Climbing as a sport provides many opportunities to measure performance. Success might be the fast ascent of a difficult route, or safely completing any route in difficult conditions. Either way if you are not up to the task in the mountains you certainly can not hide the fact. Chamonix is probably the best place in the world to hone your skills due to the easy access to so many difficult routes of such a high caliber. The mountains remain serious despite their accessibility, and the pure lines are imposing and require confidence and efficiency.
Having travelled for several months before coming here was good for my technical rock climbing, not so good for the fitness. I know I am not in the sort of shape to run up the routes as so many of the locals do, a fact which does not lend itself easily to committing to a route at the edge of my abilities. Of course, the other half of the equation is your climbing partner. A strong and competent partner breeds confidence, a hesitant, less fit, or less skilled partner can very easily sap one's enthusiasm. For me climbing at my limits requires that I focus mostly upon myself, and trust that my partner is able to carry half of the burden. If I have to worry about my partner then it makes focusing on the climbing much more difficult for me. In these cases I always have a fear of getting on a long difficult route, of getting committed and being the one who will have to perform if things don't go as planned.
I often think about this phenomenon. Surely it is natural, but just as surely it is not universal. There are a considerable number of people guiding difficult routes with clients of very limited experience. Routes that have high levels of commitment with the very realistic possibility of problems. Outside of the guiding world, most climbing relationships are unequal. The ideal is that the inequality is complementary (one a stronger rock climber, the other better on ice, for example). Things not always being ideal means that most often the responsibility to perform will land more on one person than the other. Having discovered that I don't like to be that person has led me to wonder why.
If you come to the mountains to measure yourself mentally and physically, why would you not want to see that you can perform when the chips are down? The obvious answer is fear. I might head into the mountains expecting to scare myself, but only so much. Deep down I want to manage my level of commitment. The problem with this acknowledgement is either you have to temper your ambitions or you have to set about figuring out how to change that hesitant part of your nature. At the beginning of my trip I didn't which way I would go, and now I do. I have decided to commit, and that decision is already affecting my thoughts in a positive way. It just means that there is a lot to learn, and a lot more work to do.
