On a recent vacation, to a beach of all insane places—the first non-climbing trip I’ve taken in at least a dozen years—I caught up on some summer reading. Margarita in one hand, tablet in the other, I plowed through Christopher McDougall’s 2009 bestseller Born to Run.

The book’s success seems due to its introduction of barefoot running to a wide audience. It tells the story of a lost tribe of natural born runners from Mexico, the Tarahumara Indians, and their uncanny ability to demolish trained American marathoners in 100-mile ultra-races, all while wearing nothing more than flip-flops. The book also enjoyed a certain infamy for challenging the multi-billion dollar running-shoe industry, essentially blaming Nike et al. for marketing to and selling us expensive running shoes that were actually making us slower and more prone to injury. Basically, over-cushioned $160 running shoes have instilled runners with an unnatural stride; in fact, all you need to run properly and naturally are your two (mostly) bare feet.

It’s yet another story of how humans have lost our way in this commercial age, and how the most profound answers to all these modern predicaments are often the oldest and simplest.

Born to Run had a real effect on the industry, causing shoemakers to completely change their designs and introduce fleets of “barefoot” models. Since then, hordes of runners have flocked to their online retail stores and bought “barefoot” shoes.

But to me, the book’s most powerful implication wasn’t what type of footwear I now need to purchase. In fact, running out to buy new running shoes seems to miss the message that I’d prefer to take away: that there is no magic bullet. I don’t believe barefoot running shoes will make you a better runner. Only running makes you a runner. Genuinely wanting to run allows you to continue doing it. Getting better, faster and stronger isn’t the primary objective—it’s simply the happy byproduct of doing this thing that you’d be doing anyway. The practice is daily, the process slow.

Like climbing, running is an opportunity to feel one of our most primal, essential joys. But only if we let it. Only if we treat it as an inspired pursuit. Not a quick fix.

This phenomenon got me thinking about climbing, a sport where you have guys like Chris Sharma—who doesn’t approach climbing like a grind; who only goes climbing when he feels psyched—continually pushing world standards. If I think about his longevity, Sharma has been at the top of the rock-climbing game longer than anyone else. Those who focus only on getting better, and treat each day out with those ends in mind, often burn out. Those who over-train achieve bursts of brilliance, but often end up injured and have to give climbing up. When Sharma hurt his knee at 19, he gave up climbing completely for a year, only to return stronger. Certainly there are young climbers who will surpass everything Sharma has done. But right now, Sharma’s non-approach approach has arguably produced the best results.

I was most interested to hear that running’s corresponding non-approach approach actually creates better runners. McDougall describes running in the 1970s as this sort of fringe, weird thing that attracted fringe, weird people. For these runners, with their feet clad in sneakers as primitive as their knowledge about training and diet, running wasn’t a grind. It was exalting. A cool thing that they found on their own terms, derived creative inspiration from and ultimately loved. As a result, America had many amateur runners in the early 1980s who were able to ace 2:12 marathons. But by the year 2000, the U.S. couldn’t even produce one runner to meet the 2:14 qualifying standard for the 2000 Olympics.

“[This] is about why we got slower,” writes McDougall. “And the fact is, American distance running went into a death spiral precisely when cash entered the equation.”

I have to wonder if climbing could be vulnerable to this same affliction. It would seem so. Most of what I hear from today’s next generation of super-talented climbers is a lot of griping and grousing over the lack of industry support they receive. Free gear doesn’t cut it; they need cash and quick. You see it even in their approaches; climb one 5.14a and quickly move onto 5.14b. Get better quicker, get recognized, get that money.

Even further proof, I’d say, is in the uninspired nature of most top climbers’ blogs. Is there anything more prosaic to read? I’d say the majority of today’s “big name” climbers have done little in the way of articulating the primal, exalting joy of our sport … probably because they’re most focused on becoming famous enough to get paid. Their experiences as climbers seem thinner and cheaper than ever before.

Measuring progress in running, which enjoys the stability of seconds, is much less subjective than in climbing, where we use these completely mercurial oddball grades. So I have to wonder how far we climbers have actually come. Are we really climbing that much harder than we were in the 1970s? Jim Holloway problems are only just now being repeated—and not easily. The scope of difficulty hasn’t necessarily been pushed; rather it seems to be diffused by its expansion to longer routes. Innovation and progress in climbing could very easily be a façade.

As the sport and sponsors grow, will money replace love as the top climbers’ primary motivator? Has that already happened? I wonder if climbing could fall into the same “death spiral” that beset running. Or if, perhaps, we’re already there.