What it Means to be an Adult Athlete by Phil Larosa

2018 Gap Semester in Europe athlete Phil Larosa shares some thoughts on what he learned about being an adult athlete during his 3 months climbing in Spain and Greece. Photos and comments by Aaron.

Phil was wondering if he was an athlete or a tourist (or both) at the Vlychada crag in Greece. All the climbs here were a walk-in-the-park for Phil, but that didn’t stop him from climbing almost all of them.

I learned that being an adult athlete means taking responsibility for recovery in order to stay healthy and improve performance, which includes diet, sleep, and active recovery. I also realized that the biggest difference between being a youth athlete and being an adult athlete is balancing the of freedom and self discipline, because there was so much freedom throughout the program it forced me to realize that I must set goals and motivate myself. The freedom in the program allows an athlete to become lazy, and from that experience I took away the lesson of having to understand my true motivations and goals in the sport. I had previously come into the gap semester hoping to push my redpoint to a certain grade through projecting, but once I got about halfway through the semester I started to learn that I personally had much more enjoyable and meaningful experiences onsighting routes. I learned to follow the motivation, because as an adult athlete the goal is steady progression and longevity.

The commitment to redpointing a route during a trip comes at the cost of experiencing fewer overall routes. It can be challenging to decide what’s more valuable. Phil on el Delfin (7c+) in Rodellar. Redpointing this route didn’t seem to slow him down a bit.

This leads me to another lesson which is that as an adult athlete there must be some well defined, achievable, self set goals. This helps with motivation and as an adult there really is no better goal than an authentic self set goal, which comes from a lot of introspection. Lastly and most importantly I learned that as an adult athlete climbing isn't the only thing that matters. Sometimes the most memorable things about a climbing trip are the old men who talk about their olive trees, or meeting and connecting with other climbers from all over the world, or being a drunken tourist in Barcelona. I think the sport of climbing is so much more than just the actual climbing and being an adult athlete is about experiencing all that climbing has to offer on and off the wall.

Phil learned a lot from our new friends, including farmer Gus in Reichea, Greece. Gus’s lessons were priceless, and so was the endless supply of olive oil and firewood he gave us.