It is important to notice the milestones you reach in your projects, even the small ones are worth celebrating and can keep you motivated. These milestones mark your progress and encourage you to continue—they can be a beacon during dark and depressing times. They are restorative, reaffirming, and will keep you going during the long projecting process.

There can be long periods of time between sends without any apparent feedback, which can lead us to start questioning ourselves, our methods, if what we do even matters. You may even begin to question your own existence, the meaning and purpose of your life. This is hard to recover from, so don’t do it. Instead, focus on the milestones.

Most days you don’t see a lot of progress, it’s only after a season (or few) that you really start to see how far you have come.

To keep you from losing heart while you work, it is best to make and celebrate goals small enough to achieve in a few weeks or a season, so you see that you’re making progress. The project sport climber has a few standard milestones that we can all apply to our projects:

Linking Moves: The first few times on a new project, we are still trying to find all the holds and figure out the movement. Linking entire sections together is a great early milestone and one that you’ll achieve several times in the first weeks of your project.

You Stuck the Move: This usually implies that you were able to stick the crux, the most difficult move on the whole route. This is a big deal, because it probably means that you’ve now done ALL the moves and now you just have to link them together—simple as that. Not that simple, really, but a milestone worth celebrating for sure.

The High Point: This, as the name indicates, is the highest point to which you’ve been able to successfully climb a route without falling or taking on the rope. This point continues to go up until you finally send the route and clip the anchors (so there are lots of days when you get to celebrate this milestone).

High points are always a good feeling, but especially when it is to (or through) the crux itself. That’s a good day and a real turning point in the process when you start to believe that it’s actually possible.

The One Hang: This is near the send. You have the route broken into two sections. You climb until you fall (usually at the crux or the redpoint crux), then finish it to the anchors. It’s so close you can taste it. Enjoy this feeling—it still might be one week to two months before you send.

The Send: This is a magical day. You’ve been training hard, and finally the stars align and you successfully do the route. By the time you do it, you probably have it so dialed that you could warm up on it. This is truly a day for celebration. To send something at your limit doesn’t happen too many times in a season.

The Repeat: This is when you are able to resend a route that was a former project for you. Just because you send your project, doesn’t mean that you can do it every go. It is still difficult to repeat old projects. Sometimes it can take a little while before old projects feel easy, but when you can warm up on old projects, you’ll really see how far you’ve have come.

You have to train yourself to see and appreciate the feedback of these milestones. The road to mastery is long (in fact, it never ends), so celebrate your progress along the way.