ll go out and try to achieve their goals on rock. I’ve always just gone straight out onto the rock and tried these projects over and over again.

Diet by FeelI’ve never followed a strict diet. I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t eat a lot of red meat. I try to eat a lot of fish and I’ll eat some chicken and turkey. Once in a while, I’ll have a hamburger. I’ll have a beer or glass of wine for sure. I just gauge it by how I feel.

Supplement SparinglyOver the last few years, I’ve been taking supplements like glucosamine and chondroitin, plant-based vitamins, and fish oils from Nutriex. When I’m climbing year-round punishing my body all the time it does give me a little bit of an edge.

Train Until You CrackTo get better you have to break yourself down, and you have to push yourself to that point where you’re almost getting injured. You really have to have a lot of body awareness to know where that point is so that you actually don’t injure yourself.

Rest Hard Eight or nine hours of sleep a night is my sweet spot. I really focus on having these crazy solid rest days where I just lay on the couch and fully let my body regenerate.

Be Your Own CoachI think it’s really a mistake to blindly follow a training plan. It’s important to listen to your body.

Getting Older Means Getting More RegimentedI’ve always had a lot of natural talent, and I kind of coasted on that for a lot of years. Sometimes I wouldn’t even climb for like a month and then go to a competition and just cruise in and win it. But now I’m 32 and I definitely feel like I have to maintain my level a bit more.

Failure Isn’t Bad, It’s a MotivatorFailing on climbs gives me motivation to push my limits. Sometimes it can be frustrating for sure. But that’s the catalyst to actually push yourself.

Enjoy the JourneyI spent four years working on La Dura Dura. Those moments of success are so few and far. Ninety-nine percent of the time you walk away not succeeding, and that’s just part of the process.

Climbing is my lifelong journey. And in the same way you go running and you have days where you really feel in tune, you have some days where you don’t feel that good. It’s this never-ending process. Accepting that and enjoying that for what it is, that’s really where the life of climbing is.

Chris’ rock climbing video: http://www.outsideonline.com/featured-videos/gear-videos/climbing/Chris-Sharma--First-Round-First-Minute.html

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5 LINES: Have you ever been really worried about someone or something?

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TUESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2006

Something HappenedSending Jon Krakauer to Everest was my idea. After the news broke, I spent the better part of a day wondering if I'd put him in a frozen grave.By: BRAD WETZLERS

VOCABULARY: conceived, logistical, meticulous, catastrophic, immobilized

IT WAS THE WORST STORY IDEA an editor could come up with, let alone assign to a real human being. That's how I felt on Saturday, May 11, 1996, the day I heard Jon Krakauer had disappeared while reporting forOutside on the growing phenomenon of commercially guided trips up Mount Everesta �story I'd conceived and helped make happen by dealing with an endless stream of logistical headaches. None of that mattered when I heard Krakauer was missing in a deadly high-altitude blizzard. Had I sent him to his death?

Just 24 hours earlier, of course, I'd considered myself a genius. On the morning of May 10, Mark Bryant, Outside's editor, made an announcement at the daily editorial meeting in our Santa Fe office. "I have news from Jon Krakauer's wife," he quietly told some two dozen staffers. "Early in the afternoon, Nepal time, Jon made it to the summit of Everest."

A cheer went up; there were high-fives. I pictured Everest, a three-sided granite pyramid jutting into the jet stream, ice crystals pluming off its top. Krakauer was up there in a snowsuit and oxygen mask, taking pictures and notes as he gazed out over the sprawling Tibetan Plateau and, in the opposite direction, the deep glacial basin known as the Western Cwm.

"How long will it take him to get down?" asked Leslie Weeden, a senior editor who tended to get right to the point.

"We'll probably know something tomorrow," Bryant said. Then he added, "Remember, he's not down until he's really down. A lot can happen on the descent. Keep Jon and all the Everest climbers in your thoughts."

I cruised the hallways with a tremendous feeling of relief. At various times it had looked as if the project might fall apart. Trying to put a deal together with the guiding companies was a tenuous and maddening process. Krakauer, a longtime Outside contributor with a reputation for being meticulous and brooding, was game from the start, but he needed occasional coaxing. Over a 12-month period, while he debated the risks, Bryant and I

made the arrangements, eventually placing him with Rob Hall, owner of the New Zealand based guiding company Adventure Consultants. Needless to say, I was happy when Krakauer decided to go.

EARLY ON SATURDAY, my wife, Dianna, and I drove to the apartment of Alex Heard, a senior editor who was moving to New York and who, with his wife, Susan, was unloading stuff at a yard sale. We were pulling out to leave when Heard came running up, looking panicked. He'd gotten a phone call. Something catastrophic had happened on Everest.

"There was a big storm yesterday," he said. "Climbers are missing. Scott Fischer is dead. They didn't have any information about Krakauer."

I felt disoriented, then my stomach flopped. "Krakauer is missing?"

I was too rattled to drive, so Di zoomed us through the adobe-lined streets to the Outside building. Within 15 minutes, other staffers started drifting in. I burst into Bryant's office, spouting the grim facts to his back. He turned away from his computer and looked up, stunned.

"Say that again?" he said.

People react differently to bad news. I almost started crying. Katie Arnold, an editorial assistant who did much of the fact-checking on "Into Thin Air," would tell me later that she was seriously spooked after the news broke, she had nightmares in which climbers were immobilized in the clouds near the summit of Everest.

