Mettle

by Steve Bechtel, Alex Bridgewater (Editor), Amanda Sempert (Illustrator)

METTLE is a collection of articles, essays, and stories of the training process. A climbing coach for over 25 years, Steve Bechtel started writing about training and performance as a way to organize his thoughts around the craft of climbing. In 2007, he launched Climb Strong as a blog, which then grew into a source for training plans, tips, and in-depth articles on performance rock climbing.

Of the hundreds of articles on the site and in the monthly newsletter, we took the best and most popular for this collection. The themes range from strategy and planning, to strength and conditioning, to dealing with the emotional toll of training.

There is something magical about the process of finding inspiration, setting goals, and working desperately hard to achieve them. Climbing is an incredibly rewarding sport―training for it adds a whole new dimension to this experience, and can alternate between being both wonderful and terribly frustrating. This book represents Steve's thoughts on this dimension, as recorded over the past twenty years.

Genres: Climbing

416 pages, Hardcover

Published April 13, 2022

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mettle is a hodgepodge of articles that are somewhat organized into a book. That might sound like a bad thing, but I found it the perfect way to ponder. I read an article or two and thought about my own climbing training. Rince and repeat. Loads of gems in this book

That said, I think a simpler, more organized training book would be better for a beginner climber.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Bechtel is the man. I love his no-nonsense, practical approach to climbing and training for climbing. This book is mostly a collection of newsletters he has written for his Climb Strong subscribers. That makes this book sound worse than it actually is, because each one of his newsletters is solid gold. The team at Climb Strong rocks. Read this if you care about getting better at climbing.