Sport Climbing vs Bolt Clipping

For the last decade, I’ve worked as a writer in the climbing world. Of all the crazy stuff I’ve covered, hard sport climbing has gripped me most. Sport climbing is all about pushing limits and discovering the sheer faith needed to believe the impossible is possible after all, which, of course, is all entirely relative to the individual and how seriously she takes it.

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Sport Climbing is a set of crazy paradoxes and twisted universal truths. To wit: In many ways sport climbing the least serious subset of climbing, but it’s often the thing we take most seriously.

Wanting the redpoint more than anything else often drives you further from attaining it.

And we start out sport climbing as a way just to have fun and play around on the rock in a casual setting. But as we get better and take it more seriously we seem desperate to return to that fun, playful, child-like state—which is, strangely, when you climb your best.

I’ve realized that there are two very different approaches to what people generally refer to as “sport climbing.” Both are valid, but they’re so different that they almost need different names.

The first approach, probably the most common, is to just go to a beautiful crag with your friends and spend a casual day ticking off climbs in the sun. Maybe you’ll fall. Maybe you’ll play around on something above your hardest redpoint. Maybe you’ll even try to send a route or two that day.

This is all good fun, but this isn’t what I call sport climbing. This is bolt clipping.

The second approach involves reaching a point in your experience where you are capable of trying harder routes that get closer and closer to the limit of what you’ll ever be physically capable of doing. As you approach that limit, you find yourself zeroing in on just a handful of climbs, each one offering the elusive opportunity to take a single tiny, incremental step forward in your progression as a climber. It may take months, even years, to redpoint one climb. There’s training. Striving. Sacrificing. Fathomless frustration and defeat followed up by the occasional moment of elation.

This is what I call sport climbing.

AB_062510-164-3 The real difference between the two is that bolt clipping is a pastime that’s fun and even challenging but ultimately it’s incapable of taking you on any kind of greater emotional journey as a human being. Sport climbing, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of every meaningful struggle we’ll ever face in life. What sport climbing demands is that you embark on a huge journey, with a natural beginning and end, and find the strength and purpose needed to change, grow and learn.

This is why it’s so challenging to truly capture what makes sport climbing so rad. Inspiring photos or videos of strong-looking climbers clutching an overhanging slab of rock by infinitesimal points of skin and rubber do some justice to this climbing discipline, but in reality, most of the best parts of sport climbing take place within the mind.

We get to experience these things by pushing our own limits. Whatever those limits are is irrelevant to the archetypal experience. In other words, it doesn’t matter precisely how hard you climb, only that you take sport climbing seriously enough to approach and even occasionally get to touch your own personal limit.

We also get to ground these emotional hallucinations by reading about what the best climbers in the world have to go through in order to climb 5.15c. And guess what? They go through the same shit as us.

Most think sport climbing is all about biceps and gains in finger strength, and while that’s true up to a point, it’s has never been the reason anyone has ever crossed the finish line on a meaningful (hard) redpoint. It always comes down to nakedly facing the things about your nature that hold you back and finding the means needed to temporarily overcome them. Yes, learn the moves, get strong enough to do them, become fit enough to link them. But then, the real challenge, the real reason to be a sport climber, is to go through the painstaking process of untying all your debilitating mental knots.

But when you do cross that line, you feel true freedom that comes from understanding there is no such thing as impossible. The route that once felt hard, now on the redpoint feels uncannily easy. In that moment, your limits expand and explode further away from you. And what choice do you now have but to continue chasing that elusive periphery?

About The Author

Andrew Bisharat

Andrew Bisharat is a writer and climber based in western Colorado. He is the publisher of Evening Sends and the co-host of The RunOut podcast.

Free Climb. Free Thought.

Join the climbing discourse.

Comments

24 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Great thought process. I think I have both at different times. Depending on who I’m climbing with. But when alone with my thoughts, I’m sport climbing!

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  2. Bradley Carter

    Truth.

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  3. Avatar

    Great Post, true Story! You can conclude that when people are toproping they aren’t even climbing because they aren’t Sport climbing neither boltcliping! 🙂

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  4. Avatar

    This post disparages all others who partake in the sport for any reason other than your very narrow definition of “sport climbing”. If someone climbs for fun, or for the very visceral connection to earth you can find in the sport, then they are not going on a journey? I find that sometimes some of my friends come out more enlightened, stronger, from climbing chill shit than I do when I am obsessing over my one villainous climb. Because one can get so focused on that one damned 4×4 square inch piece of rock that you forget that you are already doing something marvelous by being out there; by having this sport in your life that takes you away from the city lights and city smoke, away from your LCD screen where you leave fingerprints in the dirt instead of the keyboard, and you never need to text because all your friends are already there around the campfire passing around one can of beans. Instead of dividing climbers into groups and labeling them and therefore suggesting some sort of hierarchy, can’t we all just love the sport together, stop obsessing over numbers and muscles and just climb shit?

