In Siurana, Sleeping Lion doesn’t give much away from the ground.
A pale sweep of rock, almost blank in places, broken by subtle features that only begin to make sense once you’re close. It’s the kind of route that asks for patience, not just in movement, but in understanding.
For Sachi Amma, the process unfolded over time. Not in one push, but across multiple returns, each one refining something small and something deeper.
Where the Route Pushes Back
There are two places where Sachi struggled the most on Sleeping Lion.
The first came just after the iconic dyno in the middle section, a powerful deadpoint from an undercling pocket to a positive edge. This is where he fell the most when linking multiple sections.
During one stretch, nearly ten days were spent there alone, repeating, adjusting, trying to hold onto just enough power to make it stick.
The second crux came higher, just after the final rest. Three consecutive micro crimps, each no more than 8mm.
“If there was even a slight pump in my forearms, I would fall. It’s a very memorable sequence that made me suffer repeatedly.”
It’s a sequence that doesn’t look dramatic, but it accumulates everything that came before it. Every small inefficiency shows up in your forearms. Interestingly, the final move was never an issue for Sachi. The difficulty wasn’t at the end. It was in arriving there with enough left.
“If there was even a slight pump in my forearms, I would fall. It’s a very memorable sequence that made me suffer repeatedly.”
/ Sachi Amma
The Shift
Sleeping Lion can be broken into four sections, separated by three rests.
Sachi approached the route with a plan, managing recovery, shaking out, and trying to control the build of fatigue. Before the send, his rests were long and deliberate: ten shakes here, eight there, sometimes up to sixteen at the final position depending on the pump.
But something wasn’t working.
Despite feeling recovered, he would fall coming out of the last rest. The fatigue from below wasn’t gone, just delayed.**
So he changed one thing. He limited every rest to six shakes. On the very first attempt with that adjustment, he sent.
“I began to suspect that I was resting too long. So I decided to limit all three rest points to just six shakes each. On the very first attempt with this idea, I sent the route. Realizing the importance of rest duration was the final missing piece for me.”
“I began to suspect that I was resting too long.”
/ Sachi Amma
What We’re Really Climbing For
We asked Sachi if he had any advice for climbers approaching hard climbs, and he made a great point. There’s always a reason we choose a route like this.
On the surface, it’s about sending. But underneath, there’s usually something else, something quieter.
The desire to prove something.
To be seen.
To feel like enough.
Sachi speaks openly about this part of climbing. About how projecting a route becomes a way of confronting those deeper motivations, the ones that aren’t always obvious at first.
Facing a hard climb means facing those parts of yourself, too. The frustration, the doubt, the resistance. The feeling of falling short.
That’s why, when it finally comes together, it can feel like more than just a send. For Sachi, his approach goes beyond beta or training.
Instead of treating the send as the moment where something was earned, he has reversed the idea entirely.
His advice is simple:
Allow yourself to receive what you’re seeking while you’re still in the process.
Sachi says that in doing this, the tension around the project eases.
“When you stop believing that you can only receive something after sending, and allow yourself to receive it now, the goal starts to come closer on its own.”
And in the end, that shift doesn’t just change the outcome. It changes the experience of the climb entirely.