INTRODUCTION: “Sport Climbing: The Next Era Of Ascent”

 

Sylvain Millet was in silhouette against the dying light at Cëuse. The famously blue, pocketed wall that distinguishes this French crag as the best sport climbing in the world glowed coolly in the evening. Millet racked four—just four—draws on his harness in preparation to climb the 120-foot route. On this night, in the summer of 2006, the quiet Frenchman tied in, then spit on his hand and mashed his fleshy palm into the sole of his climbing shoe, cleaning the rubber till it squeaked dry. He took a breath and began.

The route is a 5.13a called All Is Not So Easy, but for Millet, who has climbed the illustrious Realization—one of the world’s hardest routes with a rating of 5.15a—it was relatively easy. Millet was only interested in reaching his project, a 50-foot extension to All Is Not So Easy that might be as difficult as 5.13d. Millet has All Is Not So Easy so wired that he climbed 30 feet up the wall before taking a quickdraw from his harness and clipping into a bolt. For Millet, stopping to clip interrupts the warm flow and brilliant movement. Not only that, but clipping is pumpy, and if Millet wants to redpoint his project, he cannot be pumped.

After successfully climbing the 5.13a, Millet paused to shake the lactic acid out of his forearms and prepare for the remaining difficulties. As Millet moved up into the crux, he reminded himself to stay composed, set his feet accurately and hang off the shallow dishes and hard edges with straight arms and an effortless grip. He moved slowly but constantly—in balance and with total efficiency. Now 20 feet below the anchor and 20 feet above his last protection, Millet produced a noise of exertion. He cranked hard off of his right arm and released another guttural blast. “Psaaaaht!” To the crowd of climbers beneath, it was a gripping noise that sent pangs of uncertain anxiety. Would he battle through and succeed … or would he take the fall?

That day Millet pitched, gently arcing through the air for 50 feet before his wire-thin cord softly arrested his fall. He lowered to the ground as the last rays of light washed up the wall. Millet smiled. Success would come another day. The route would still be there.

Sport climbing has come a long way since its indistinct emergence in the early 1980s, but in many ways this phenomenally fun discipline of rock climbing is only just getting started.

 

What is sport climbing?

Sport climbing is a style of rock climbing where the climber relies on the safety of pre-existing or “fixed” protection, usually bolts that have been drilled into the wall. With fixed protection, sport climbing is considered the safest form of rock climbing. A solid bolt placed in good rock is safe and reliable, allowing sport climbers to focus on pushing their free-climbing skills without worrying too much about the consequences of a fall. The emphasis in sport climbing is less on managing danger and risk, and more on pushing these physical boundaries. The basic “point” is to free climb an entire pitch, leading it from start to end, without falling or resting on gear.

 

Fundamental Terms

Route: A route is a definitive path up a cliff. Sport routes (or climbs) have a certain number of bolts in them, and a two-bolt anchor at the end. The anchor marks the top of the route and the end of the climb; the goal is to reach the anchor without falling. Routes are given names (which appear in this book in italics) as well as a free-climbing grade such as “5.10a.”

Crag: A crag is a cliff with a collection of routes of various grades and quality. Typically, climbers use guidebooks to find crags and the particular routes there.

Free climbing: A general term that simply means you are relying on your hands and feet—not gear—to actually move up a wall. Gear is used, but only to keep you safe if you fall. Free climbing is the opposite of aid climbing, which is when a climber places gear and hangs from it in order to progress upward. Free climbing is the purest form of climbing, and also the most enjoyable. It’s an experience of twisting your body into unbelievable positions that allow you to move up a sheer face, using the natural hand and foot holds presented by the rock.

Free climbing is not exclusive to one particular discipline of rock climbing—it can be done on tiny boulders with no gear, or on big walls with a rope and lots of gear. This is an important distinction because free climbing is often confused with “free soloing,” which means free climbing a tall route without the safety of a rope or gear.

While certainly physically challenging, free climbing engages the mind equally. A climber must figure out how to “read” a route—what order to grab the holds, how and when to grab them, how to best place the feet, and so on. There’s also the thrill of leading above your gear and risking a fall—and then learning how to balance this fear with a need to remain calm and climb well, like Sylvain Millet, who eventually “sent” (aka redpointed) the project described above. Finally, there’s the mental barrier of believing you can actually climb something you once found impossible. Sometimes, this feels like the greatest challenge of all.

Photo: Keith Ladzinski

Leading: Climbing “on lead,” or “leading a climb,” is the act of ascending a route from the ground to the top. A leader clips the rope to the pre-placed bolts using “quickdraws,” which are two carabiners attached via a nylon sling (one carabiner clips to the bolt, while the rope gets clipped to the other carabiner). After clipping the quickdraw to the bolt, then the rope to the quickdraw, the leader must climb above his “protection” to reach the next bolt. Climbing above one’s last protection means risking a lead fall, which is a fall roughly twice the distance above a bolt. If a leader is three feet above a bolt and he falls, he will fall a total of six feet before the belayer can catch him. If he is five feet above a bolt, he faces a 10-foot fall. Falls in climbing are arrested by your partner, called the “belayer,” who uses a belay device to hold the rope and catch you.

