James McHaffie has been a dominant force in UK climbing for some time now. Most associated with hard onsight ascents of both existing and new routes. This was epitomised by his ascent of the Tower of Midnight on Cryn Las early this year. However in the last year or so James has turned towards sports climbing to push his limits and unsurprisingly he has managed to repeat one of the hardest routes in the UK The Big Bang at LPT.
Early this year I accompanied him on a couple of days out and whilst I was injured James most certainly was not. One of those days was a damp day in Twll Mawr home to his recent first ascent of the long standing Meltdown project. After the ascent James mentioned he had designed a plan for the route by sketching it.
I thought I would explore this tactic from a coaching point of view. A couple of years ago now I coached a few elite welsh junior climbers as part of my MSc, the aim wasn’t to design training plans but instead to try and get my clients to improve their psychological approach to hard indoor climbing. After working through a series of self-talk, imagery and relaxation exercises and getting the think more widely about there climbing, I introduce planning a route.
At first I tried to see if I could get these kids to look at a route and plan the moves. As this is something I do on a regular basis. However when I got the kids to do this they would look you for about 10 seconds and say “Planned it and off they went”. I needed something to slow them down and make them actually plan in depth rather than just pretend they had. So I turn to a pen and paper and got them to draw the route and plan their hand movements, orientation of the holds and where they could match or rest.
Within a few week they went from F6b+ to F7a+. So I know this works really well for indoor climbing, but I have never used it outside as often time constraints mean its impossible. Seeing Caff’s diagram tells me that it probably works outside as well because he climbed the Meltdown in a rapid style. Whilst it suits itself to redpointing, the whole planning and preparation for the onsight of a hard route can also benefit from simialr lengthy tactics like climbing adjacent routes and noting possible rest or gear. Some of course will think this is cheating, but to me its just a sensible tactical approach.
Anyway, I just wanted to share caff diagram and how they can be of help not just to rock climbing legends like Caff but also us the common man. Caff is shortly heading out to the States for round two with El Cap, but before he is in an undisclosed location in the UK attempting to repeat a very hard route. I hope he is successful as it would be a significant reduction in time to make the ascent than the first ascentionist. I also wonder whether he’ll draw a plan for the top pitch of that route.