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    • Avatar

      Spot on. Andrew, the article is called X vs Y. You proclaim X as the winner. I have a hard time seeing it as not putting down Y.
      But again, you are free to post what you want, if you make it public we have a right to comment and you have a right to disagree. But let’s call a spade a spade, hun?

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      • Avatar

        Sorry, what’s X? What’s Y? Sport climbing vs. Trad? You are free to call a spade a spade, but the problem with your comment is that you are imagining what the spade is and projecting into something where it doesn’t actually exist … I’m sorry this conversation is above your capacity to understand and reason, but you’re just making a fool of yourself by posting rebuttals to things that aren’t actually even there. I’d love to see a single line written in which you think I am putting something down by writing this article.

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        • Avatar

          I couldn’t you tell that X was sport climbing and Y was what you call bolt clipping?

          “This is all good fun, but this isn’t what I call sport climbing. This is bolt clipping.”

          “bolt clipping is a pastime that’s fun and even challenging but
          ultimately it’s incapable of taking you on any kind of greater emotional
          journey as a human being.”

          You are considering sport climbing as the way to go. Have you thought that the self-realisation you are talking about can happen also in other ways in one’s life? It doesn’t have to be the absolute struggle you are mentioning, which is good for certain things but unrepresentative of so many other ones?

          Not sure it’s for you to say what Adam Ondra will remember in 20 years, but he has stated that onsighting the Golden Ticket had been an objective of his for many years. And he did it on the same day as Pure Imagination, so I doubt he’ll forget about it.
          And look at what he seems to think about extreme redpoints:
          “The mental fight, the loss of confidence, the frustration – this all
          kind of disappears from memory as time passes by. In the end, if there
          wasn’t the movie (Editor’s note:”The Wizard’s Apprentice”, a documentary released in early 2012 documenting Adam’s struggle on Golpe de Estado),
          I wouldn’t even remember how hard the process of sending Golpe was.
          Success quickly erases bad memories. And when you get to a next
          challenge, it all starts from the beginning and you rarely learn from
          it.”

          My point is that many pursuits, challenges and activities can teach you many values of life. Redpointing is not the only way to be on that journey you mention, not even within climbing.

          Also, well done on insults such as “I’m sorry this conversation is above your capacity to understand and reason”, if this is your general attitude towards discussion I find it embarassing that you are the editor or Rock&Ice…

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          • Avatar

            OK, fair enough. It’s clear that this is your opinion and I welcome it on my blog. Thank you for sharing your point of view and for entertaining mine.

          • Avatar

            We got chippy there didn’t we? Still, this is the crux of what I’d love to learn – how to take Sport Climbing seriously without being a condescending prick. Andrew, I think it’s your place (or you’re in the right place… see it as a responsibility or opportunity) to figure that one out and share it with us. Your response to a less than articulate, yet spot on, critique should make that study all the more relevant. Now I feel like I have to compliment and tell you how much I love reading your posts. This honestly does make my life richer. Seriously, figure this one out for us, okay? It’s likely a long term project with a lot of failure involved, but you could get this one eventually. Damn! Now I feel like I have to complement you again. Basically, I need a response back on this but want something more serious than another paragraph in this chat. Preferably we get a long and well thought out post with lots of supporting research and anecdotal experiences from more than just your life. Please. Surely you take requests. Thanks in advance from all of us who need this.

        • Avatar

          It’s pretty clear that Franz meant that X is by your definition “sport climbing” and Y is “bolt clipping” Personally I did get the sense from the article that the term bolt clipping is a diminutive term, and I think most of the detractors were just pointing this out. Kind of like saying to someone who goes out for the occasional recreational round of golf “you aren’t golfing, you are just a club swinger”

          I also found your responses to these comments as very defensive and insulting.

          You stated “Not everything needs to affirm itself by putting something else down; it can just stand alone.” Whether you intended it or not, that is exactly how the article can be read: Affirming redpoint climbing as real “sport climbing” and putting down recreational climbing by calling it “bolt-clipping”

          Reply
          • Avatar

            approave

            Subject: Re: New comment posted on Sport Climbing vs Bolt Clipping

          • Avatar

            This is a good critique. Thanks.