In the hallway, I heard muted giggles the news having inspired a bit of nervous black humor. John Galvin, an assistant editor, was talking to a few people about the Patch, a white rabbit pelt, purchased at our local Hobby Lobby, that Krakauer had carried to the summit as an odd souvenir for us deskbound editors. To make a long story short, the Patch had been used prior to

Krakauer's climb in a jokey nighttime ritual held near the Santa Fe ski basin, a quasi-pagan exercise designed to bring on a season of heavy snow. People couldn't help wondering whether the Patch had worked too well. Krakauer didn't know about the Patch's origins when he took it up, but he admitted later that the coincidence slightly weirded him out.

Sick humor? Yes, but tension works itself out in strange ways. For my part, I spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone, trying to learn whether Krakauer was still alive.

TODAY, WHEN I THINK of that Saturday, I think mostly of the night, which I remember as being black, eerie, and still. There was a going-away party for the Heards at the home of Hampton and Anne Sides Hampton was an Outsidesenior editor at the time and by 8 p.m. their back patio was full of buzzing people downing chips and designer beer and talking about you-know-what. The usual going-away stuff had been arranged a fortune-teller, a guy in a chicken suit but Everest hung over everything.

Early in the evening, a local woman who'd done some high-altitude mountaineering showed up,

and Heard bluntly told her that Scott Fischer the charismatic, ponytailed leader of Mountain Madness, the other commercial group that made its summit attempt the same day as Krakauer's was dead. He wasn't aware that this woman and Fischer knew each other through climbing circles. She instantly burst into tears.

That night I was a bearer of good if frustratingly incomplete news. Late in the afternoon, Bryant had stepped into my office and told me what Linda Moore, Krakauer's wife, had related to him a moment earlier: Jon was now listed as accounted for. She had no additional details; later we found out that Krakauer made it to his tent just as the storm hit and spent the night shivering and delirious.

I arrived at the party with bad news as well. Rob Hall was stranded at 28,700 feet near the South Summit, trying to hang

on in windchill temperatures estimated at minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently Hall had stayed with a client who was having trouble getting down the Hillary Step. (It was Doug Hansen, we later learned.) People at Base Camp, talking to Hall via radio, pleaded with him to stand up and move his legs, but he couldn't. As Hall's wife, Jan Arnold, would tell Krakauer: "He sounded like Major Tom . . . like he was just floating away."

THE FEELING WAS BEYOND BIZARRE. Hall was up there dying, and I was standing around with a beer in my hand. I thought about an issue that would be aired more than once in the months ahead: the culpability of Outside's editors. Of me.

Both Fischer's and Hall's companies had competed hard for the right to guide Krakauer to the top, but, clearly, they also seemed to have been competing on the mountain. It appeared that each man had ignored his turnaround time so he could get the most climbers to the summit. Were they motivated by a desire to show each other up in the magazine? Whatever had happened, I couldn't help wondering whether our presence on the mountain had created the environment in which the disaster played out.

A few minutes later, I heard Hampton Sides's voice from the kitchen: "Phone call for Mark." I followed him inside. It was an editor at Outside Online, our Internet partner, with updated information about Krakauer. He confirmed that Jon was alive. At the moment, he was descending the Lhotse Face with the storm's other survivors, on their way to Camp II. From there, it would take them a few days to reach Base Camp.

Mark returned to the patio and shared the good news. And then he passed along the sad part of the story that everybody sensed was coming. "I've just been told that Rob Hall quit responding to radio calls a few hours ago," he said. "Base Camp is presuming that he died."

I went to the backyard, sat down on the lawn in the darkness, and listened to more of what Mark had to say. Unfortunately, the story he told was as black as the night.

About Jon Krakauer

Born in 1954, Jon Krakauer grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, where his father introduced him to mountaineering as an eight-year-old. After graduating from Hampshire College in 1976, Krakauer divided his time between Colorado, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest, supporting himself primarily as a carpenter and commercial salmon fisherman. For the next two decades, however, his life revolved around climbing mountains.

In 1996 Krakauer climbed Mt. Everest, but a storm took the lives of four of the five teammates who reached the summit with him. An analysis of the calamity he wrote for Outside magazine received a

National Magazine Award. The unsparingly forthright book he subsequently wrote about Everest, Into Thin Air, became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was translated into more than twenty-five languages. It was also Time magazine's Book of the Year, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1998, as a tribute to his companions lost on Everest, Krakauer established the Everest '96 Memorial Fund at the Boulder Community Foundation with earnings from Into Thin Air. As of 2012, the fund had donated more than $1.7 million to such charities as the American Himalayan Foundation, Educate the Children, Veterans Helping Veterans Now, the Access Fund, and the Boulder Valley Women's Health Center.

Krakauer's writing has been published by Outside, GQ, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Playboy, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Byliner.com. An article he wrote for Smithsonian about volcanology received the 1997 Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. His 1996 book, Into the Wild, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years.

In 1999 Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, intended "to honor writers of exceptional accomplishment." According to the Academy's citation, "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind."

In 2003, Krakauer published Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, about religious fundamentalism in the American West. While researching Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, published in 2009, Krakauer spent five months embedded with combat forces along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In 2011, he published Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. All of his proceeds from this latter work have been donated to the Stop Girl Trafficking program at the American Himalayan Foundation.

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PROMPT: Collins FCA Paper #9

What kind of opinion can a reader form about Jon Krakauer from reading this biography printed by his publisher? Use at least two details from this biography to support your answer. FCA – Viable and clear answer to the prompt (4 pts.); two examples copied from the reading (4 pts.); each example contains quotation marks, indicating it was copied (2 pts.).