How To Slice an Avocado
In 2018, injuries sustained from slicing avocados sent an estimated 24 Americans per day to the hospital. Most of these injuries were to the hand. Climbers like avocados. Climbers need to use their hands. A fundamental relationship exists here, and before you roll your eyes and decry me as being hyperbolic (yet again), please consider how the act of slicing an avocado relates to how we manage risk in both climbing and in life (which affects our ability to climb).
Imagine getting home from a normal day at the crag or gym. You’re worked…forearms are like lead cables. You’re exhausted and need something easy to fill your glycogen window. What is better than avocado toast made on homemade sourdough bread? Personally, I enjoy an almond butter and honey sandwich, but for the sake of this hypothetical, let’s stick with the avocado. First, you wash your hands (right?). Then, while your bread is toasting and filling the kitchen with a warm aroma, you grab a knife (which your roommate sharpened earlier in the day) from the rack. Just as you’ve done 1000 times before, you hold the avocado in one hand and slide the blade across the skin. Only this time, the razor sharp steel drops through the flesh in an instant, missing the pit (which might be tiny or nonexistent) and severs the nerve in your thumb. Blood is gushing everywhere. Your toast is smoking. And your weekend trip to Bishop will be put on hold until next year. NEXT YEAR. It’s March. You were primed. This was your moment.
Here’s the thing: you were using a tool that is designed to fillet all matters of flesh and skin; a tool that is made to slice, deform, chop, maim, and even kill. In doing so, you must accept that operating it in a direction towards any part of your body will come with some risk. Operating it in the vicinity of your body, or being near someone who is using it, comes with risk. Of course, there are various ways to control, minimize, transfer, or even completely eliminate the risk. Not accepting or acknowledging the risk doesn’t eliminate it. The risk is there whether you know it or not.
The same is true with climbing. When we climb, we take on risk. It’s absolutely unavoidable. Learning to manage risk becomes a primary function that enables our longevity, performance, well-being, and survival. From a purely evolutionary perspective, it is what allows us to reproduce and maintain viability as a species.
In climbing, risk management is frequently presented as the realm of beginners. A climber who has worked their way up to a particular established level is often perceived to have mastered a relative level of risk management. There’s some psychology here that can be hard to deconstruct, especially with teens and young adults. Our egos prevent us from taking rational action to protect ourselves and our partners. In a single word, it’s hubris (I call it pride for ease) that keeps us from checking in and maintaining a risk management strategy. Acting with concern of the dangers involved might hint at inexperience. It can come across as an annoyance or hindrance to our partner. But the confidence façade we wear, for whatever reason, is a suit of armor filled with holes; holes that are big enough to let that knife blade through when slicing an avocado.
“I’ll be careful.” “It won’t happen to me.” “I’ve done this 1000 times before.” “It’s fine.” These are common dismissals when presented with risk. It’s actually quite reasonable to think that, after slicing an avocado 1000 times without getting hurt, I could do it 1000 more times without getting hurt. It’s reasonable (and entirely possible) to think that I won’t get hurt or ever will. But remember, the risk is still there. The blade is still directed and working towards my skin - a blade which has been made and tuned to slice flesh in an effective and efficient way.
My knives are sharp. Watch out!
I’ve lost friends to the mountains who had commonly remarked similar sentiments. It’s a haunting reminder to hear their retort in my memory: a response when I proposed some sort of safety gate, such as an avalanche beacon test, or making sure they were tied in correctly. The impatience and cavalier attitude that came with the dismissal of my insistence will forever torture me. “It’s fine” - until it wasn’t.
In addition to pride’s grip on our ego, we repeat seemingly effective patterns for other reasons such as, 1) we don’t know any other way, and 2) we don’t know what the consequences might be other than success. It’s cliche to say “we don’t know what we don’t know,” but it explains our ignorance and why it can be so difficult to learn new patterns and behaviors. When ego gets sprinkled on top of our ignorance, a very dangerous combination presents itself. Not only are we lacking in knowledge, but now we are blessed with arrogance. The defiance in choosing to proceed with limited or flawed knowledge can result in tragedies of Shakespearian scale. When the stakes are high, the consequence can go from “it’s fine,” to mishap or monumental disaster in the time it takes to slice an avocado.