  5. Avatar

    This is an interesting article, I have a few questions; Is ticking off climbs is different to sending? I would define a send as a clean lead of a route I wouldn’t tick off a climb unless I lead it clean, so in my mind ticking off routes requires sending. It seems like your define sport climbing as only redpointing? Therefore what would you define Ondra and Megos’ 9a+ onsights? Bolt clipping? I find a hard onsight, fighting to the end very mentally rewarding and the feeling of climbing through a difficult sequence making quick descsions and relying on instinct is pretty amazing, addmitedly it is different to the mental state of flowing through a totally wired sequence. To me sport climbing only describes the style of route as it is totally possible to redpoint a trad route in the same way you described above and that cannot be sport climbing.

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    • Avatar

      No, ticking off climbs and sending are both synonymous in normal parlance. In this article, when I use the term “sport climbing,” what I really mean is long-term projecting until you eventually repdoint a route. Onsighting doesn’t have that same long-term opportunity to grow and learn as a person. You either onsight a route, or you don’t. End of story. No big deal. (That said, the process of improving your onsighting capabilities could offer the type of emotional growth/journey that longer-term redpointing does). … And yes, of course, these insights are true no matter what your chosen discipline, whether that is sport climbing, trad climbing, or golf. The point is to find something you’re passionate about, that must also be very very very challenging physically and mentally, and stick with it until you complete it successfully. Then still having the fire and passion to go and do it all over again.

      The thing is, most people don’t redpoint trad climbs…but, technically speaking, the type of gear involved in the dogged pursuit is completely irrelevant in terms of what it offers emotionally and spiritually.

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      • Avatar

        Nicely written. No disagreement implied here, just to emphasize, that the joy of it – the emotional uplift and enlargement of the spirit trumps all. And did you get Ralph Steadman to do the heading;) cheers

        Reply
  6. Avatar

    Hard trad climbing is the essence of our sport, period. Sport climbing is at its best, good training for trad leads.

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  7. Avatar

    Right. And hard trad climbing (5.10+ etc.) is good training for mountaineering. And mountaineering is good training for alpinism. And alpinism is good training for spiritual salvation.

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    • Avatar

      Hard trad climbing is a singular pursuit separate from mountaineering and alpinism.

      Reply
  8. Avatar

    By your logic, Ondra’s visit to the RRG and Megos’ exploits in Siurana last March are bolt clipping. Makes sense. And comp climbers are all “spiritually and emotioanlly underdeveloped”, they don’t redpoint shit.
    Can we just stop this attitude of “I tell you what to do, you can’t just do what you want”? Whether it’s within one discipline or between different ones, it’s bullshit all the same.

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    • Avatar

      I wonder if this article is above your reading capacity? It seems to me that you’re not comprehending what is being written and projecting your own biases into what I wrote in order to affirm your own opinions. I suggest you sit down, take a deep breath and try to re-read this article as many times as it takes in order to open your mind to the possibility that I am simply writing about how working hard to achieve something often results in a greater learning and growing experience. I guarantee you that Ondra won’t remember and won’t give a shit about Pure Imagination in 20 years, but he’ll sure as hell remember the painful process of working on Dura Dura.

      Reply
      • Avatar

        Thank you for your great prose! I told a person around a campfire the other night that the most important aspect in Climbing is failure. He didn’t quite understand me and neither did anyone else around the campfire. They all looked at me like I was an idiot and rebutted me in the same way these other people have responded to your thoughts. And to me that is what separates the “Long-Term Projector” from the “Fun of it all, get away from life, care free, lets clip some bolts mentality.” How much can one really know about themselves if they have never been in a fight (and in relation to this comment – That fight is an on going war.) I’ve started taking the mentality that I’ve gained from “long-term projecting” and internalized that growth in to all aspects of my life. I’ve started looking beyond the now and at 1yr and 5yr goals for me in LIFE, not just climbing. What am I truly capable of, I re-enrolled in college after dropping out 10 years ago. “Long-term Projecting” gave me that belief in myself to struggle and doubt and suffer but know that I can and will overcome. I appreciate your articles Andrew. They always find me as a breath of fresh air.

        Reply
      • Avatar

        I wonder if your ego is below the capacity of discussing without insulting people? Because it seems like it, from the fact that you dissed my CIVILISED critiques by insinuating that I am mentally deficient…

        Reply
  9. Avatar

    Good post. Your definition of Sport Climbing is the essence of what I’ve loved most about the sport. Painstakingly pushing my own limit on rock has contributed more than anything to the grit and concentration I have to stuff like work, my beliefs, and relationships… to life in general. The flip side of this however is that I tend to be the ass hole that takes climbing (and life) too seriously. My friends respect and, for the most part, like me, but also kind of get sick of being around me. My wife has it hardest, actually living with me. I sometimes wonder if I just haven’t found the right people to hang out with; that this more intense strain of comrade is somehow elusively there trying harder than everyone else in their particular sphere. Probably I just haven’t figured out how to try hard and yet not be a dick. I’d love to read you wax philosophical on that one.

    Reply

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