The Art of Falling

In most outdoor adventuring, there is always a risk (or promise) of falling. Sometimes you see it coming. Sometimes it’s out of nowhere. Sometimes it’s dangerous, and sometimes it’s safe. Anything can happen out there, but what’s the difference between falls in different sports?

Climbing

In climbing, if you aren’t falling, you probably are not trying hard enough. You expect to fall constantly. It’s just the sport. Which is why we (usually) use crash pads and ropes to protect ourselves.

Indeed, protection from falling is one of the main components of climbing. Sure, there are the technical challenges of scaling rock, but in many instances the real difficulty is scaling the rock in a safe and protected way. In other words, sure climbing can be physically hard, but at times more focus is how to be safe if you fell at any moment. It’s almost like you expect to fall at any moment. At any rate, you learn pretty quick how to take a safe fall, and usually you either have enough time to react and have. safe landing/catch, or you position yourself on the wall in such a way that you won’t have to react, and you will automatically fall correctly.

All in all, falling is just as much as part of climbing as the actual climbing.

Skiing

People fall skiing all of the time. It’s nice that you fall into snow instead of concrete or rock. However, good skiers don’t always expect to fall, and falls may not occur too often for them.

The whole point of progressing in skiing is to ski down harder terrain, but in particular, it’s about how to stay in control so that you do not fall. You still have safety gear (e.g., helmet, ice axe, binding release), but the technical challenge is how to not fall, as opposed to protecting a potential (if not inevitable) fall as in climbing. Put another way, there are practices and gear that will help you in the event of a fall, but your focus is mostly on staying upright.

You may expect to fall at some point, but that’s not really your focus the entire time.

Biking

The biggest difference with bike falls is that you have to deal with this rather heavy bike going down with you. It could fall on you, or you could fall on it, potentially getting poked or scraped in the process. You usually don’t worry about your gear hurting you (other than failures) in the other sports.

Similar to skiing, while you might expect to fall at some point, and you have gear to help (e.g., helmet, gloves), your main focus is staying upright. The technical challenges are more about the terrain than some sort of protection in the event of a fall. Unlike skiing, you are probably not going to have a soft landing. It might be very exposed (and you fall off a cliff), or you may fall into bushes, trees, dirt, rocks, etc.

Again, you need to know how to fall safely, but the challenge is navigating the terrain.

How do you fall in your mountain sports? How does it compare to these?