Life in the Vertical

Dave Macleod has been busy over the holiday period, attempting and finally climbing James Pearson’s Walk of Life, an E12 at Dyer’s Lookout on the coast of Devon. In Dave’s blog he covers the ascent as well as the grade.

I was knocked back recently for some comments that I made about James ability to grade. However despite never having seen the route other than in pictures I find it quite interesting that many of my ‘guesses’ were reasonably right. With The Indian Face as a benchmark for E9 where you’re gonna die, it seemed ludicrous that a slab can get E12.

I have seen The Very Big and The Very Small a F8b+ slab being attempted and there simply aren’t many holds larger than two matchsticks thick. It is extremely easy to fall off even after lots of practice. Interestingly if grade tables are anything to go by would make it necessary for an E12 to be F8b+ or harder, and be bold.

Now given that Dave MacLeod didn’t wish to grade his route on Ben Nevis, Echo Wall which for a few weeks was dubbed the hardest trad route in the UK, until James ascended and affixed the E12 tag to his route. Rather than idly gossip online about it Dave got in his car drove the length of the country and set about repeating ‘The Walk…’ downgrading it to E9!

Despite downgrading the route Dave concludes his blog, “A huge thanks and congratulations to James Pearson for his brilliant effort of climbing The Walk of Life…I enjoyed doing the walk tremendously, and I wouldn’t have had that were it not for James’ effort.”

However having seen a string of down grades for Jame’s routes in the past few months The Groove, The Promise and now The Walk… I can only guess as to the answer behind this. James will talk of not using pads, however some of the routes have been judged to be 2 or even three grades out. So whether its is a genuine mistake or a method to attract media attention and sponsorship who knows. I jokingly looked at some research into personality and climbing a few weeks back that could be interpreted to give a comment on over-grading.

I also found it interesting that when Dave was talking about some modern desperate test-pieces he said… “it’s my opinion some of them have been overhyped when they are not as hard as others hard routes that have been there for a good while such as ‘if 6 was 9′ or ‘Widdop Wall.”

Since the first time I heard of dry tooling, I have had a place in the back of my mind that would be an ideal venue for this much hated sub-sport of climbing. Many see it as sport climbing but with the added evil of chipping holds. However if the growing popularity of things like the Scottish tooling championship is anything to go by then there is interest in this activity. The location that I have had in mind for several years now is amazing, I forgot just how good it is until today when I went back up there to have a look.

A 5 to 10 degree overhanging, and absolutely blank slab of rock. Having heard various suggestion for the venue from chipping an extremely hard sports route up it to placing a series of ‘bolt-on’ holds to make an outdoor climbing wall. The problem is the wall is dark and damp, rarely ever dries, and probably the last time it saw direct sunlight was prior to rock metamorphosing into Slate. I have dropped many hints to people who mix climb or have dry tooled over the years but, no one took the idea on. My thoughts were if I tried to set a route having had no experience of dry tooling the route would be crap.

Owain Samuels of Ibex Guides preparing the first dry tooling route in Wales.

Fortunately two very driven people have decided to have a go, and experiment on the wall, hoping to establish the dinorwic quarries first ever M grade route. Now before people get on there high horses about ethics, I am going to give you all my opinion.
1. This wall is and has been redundant since it was quarried, as such no routes are really being effected.
2. The locals developing this see it as a limited experiment to this one wall at present to see whether Slate makes a suitable medium.
3. Chipping has happen historically in the quarries since the very beginning. Of particular relevance is the wall with Satisfying Frank Bruno on, where Paul Pritchard basically drilled finger pockets!

For any mixed climber who question the validity of dry tooling. Every time I climb a route that winter climbers scratch there way up I can’t help think that if I did that to a route at stanage I would be shot. Whilst many mixed climbers argue that its everyone else who climbs when the route isn’t in condition that damages the rock, I can’t help feeling that they are only trying to fool themselves. As if the route is covered in snow, I often see climbers do there best to scrap it all off to revel the rock. May be dry tooling is the future, maybe we should realise that winter climbing damages the rock that as a climber I love, and set aside routes for the tooled up to trash!

Anyway, before long there will be at least one route, hopefully two or three more in the slate quarries.

