Disclaimer: This blog is not intended as climbing instruction, so don’t take what I say and go try it. Though I do discuss advanced sport climbing techniques at length, the purpose is not to teach you to climb, rather to show you specifically how I approach difficult problems in climbing so that you can use similar strategies as you approach difficult projects in life and business. If, however, you are actually interested in learning to climb, contact your local climbing gym. Gyms have trained instructors who would be happy to teach you how to climb safely.

Explaining what you saw in the video and more on sport climbing

As you can see from last week’s videos, sport climbing is quite a bit different than mountain climbing, which is what most people envision when I tell them I climb. These videos do a great job of showing what we’re going to be talking about, and I really want to make sure that you have an image of where I go and what I do every week. If you haven’t already watched the videos from last week’s post, you should go and do that now.

The climbs in the videos are just a few examples of hard project sport climbing. It is important to realize that no two climbs are the same. Sure routes may have similar movements, but routes vary in many aspects: the length, the difficulty, the angle, the kind of rock, the rock features, where the protection is located, the holds, the feet, the movement … everything. Climbing areas are also different as a result of the local cultures, ethics, and accepted process for dogging. If you ever drive by an impressive piece of rock, and it’s not a choss pile (as in it’s not crumbling into pieces), chances are a sport climber has put bolts into it and climbed it.

Prior to bolting, people were limited to rock climbing rock with existing cracks where they could place their own protection each time they climbed (think Yosemite’s El Cap or Half Dome). The introduction of bolting opened up more possibilities in the sport, new locations previously thought improbable were developed, and new “impossible” climbs were accomplished.

We are often asked, “How do you get the rope up there?”

It seems like a good idea to present a broad overview of what sport climbing is.

A climber, or in this case a developer, repels down the face of a cliff, and looks at all the crack and features for possible lines that could become a climbing route. He cleans up the rock and starts placing bolts into the rock every 5 to 10 feet (this can vary a lot depending on the climb).

Most sport climbing routes are a single pitch — they require one length of rope — and around 80 to 100 feet long. You can purchase guidebooks for different climbing locations that have all of the information you need, including descriptions of the location, information about routes, their difficulty, photos, and so on.

For the actual climbing portion, the climber ties in to one end of the rope (this is a special and critical knot, so get instruction!) and then the rope travels through a belay device which is connected to the belayer — your buddy that you literally trust with your life.

As the climber goes up the wall, he clips each bolt on the route with a quickdraw, or draw as we call it, which is two carabiners held together with webbing or cable. The top carabiner, or biner as we call it, goes into the bolt (which is actually a hanger, but I am still going to refer to it as a bolt, because that’s what we do …) or clip (because sometimes we call it that too, but don’t let that confuse you). The climber clips his rope into the bottom biner of the draw, as you saw in the videos. The climber continues up, clipping each bolt until they reach the anchors, which are really just two bolts next to each other, designating the end of the route.

The ropes that we use are dynamic, so there’s some stretch to them. The size of the fall is based on the distance between the climber and their last clip. So for instance, if you clip the rope above your head, which most of us can do, and the belayer takes tension on the rope before you fall, you won’t move, you’ll just hang on the rope, because the last placement is above you.

However, once the climber’s waist goes above the bolt, you must factor that the fall will be twice the distance from that last bolt. The bolt acts as the radius in this case (for those of you that remember geometry), so if the you are 5 feet above the last bolt and fall, you fall that 5 feet, plus the 5 feet as you pivot around the bolt, plus any additional slack that might be in the rope. Slack can come from the rope stretching, plus how much slack your belayer has out of the belay device, plus how much you lift your belayer off the ground when you fall, which happens more if your belayer weighs less than you. The distance of a fall can really start to add up. The big falls in the videos, or whippers, are common on the run out sections (sections with few bolts) of the upper wall.

Now, for a climber to say he has done a sport route, or has sent it, as we say, which is short for the mountaineering term ascend, the climber must have done the entire route without weighting the rope or falling and then clip the anchors at the end.

There are different kinds of sends: the on-sight is the completion of a route the climber knows nothing about. He just walks up to it and does it his first go. On-sights are highly sought after by strong Europeans and teenagers — and sometimes 10-year-old Australian girls — who want to make us older recreational sport climbers feel fat and weak by hiking (in our face and on their first go) the incredibly hard projects that we have spent an entire year working on.

Then there is the flash. This particular send is on a route a climber has either watched someone do or received key information about, which allows them to do it their first go.

And finally, the redpoint. This send is on a route that takes the climber more than one try to do. This is what the project sport climber goes for: a route that is at their limit, one that pushes their potential. We work the same route for months, sometimes multiple seasons.

Why? I’ll talk about my path to sport climbing next week. Till then.