 

Toprope: A toprope is the opposite of lead climbing. It is when the rope runs through the anchor at the top of the route and down to a climber. As the climber climbs up, the rope moves up with him because the belayer, who is on the ground, takes in the rope through the belay device. Toproping is a good way to safely learn to become comfortable climbing up a vertical wall. That said, a toprope ascent doesn’t actually “count” as an ascent. Beginners who are uncomfortable leading most often toprope to enjoy and experience free climbing. Also, toproping is a popular way for climbers to “run laps” on routes, getting an extra workout in at the end of the day.

Beta: This is information about a route: how to do the moves, where crucial hand or foot holds are, etc. Beta could also be information about route length, or location, or anything that could be deemed useful to a free climber. The term was coined in the mid-1980s by the great climber Jack Mileski, who is fondly remembered by his climbing partners for being so excited about climbing in general that he simply couldn’t help himself from sharing his way of doing moves with other climbers who up on a route. “Beta” is thought to be short for Betamax, the video format that was eventually replaced by VHS, and its correlation to climbing was possibly a reference to being able to rewind video—or “replay” moves over. We’ll never really know since Mileski was tragically murdered in 1997 by his ex-girlfriend. However, his quirky term—and his passion for sharing information to help people climb—lives on.

Sending, or an “ascent”: Sport climbing’s point is to “send” a route—that is, to make a successful “free ascent” of it—which means leading a climb without resting on gear. Successful free ascents can be categorized like so:

• Onsight: This means you free climb a route on your first try without any prior knowledge of it. An onsight is the purest, best style of ascent you can make, and it is the ultimate goal of any route you choose. Typically, most climbers will only onsight routes that are easy for them, though even on easy climbs, an onsight is not guaranteed. You only get one shot to onsight a climb, which is what makes it so special.
• Flash: Like an onsight, a flash is also a successful first-try ascent of a route; however, a flash differs in that the climber has beta, particularly knowing where the crux is, how to grab certain key holds, or having someone tell you want to do from the ground. Flashing is the second-best style of ascent you can make, and sometimes, climbers choose to try to flash routes—gathering as much beta beforehand as possible—that they think would be too hard for them to onsight.
• Redpoint: This means making an ascent of a route that you have tried before, but hadn’t successfully free climbed until now. Redpointing is the third-best style of ascent, and the most common one used by sport climbers who “work” on one particular climb that is hard for them until they have figured out all the moves, and have the strength and fitness to link them together. Sport climbing’s backbone is the redpoint style of ascent.

Project: First and foremost, a “project” means a route that has been tried, but has not yet been successfully redpointed by anyone. However, in today’s vernacular, climbers use the word “project” when talking about a route that they themselves are trying to redpoint—even if others have done it before them. To wit: “How’s your project going?” “Not bad. I’ve only fallen 30 times at the same move. Hopefully I’ll do it next try!”

Hangdogging: This is the name given to working a project by hanging on the bolts in order to figure out the free-climbing moves. It is a style of climbing that is meant to help a climber redpoint a project.

Trad Climbing: Trad, or traditional climbing differs from sport climbing by the type of protection used. Trad climbers place their own protection—typically cams and nuts—into the rock. The protection is then removed when the second climber ascends the pitch. Like in sport climbing, trad climbers free climb; however, they typically choose routes that are easier to free climb to compensate for the added difficulties and increased risk of placing one’s own protection. The terms onsight, flash and redpoint are also used in trad climbing.

Bouldering: Free climbing on boulders—except for crash pads, no gear or ropes are used. In bouldering, the point is not to simply reach the top; it’s how you get there. Often boulderers seek the most difficult path, or “problem,” they can find on a particular boulder in order to improve their free climbing. Whereas sport climbing tests a climber’s endurance, bouldering is a test of power. The hardest single free-climbing moves in the world are found on today’s cutting-edge boulder problems.

Grades

Grades are the funny-looking number/letter combinations that often follow a route’s name in guidebooks and text. They are meant to provide a general idea of a route’s free-climbing difficulty. Explaining grades is further complicated by the fact that there are at least a dozen different grading systems, not just between the many disciplines of climbing (such as bouldering, rock, big-wall, ice), but between different countries and regions as well.

In North American free climbing, the grading scale used is the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS), which looks like this: “5.9” or “5.11c.”

