Athlete’s Insight: Charlie Schreiber
Becoming the Best Version of Myself Through Climbing
By Charlie Schreiber, CSCS, CWIP
Climbing Nurtured My Creative Side
Climbing has allowed me to fully express the truest version of myself. Before I found climbing, I was a jock with ADHD. I played sports year-round, usually on multiple clubs and travel teams. I skateboarded, was a sketch artist, the class clown and loved to perform in front of people. I had a love for puzzles and creating. Creating anything: using trading cards, writing short stories, making obstacle courses as well as my own action figures!
I was strong as a kid and loved doing calisthenic exercises, climbing trees and scrambling around on boulders and buildings local to my house. My ADHD made it very hard for me to sit still. Keeping my mind on tasks that felt forced upon me (having to play by the rules of my team sports) was a challenge. It later became clear that was because I wasn’t truly in love with any of those sports.
When I accidentally walked into the climbing gym, I remember feeling as if I was in a trance. As I stared at the walls, I immediately knew this was a sport I would fall in love with. It answered all the questions and desires that I hadn’t realized I had.
I quickly fell in love with climbing, dropping all other extracurricular activities. Those sports didn’t allow me to explore my creative side; nor did they cater to my mind that craved variation, freedom of choice and exploration of new experiences.
Having success in climbing has allowed me to build a positive self-image and be recognized for my skills. Rock climbing has given me a confidence I never used to have.
I was also drawn to route setting and coaching. These aspects of the sport allow me to express my creative self and develop the side of my brain that always felt neglected in my extracurricular sports. More importantly, climbing has allowed me to enjoy nature in a whole new way. I have forged a relationship with my environment with a need to protect and respect it as well as educate others about how to help treat our lands properly.
Coaching
From the time I started climbing at age 13, one of the most fun parts of climbing for me was sharing beta and helping others. This simple act of kindness/helpfulness had countless benefits. Through helping others improve their movement, their experience, success/happiness and growth, I felt proud of myself, and it aided my understanding of climbing movement. It felt good helping others.
I started teaching private lessons to my teammates. Word got out to other members at my gym and eventually other climbers, and as a 16-yr old, I was, at times, teaching 5-hrs of lessons a week! I figured, why not do what I love?
I started as an assistant coach for my home-gym, Gravity Vault, at their Chatham location. Suddenly, focusing on movement, proper technique and mental skills became a WAY higher priority. I noticed these skills were by far the biggest ways to improve my team’s performance. I took this into my own climbing, and over the first 2-years of my coaching career, I would devote up to 2-hours during my sessions on purely movement practice and mental skills.
A great opportunity came my way when High Exposure, opened and I had the opportunity to start a team from scratch. This is where I truly began my career as a coach and began to transform as a human being. I didn’t build a team. I built a family of best friends. I felt as if these kids were my children and devoted every ounce of my being to making sure they had the best team experience possible.
For 4-years, I devoted 60-hour work weeks to setting, coaching, and traveling for my team. All the while, I was training for big competitions such as Nationals and World Cups, myself. My mind spent so much time thinking about how I could help others, that I found myself transforming into a less selfish version of myself. Not only that, but coaching took a tremendous amount of pressure off my own climbing performance. It was no longer solely about me.
Coaching pushed me to learn more about EVERYTHING climbing/fitness/mental performance related. It has helped my mental health, physical health, and competency as a professional in the workplace. As a head coach, you are also forced to become a mature leader, while also being fun-loving, empathetic, and compassionate. I choose to be a performer/comedian and keep my kids laughing, smiling, and having fun in as many ways as possible!
Now, as a head coach of Reach Climbing and Fitness who also writes training plans for over 50 athletes nationwide (V3 to V14 climbers!), I feel a deep connection and a deep appreciation to the climbing community in a whole different way! Hearing success stories and receiving thank you’s on a weekly basis makes me want to journey deeper into the coaching realm!
Friends and Community
The people who had the biggest impact on my past experiences have been my closest friends in climbing as well as my most devoted team members. Friends have helped me find confidence, make experiences fun and stress-free, taken me to the most beautiful places in the world/country and have taught me so much about life as a coach and a climber. My richest experiences have all been days outside or trips with close friends.
My kids have taught me how to be a better person in so many ways. As a coach, you can only succeed if you have patience, trust, respect and have a heart-felt bond between you and your athletes. This bond supports them mentally and allows them to feel safe and secure to fail, ask questions, be vulnerable and grow. My kids and I also laugh and play and get silly every practice, which keeps me young at heart and helps relieve an enormous amount of stress. I have taken this same approach to my relationship with my fiancé, and I can confidently say that we couldn’t be happier together.
However, my team kids have also taught me how to be tough and keep others accountable and focused. Leading a youth team is HARD compared to leading a team of adults (which I also do at my job as Program Director for Reach). Some kids want to achieve big goals, but also want to play around, take the easy way out at practices, have spotty attendance, get distracted easily, and give up early. I have learned how to communicate with, inspire and encourage this type of person. Early in my career, I used to get frustrated with this type of athlete and be a bit too stern. Now, I start off every interaction with compassion and hear where they are coming from, have a soft tone in my voice, smile and inspire them to give their best effort, as opposed to being stern or dismissive. I have found that virtually everyone just needs a gentle reminder of what their goals are and how they need to act to get there.
Mental Preparation
Mental preparation for a competition starts months before the day of the event. An athlete must have the identity of a winner. You must think like a winner and convince the mind that you are a winner. Every practice must focus on 2 things, goal pursuit/ achievement and training the body for specific demands. Continually training the body to adapt to the demands of competition and experiencing success on the training stimuli/climbs/drills that mimic the demands of the competition, will make positive performance a habit.
Therefore, the most important parts of comp prep for me are:
• goal-specific programming
• maximizing the quantity and quality of successes in the months/weeks leading up to the competition and
• tracking both things to provide concrete proof for my brain that I have improved.
If all this is done, on the day of the event, all I need to do is look back at my training journal, my videos of recent sends or goal accomplishments, play some pump-up music, do the same warm-up routine I always do [at practice] and let the day unfold like all my recent training sessions, full of success. If things don’t go my way, I remind myself why I am there, to have fun, get better and challenge myself! I record all my learning moments in my journal and use them in my programming for later. I think that using poor-performances as a study, takes the pressure off myself. I view the findings as portals to future success.