Carrying from last nights blog about old climbing films, I remember that for a presentation a few years back I ripped off a very old climbing film and brutally cut it down to 4 minutes. The film was shot by the legendary climbing photographer John Cleare, and as such the angles are a testament to his ’style’ which captures not only the climbers but the architecture of the climb. The film was shot on ‘old school’ film, none of this video, miniDV or digital capture, and non destructive non-linear editing.

The very filming of it would have had a considerable cost in the developing and film costs alone, then the film would have to be cut and spliced by hand. A sound track recorded and added. Things that I can do in an afternoon on my laptop now, would have be a slow, tedious and manual job, that if you got it wrong were not as simple to rectify, as hitting the undo or Apple-Z buttons. What you get is one well thought out piece of quality film rather than a series of bedroom production companies knocking out a vast quantity of Amateur Hardcore.

If you like to see old school films on a variety of subject, then you can access the British Pathe archive online via www.itnsource.com. You have to register, but when you do there are a host of old news and showreels that were shown before films in the cimema. In particular I like the film of the dinowic slate quarry’s when they were actually work, as well as some very early mountain rescue footage from around North Wales. Pure genious!

Anyway I have put the edited version of The Climbers here. Not sure how long it will stay up for, as I don’t own the right for it. DMM did pay for the restoration of the film, and have shown it at several Film festivals over the years, and as such deserve the credit for saving this film from slipping away into the dustbin of history.

There is often a thread or two on UKClimbing on how you can go about escaping the system. In an effort to answer this question I literally threw this video together today, after filming it yesterday. Now its not polished, as I filmed myself, which ain’t that easy. I also did everything in one take, so there is one point that I slip at at, other than than though its pretty much as is. The video starts with an overview of the whole skill before going into the component parts of escaping the system.

This really is the start of self rescue, as the question you need to ask yourself is when you have escaped the system, how are you going to rescue the injury person or yourself. These skills take a long time to learn, and need a lot of practice in a safe environment to master. There have been several near misses on MIA courses when doing improvised rescue, so even the experts can get it wrong.

If you like a course on how you can develop these rope rescue skills then please contact me through this blog. If you have any questions on the video then please post a comment here, and if you found it useful and would like to see more video’s on coaching climbing skills then you’ll have to let me know that there is enough interest to warrant it!

We all have a dream, whether its to scale the 3000ft vertical cliffs of El Capitan or something closer to home like traverse across ‘A Dream of White Horses’ at Goagrth. Whatever you dream is there are various strategies to set yourself goals, some of which are more effective than others at helping you reach your Dream. So when is a dream just a goal, and how can you turn that Dream of White Horses into reality.

The psychologist have looked at goals in a variety of ways, to start with though they categorised them into different types of goals which are.
1. Outcome Goal or Dream – The final goal or dream – e.g. Climbing Dream of white horses.
2. Performance Goal – Some form of measurable performance – e.g. Climbing the Grade of E1
3. Process Goal – The processes that make the Outcome or performance goal possible – e.g. Placing gear, staying calm, good technique…

So whilst for instance having a Dream Goals is important to make sure that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that is your training program. The important thin g is the proximity of that Dream. Too far away and the light at the end of that tunnel is going to be awfully dim for an awfully long time. The worry is that this goal will just seem too far away, and rather than direct your attention and effort towards reaching it, you will find that you disengage from attempting to achieve it. A dream goal needs to be close enough that it feels achievable in the medium to long term.

So whilst you actual dream might be to climb Right Wall on Dinas Cromlech, you might find that that simply isn’t achievable in a year, as such you end up setting more overt mini dream goals with Right Wall being a more covert one, at the back of your mind, with the mini goals making stepping stones across each few months and eventually you’ll reach that major goal. One of those mini dream goals might be a performance type goal, like climb at least 10 routes of E4 over the summer.

The important thing to remember is this goal proximity, if you are close to achieving a goal then the behaviour that you have towards that goal radically changes. The best example I can give is a bouldering one. Imagine there are three problems, one you complete easily, the next you find impossible and will takes week to work out and develop the strength require to succeed, the third problem is just out of you ability to link, you can do all the moves and you believe it is possible. What you’ll find is that the effort and mental attitude you towards achieving the third boulder problem will be far more intense than, if you find something too easy or too hard.