The system derives out of a larger system that grades the technical difficulty of hiking trails. A “Class 1” trail is a flat walk, while a “Class 3” is steep and may involve using your hands to scramble over or around boulders. Class 4 is like Class 3 only it’s “more exposed,” meaning there’s a danger of falling off a cliff. Class 5 means that the “trail” becomes so steep and technical that you need ropes and gear to safely go up it. Class 5 is the start of technical free climbing, which is why YDS grades begin with a “5,” followed by a decimal, followed by another number or number/letter combo.

The YDS is an open-ended system, meaning there’s no cap to how difficult a rock climb can be. The scale begins at 5.1, and goes 5.2, 5.3 … all the way up to 5.9. Things get complicated at 5.10, which is when climbs are further broken down by the letters “a,” “b,” “c,” and “d.” To wit: 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d, 5.11a, and so on.

Beginner-level routes are in the 5.1 to 5.9 range. 5.10a to 5.11d routes are considered “moderate,” and are a good range for intermediate-level climbers. 5.12a is where advanced climbing begins. For most people of average fitness with honed climbing technique, 5.12 (and even many 5.13a’s) are a very reasonable goal. Climbing 5.13+ and 5.14 require not only above-average fitness, but superb climbing technique. As of 2009, the hardest routes in the world are rated 5.15b.

Sometimes, instead of letters, you will see a plus or minus sign. This is simply a way to remain vague when a grade isn’t certain. For example 5.13+ means, “Hard 5.13, lets just leave it at that.” Likewise, 5.9- means “an easier 5.9.”

With ratings of certain trad climbs, you will sometimes see the YDS grade paired with an “R” or “X”. These two letters provide information about how dangerous a route is to lead. “R” means there are significant “run-outs” between reliable protection points. In other words, a leader has to climb farther above their last protection piece before reaching the next one. An “R”-rated route exposes a leader to a long fall that could be injurious. “X” is like “R”, except that the run-outs are much longer. There are dire consequences to falling on an “X”-rated route.

Grades are far from an exact science, and they are not supposed to be taken too seriously or literally. Grades are merely meant to give you a rough estimate of what kind of challenges you can expect. One man’s 5.10a may be another man’s 5.9. Similarly, you may surprise yourself and find that, even though you’ve only ever climbed a 5.9, there are some 5.10c’s that are well within your abilities.

The jump in difficultly from 5.8 and 5.9 is meant to be equivalent to the jump in difficulty from 5.10a to 5.10b, or 5.11d to 5.12a. However, you’ll find it’s far easier to make quicker progress through the lower grades than the higher ones—this is merely a function of the Learning Curve. When starting out, gaining the technical skills, poise and balance needed to rock climb a moderate route comes faster than gaining a new level of fitness (endurance, power or both) needed to take your redpoint level to the next higher grade.

Onsight vs. redpoint grades: These vague terms help explain the variation of grading that occurs for different climbs at different areas. The person who “establishes a route” (drills its bolts and redpoints it first) also gets to grade the climb. Subsequent repeats may reveal that the original grade is too high or too low. Climbers are like upward-flowing water: always finding the easiest path to the top. Eventually a community consensus is organically reached that could be based on anything from ego, to a guidebook author wanting to give a grade that makes people feel good, to ignorance, to personal strengths and weaknesses. Typically, routes are rated relative to the other routes in that area. So, if there are a bunch of 5.11d’s, and someone establishes a route that feels noticeably harder, he might rate it 5.12a—even though, if it were in another area, it might 5.12b or even 5.11c!

An “onsight grade” is the degree of difficulty a typical climber will experience during the onsight, whereas a “redpoint grade” means that the route has been graded to reflect the degree of difficulty a climber will experience with perfect beta during the redpoint.

At most sport climbing areas, the “moderate grades,” which usually mean anything under 5.11, are graded for the onsight. Most trad routes use onsight grades as well.

As climbs get harder, or at areas with routes that are difficult to onsight, redpoint grades are more commonly employed. Often, an area boasting redpoint grades feels harder at first.

The Elite Deceit

Sport climbing’s biggest turnoff to many climbers is that it’s really hard and they don’t like failing. They’d rather spend a day onsighting easier routes than projecting a physically demanding one that takes more effort. Their disenchantment with sport climbing is further exacerbated when they see others easily climbing routes that they struggle with. However, this cynical attitude has no basis in reality, and it is a result of common misperceptions about how “hard” routes are achieved.

It’s easy to feel like there’s an enormous gap between what you do and what the pros do when climbing magazines and videos show the featured talents rarely fail and always succeed.