How do we explain the phenomena of why we make mistakes when all signs point to competency? In establishing a trajectory towards success during the initial learning curve, we fail to experience or recognize the folly in our ways. It’s possible that we have been successfully enacting a dangerous pattern without consequence. Another possibility is that we were modeled a dangerous technique, or that we assimilated a skill set that works for someone else in a unique environment, which might not be appropriate in our specific context. Almost any skill or task can be visualized by watching a youtube video. In some cases, we can repeat these skills with limited experience. In others, there’s just no way. We don’t have the tools. We don’t have the environment. We don’t have the countless hours of experience to make the right decision when the time comes. For many of us who grew up being told that we can do whatever we want if we put our mind to it, our insistence to do things a certain way might come as a cost to others, who end up having to use their resources to help.
Psychologists have attempted to understand why we behave this way. Theories abound. In my experience as a climbing coach of 20 years, I have my anecdotal understanding of the phenomena, but I frequently come back to the findings of researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning from their landmark 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments":
“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”
The “Dunning Kruger Effect” should be taken with grain of salt when it comes to how our skill set and decision making ability specifically pertain to risk management in rock climbing, although the demographics of reported accidents would show some parallels. I highly recommend reading the Accidents in North American Mountaineering publications from the American Alpine Institute to get broad perspective of consequences that follow participation in risky environments.
We put a lot of emphasis on luck and karma in our culture. I don’t think we put enough emphasis on how our actions affect others. Luck and karma (in my opinion) have a lot to do with what we have to fall back on. We think we’re lucky (or really skilled), when it’s actually significant privilege that continues to hold us up when we make mistakes - and whether or not we know we’ve made a mistake. The process of becoming an adult involves the recognition that our mistakes don’t necessarily mean someone else is to blame for not telling us a better way. When I slice my hand from an avocado mishap, I can’t blame the world for not showing me how to do it safely, even though there are many ways to do it that minimize risk. There are methods that don’t require a razor sharp knife moving towards the main component of my ability to connect with the rock. Staying safe while doing it isn’t about luck. It’s about learning to manage risk.
Climbing to one’s potential is a journey of thousands of steps, or repetitions. The journey is filled with controlled failure - failure that is anticipated. We use tools and strategy to prevent the failure from becoming a catastrophe. At any point in this journey, we might demonstrate patterns that come with a high level of risk and consequence. When we are early in the journey, we don’t know what patterns might have higher risk. When we are experienced, we disregard the potential of a high risk pattern if it hasn’t already affected us. In the age of social media, we model our behavior after influencers whose achievements or status we lust for, while failing to recognize the nuances of their specific path.
This knot saves lives.
In climbing, the “avocado mishap” is an oversight that can have a catastrophic or utterly tragic consequence. Or, it could be an actual avocado injury - something we do all of the time that isn’t specifically climbing. How do we know if we are metaphorically “slicing an avocado in our hand” in a climbing sense? If everyone else around me is doing the same thing, if the pros I worship do it a certain way, or if I’ve done it 1000 times and haven’t gotten hurt, doesn’t this mean that it’s the right way? The simple answer is “No”. The more complex answer is “It depends.“ The really difficult answer that I have to give you as a mentor is “I don’t want you to learn this hard way,” even though I do want you to learn through struggle and discomfort. You can slice an avocado 5000 times and never get hurt, or it could happen your next go. You can fail to tie a knot in the end of your rope 5000 times and never get lowered off the end. Or it could happen on the next climb. With both of these scenarios, the first step is to acknowledge that there is risk involved with either, whether or not it’s likely. Take on the perspective of doing it 1000 times. If there is a chance, what patterns can you establish to minimize or eliminate the the risk, in the context of doing repeatedly over your lifetime? If you learn to slice an avocado on a surface other than your hand, you will all but totally eliminate the chance of slicing your hand. If you learn to tie and keep a knot in the end of your rope all of the time, you will all but totally eliminate the chance of getting lowered or lowering off the end. It’s easy (and arrogant) to say, “I won’t be like them. I won’t let that happen to me.” But how? If you’re demonstrating the same patterns that led to someone else’s misfortune, you are risking the same consequences.
Developing patterns that stay with us continually can be frustrating at first. It takes time. It adds to the complexity of just trying to be better at it. It gets in the way of actually doing it. It can illicit eye rolls and groans from our impatient partners. And, it takes the effort of finding good mentorship and then being open to changing and improvement. But do it enough, and it becomes second nature. It’s important to recognize that developing consistent risk management IS becoming better. By minimizing consequence over time, we create more opportunities to try, to get stronger, to learn.
This post hasn’t sliced into the relationship of risk and reward. I’ll save this for the next crop of avocados.
To conclude: as athletes, we need to learn that the dedication to doing our best on rock can be held back by one failed avocado slice. Now watch this video before slicing another avocado in your hand!