Maybe I could fit into the Boulder climbing scene—I just need to lose weight, run faster, and embrace the rules around the city. I needed to push harder to send the last little bit.

The climbing felt crimpy, powerful, and dynamic—all my weaknesses. I knew that the Moonboard would help me improve as a climber, even if I was just sending the warmups, and I liked bouldering with the Shrine Crew. But the Moonboard felt too hard, too overwhelming for me. I let the idea of climbing on a Moonboard, of joining this foreign club, percolate.

“SO STOKED. I just sent the proj!” Alex Honnold said in a voicemail from El Capitan on June 3. “Hiking down the East Ledges. Thanks for the support up here this season and, you know, just in general. I’m feeling pretty stoked out of my gourd.” That day, Honnold, 31, made the first free solo of a VI on El Capitan.

“How can you know such a grade with so few participants?” Dave Graham said of rating high-end problems. “It’s like an experiment with six control subjects.”

While my ascent was less than perfect, it was what I could do at the time. These asterisks provided opportunities to learn, though. As notes of truth, they showed me just how I could make mastery of climbing more important than the send.

When I polled my Facebook friends about what gives them recreational outrage, I received 110 responses. People mouthed off about everything from “Sprinter vans,” to people who “play music on ‘personal’ speakers for everyone to hear while hiking,” to “Climbing organizations that debate solutions to preventing destruction of outdoor spaces while simultaneously encouraging more people to start climbing,” to “kids warming up on my projects.”