Gympoints?

Before this post gets carried away into an overly serious topic, I made this post to tease a buddy who couldn't topout his otherwise clean send of his hardest ever, on the best lines in the area for this grade (i.e. both hands on top, good feet to an easy top out, but the 2 ft of slab top out completely impossible to navigate due to wet rock).  Everyone would be tempted to claim it as send by enpathy.   Think of Jim Lovell and going 2X to the moon but never setting foot on it... biggest near send ever! The teasing here is creating a new category of "send" to recognize the achievement (maybe adding "sans Top" to the name would also be equivalent)  :0)  On the Jim Lovell analogy, he's listed as one of the 24 men to have flown around the moon and the only one who've flown twice and never set foot on it... so he's got his own category of achievement, even though what he did is pretty badass...   That being said and teasing all done, how do we cope we these kind of events when faced with the black and white strict self-imposed rules we set on ourselves (like in climbing)?  How can we cope with the feeling of great success and that little nagging sense that since we didn't "do it" in the eyes of others?  How do we resolve this apparent conflict? I've experienced so many climbing failures and a blatant lack of success in the last few years due to little free time, wrong timing for adequate conditions, business trip, family responsabilities, etc, etc and etc.  I'm at the point wehre I think me it's important to discriminate between the two, and putting things in perspective. Putting things in perspective might mean that sometimes you're not as excited about a "send" when you felt it was soft and wasn't quite as challenging as you'd like, but it also means you're able to find out why things feel different because you're out of shape or you're skin is too soft. The detachment I experience then pulls me back onto problem solving mode and allows me to focus on what would bring back to doing what I'm trying to do (and yes Yoda, trying implies failure but sometimes that's fun too) How do you do it?

I guess it all depends on the context, at least for me. Personally, I have logged a few ascents that I did not top out for different reasons. All these problems were well below my limit, so that's probably the reason I did it. One of them was during a winter session, so the easy topout was snow-covered. On another instance, during a climbing trip, I was recovering from a broken foot and the V0 top out was at about 20 feet, so i decided to down climb to minimize the risk of injury. In the comment section of those ascents, I mentioned the reasons stated above for not toping out, not trying to hide those facts. For harder problems closer to my physical limit, if I don't topout, I don't log them until I top them out properly. In a perfect world, I guess the criterias for doing a problem should be the same for all problems, but in the end, I think the important thing is being comfortable and honest with your actions. Personally, I don't climb for anyone else out there, so it's up to me to decide wether or not I did a problem. Just be honest and don't try to hide anything. I'm not sure i'm very positive about that 'gympoint' idea. If you consider you did it, log it in, if not, go out there again and finish the problem. Although it kind of raises a problem about cheaters and liers, these guys always get caught in the end. Hope this sorta make sense heh!