Through my tenure as a senior editor at Rock and Ice, I’ve been fortunate enough to actually climb with and watch the world’s best in action. It’s not only true that good sport climbers fail, but that they fail a lot. I’ve seen Tommy Caldwell take half an hour to manage a V4 boulder problem. I belayed Chris Sharma when he asked me to “Take!” on a 5.13a at the Virgin River Gorge that he had done many times years before. I’ve seen Dave Graham quiver with fear on a 5.10, and I’ve witnessed countless 5.14 climbers struggle on easy 5.11’s. Everyone has “bad” days, but really, it’s the great days in sport climbing that are so rare and special. That’s because free climbing is just plain hard.

Undoubtedly, genetics and natural talent help a person become good, but success in sport climbing is equally about having the right attitude, and knowing the right tactics and techniques more seasoned climbers use to approach difficult climbs.

So, what is it that makes Chris Sharma, Tommy Caldwell, Dave Graham and all the other 5.14 crushers so good? The biggest difference that separates “us” from “them” is their willingness to fail, and their desire to learn from mistakes, improve weaknesses, stay positive and, above all, be persistent. If you can accept that you will be doing more falling and failing, and actually enjoy this process, then every day you get out will be great. Accept that sport climbing is tremendous, lifelong challenge—embrace it—and you will continue to improve interminably. And one day, you’ll be clipping the chains after onsighting another 5.12, shaking your head and grinning wildly with the disbelief of how far you’ve come.

 

A New Look

Sport climbing is the art of free climbing at its pinnacle. No other climbing discipline demands more of your strength, stamina, power and mental acuity than successfully redpointing a sport climb that is truly difficult for you.

Of course, at its heart, sport climbing is just plain fun. Anything more is vanity. Yet, it’s impossible to not acknowledge that it is a pursuit at once uplifting and demanding, moral and enlightening, and best of all an infinite challenge.

The rise of standards over just the last decade, along with the emergence of thousands of new routes and hundreds of user-friendly crags, has changed the face of sport climbing so drastically that an entire anthology of gear, tactics, belay skills and rope-work techniques have been tweaked to tackle these modern challenges.

Until now, however, most texts have treated sport climbing as a sideshow act to the grander pursuits of traditional and big-wall climbing. After all, if you can place cams and nuts, then you should be able to clip a draw to a bolt, right?

This book intends to define the new face of this exceptional discipline, and address both the basics for getting started as well as the cutting-edge strategies that climbers use to redpoint routes at their physical and mental limits. What’s so awesome is that these techniques will help any climber on any route, whether its 5.8 or 5.15.

There are no boundaries in sport climbing, personally or otherwise. Sport climbing could mean a carefree day spent hammering out a bunch of routes with close friends. Its logistical ease and accessibility make even three hours at a well-developed crag a great workout and a satisfying afternoon—much appreciated by those with fulltime jobs and busy lives. Says Jim Gilchrist, a longtime climber and high-school principal, “If it weren’t for sport climbing, I don’t know if I’d be climbing anymore!” The fitness he keeps by sport climbing allows him to stay in shape for when he goes on longer road trips.

Sport climbing can also involve heading up a route that is so difficult you can barely do the moves on your first attempt, and actually redpointing the route may take you months of dedicating every free weekend you have to “working your project,” and gaining the fitness to actually do it.

This can be a frustrating ordeal, but when you succeed, you’ll feel unbelievably content … for about a week. You will celebrate, but only a bit. The next climb always beckons, and the process begins again.

No matter how seriously you take it, or what grade you climb, there is one underlying truth that you will hear repeated throughout this book: Sport climbing is the very best way to improve your abilities as a rock climber. Training in the gym, losing weight, slapping a campus board—these things can be good (in moderation), but they pale in comparison to the real-world powers that dedicated sport climbing brings.

These days, every great all-around climber has a strong background in sport climbing. Whether learning how to hang on till the end of the pitch, or gaining the endurance to do so, or simply learning to fail on hard routes, sport climbing has much to offer. It is one of the main reasons Tommy Caldwell has freed more routes on El Cap than anyone else and Alex Honnold has the fitness and skill to free solo big walls such as the Regular Route (5.12a) on Half Dome and the Moonlight Buttress (5.12d) in Zion.

Sport climbing may be entirely responsible for this rise in standards, but it is also immensely rewarding in and of itself. Yes, it’s culturally taboo to “chase grades,” but seeing yourself progress from 5.8 to 5.10 to 5.12 to 5.14 (why not?) is certainly gratifying. It takes a lot of work to go from 5.10a to 5.11a, and even more work to go from 5.12d to 5.13a, and it’s usually true that the more work you put into something, the more rewarding the process becomes. Making progress keeps our psyche high, and gives us the motivation to stay in shape and lead healthier lives.

Finally, always remember this: At some point, everyone struggles to succeed. Herein lies the social cement that binds climbers of all levels together and makes us one. Find true happiness in your friends’ successes, and they will reciprocate in yours.

And if you can balance your strong desire to improve with allowing climbing to exist as a fun way to relax and be happy, you will have succeeded in more important ways than any redpoint.