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.