The last type of goal I want to talk about is the process goal. These are the most powerful types of goal you can set yourself. Unlike the Dream or performance goal, which offer a distance focus on the horizon, something to look forward to if you like. However what is a goal like “I am going to climb ‘A Dream of White Horses’ this year”, actual going to do to help us actually achieve it. This is where the process goal comes in, where if you like you think through the processes that climbing your dream would involve and set many mini goals that build up your skills, confidence and fitness to eventually reach your dreams.

Often this setting of specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time specific process goals is where people fail on there training regime. Often running head long into a regime of fitness training when maybe all they need was to work on their technique and ability to read routes! This is where the help of a coach can come in useful, assessing your needs and setting goals can be done through our online coaching

Often people who want to be coached want to improve their technique, which in my mind is often the best way to make rapid improvements, as improving how you climb will improve your grade and confidence without the need for lengthy conditioning through aerobic, anaerobic or strength building regimes. Often where people fall down is how to develop good techniques, and this is where the science of skill acquisition can help.

At its simpliest level there are three stages to skill acquisition – Cognitve/thinking stage ; Associative or Intermediate stage; Autonomous or Elite Stage. If you then see this as a continum rather than seperate stages then we start off as a beginner, were we are first introduce to a skill, by practicing that skill we move from the first stages of learning where we are having to think about it all the time (hence cognitive stage), to where from time to time we will associate that skill with a given task, before after more practice we can carry out that skill without consciously thinking about (Autonomous Stage).

The key to moving from the cognitive/thinking stage through to the Autonous stage is effective practice. Now many people will have heard the saying practices makes perfect. Unfortunately this simply isn’t true, a modern coaching maxim is that only perfect practice makes perfect. So the chances are that unless you have used perfect technique from the very start of your climbing you will have some less than perfect technique that you will need to over write in your brain to adapt to better technique.

What often happens when learning new technique is that you practice it in an nice and easy environment, and then as soon as you try and use it in anger for the first time on the sharp end of a hard route is that it goes out the window, and you revert back to your old bad technique. This is because you haven’t practised it enough in the right type of environment.

Lets take for instance the habit of trying to face sideways when climbing, one of the quickest and easiest of technique to practice, and great help to your climbing. Try and climb keeping your upper body facing left or right as you climb. Now if you try and practice it on hard boulder problems then you simply won’t be able to practice it enough as you will get to pumped. If however you practice facing sideways as a technique drill every time you warm up on easy routes then you will effectively have more and more practice everytime you go climbing. After a few sessions try practicing that skill in a variety of situations e.g. leading easy routes, top roping hard routes, climbing corners, climbing arete, climbing slabs, climbing walls, etc… Adding in the different places and types of climbing that you practice the skill in help to make it a robust technique that will stay with you.

Remember though it won’t all happen over night as one researcher in sports science said ‘It take 10000 hours or 10 years of practice to reach an elite level in Sport’. So keep at it, as everyday is a school day when it comes to learning technique. I still use climbing drills during my warm ups!

Rumour has it on the streets on Llanberis that the new guidebook to Gogarth (North) is on its way or its on its way to the printers at the very least. This long awaited guide has caused many controversies along the way including a rift between the Climbers Club and Ground Up Production. The CC believing they had the moralistic high ground and exclusive rights to publish a guidebook to Gogarth, fortunately Ground Up brushed aside much of the criticism aimed at them from the CC, and threw themselves at the seemingly endless task of producing a defintive guidebook.

The whole CC, Ground Up Gogarth debarcle even spurred the conception of the first of the North Wales Wiki site, which then lead onto sites for the Slate Quarries, Tremadog and Ormes Limestone. Fortunately that seems to be behind us and now what we have to look forward to is Ground Up productions first guidebook since amazing North Wales Rock. If you’d like to see a preview of the guide you can here.

Future project for Simon Panton and his ground up team are Slate and Gogarth (South) which should be enough to keep you going.

For many people getting a good climbing coach is difficult, if you live too far away from the large urban areas and especially London, then a coach rather than an instructor can be hard to find. In order to help address this and keep the cost of coaching down, here at Climbing Coach we are starting to offer individualised online coaching solutions via email, skype and MSM

How does it work?

Well the first session, which is a thorough needs assessment, where we identify you weakness, help you set training goals, and develop a few training activities to address those needs. This takes around one hour and cost £10.

If you’d like to find out more about online coaching then email Mark Reeves via his main webpage.

Watching paint dry, not the most exciting of activities, now climbers have come up with the mountaineering equivalent a LIVE Great British Grade Debate. Now as far as I am concerned for the vast majority of climbers the Great British E Grade is alive, well and totally functional. Now Shaff are proposing a debate with Nick Colton as chair and several of the UK’s leading climbers (John Arran, Dave Birkett, James Pearson, Steve McClure, Lucy Creamer, Dave Macloed) . Why on earth anyone would actualy want to waist a Sunday to listen to this drivel is beyond me, even if its raining sulphuric acid I think I’d prefer to be pegged out naked on the summit of the wettest peak in the known world.

It seems to me that the grading system is only in turmoil at the end of the spectrum where grades mean money, sponsorship and glory. Looking at the UKC log books me and 99% of climber would be unaffected by anything they choose to debate. I say we lock all the panel in a room and see how long it takes them to realise that no one is interested in whether the personal experience changes the grade (based on this notion, I have seen VS climbers ascend E13), even if the moon being in the vicinity of Uranus was to make a significant difference all I’d want to here is the astral prediction of when its next passing so I can get out the way.

What is total blowing me away, and has the potential to make my blood boil is the BMC is supporting this event, so just how much of our subscription have they put into this event? So we can witness some ‘celebrity’ climbers create a load of hot air. I say bring on “Celebrity Climber Death Match”, we can all debate a scoring system!

Well there is always something going on on UKC, this time it seems that the discussion of what is and what isn’t an on-sight, this time though the controversy has come because the person who climbed the route downgraded his ascent to a flash, not claiming the Onsight because of he’d seen Hard Grit, where in the opening sequence we see a visiting French climber try and break his leg by falling off it!

Now Alex Honnold, has torn us a new view of trad climbing in the UK. I reviewed The Sharp End, and American film where Alex ripped up the Czech Republic. From this film this guy has not only balls but no shortage of climbing ability as well. Whilst I feel it is a noble act for him to put his hands up and say well I saw someone climb in on a video a while back, he still hadn’t touched the holds or felt the moves.

Now there was a lot of talk of how seeing someone climb a route could totally blow your on-sight of a route. Now whilst ethically this may be the case from a scientific stand point observation can have several effects. In particular seeing someone climb a route allows you what is describe as observational learning, by seeing a video of a route, and watching it over and over and then using this to aid you imagination of that route will help you remember the key crux sequences before you get on a route. Imagery as it is called is one of the most common mental skills that any athlete athletes use to enhance there performance.

However in the report on Climb Magazines website, Alex mentions only seeing the film on TV, he doesn’t talk about watching it repeatedly to analyze the sequence. Similar effects of imagery can be had through simply looking at the route from the ground, and carefully planning and mentally rehearsing your attempt before you head off.

Now for most people when we climb observation of another climber on the route can also improve our confidence to be successful. We often do this subconsciously by judging the person who we are observing against our own perceived ability. So if we see someone succeed and we perceive them to be less able or equal to ourselves then our confidence in achieving that route are increased. There is a lot of research that points to an increase in confidence leading to an increase in physical performance. Again given that Alex won’t have know Jean-min from the Hard Grit film he can’t judge his own ability from that.

As such all the bully about whether or not it could justify an on-sight ascent by many of the armchair critics on UKC (see thread), is just unnecessary. I have never meet Alex, and can’t say if he is a nice guy or an arsehole. However his climbing speaks for itself, I’d give him the on-sight as improving on his style of ascent in this case is going to require us to know exactly how many times he saw Hard Grit and when take was, which just beggars belief.

Good luck to Team America on the rest of their stay in the UK, and I hope they ignore many of the comments on UKC