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jstan
climber
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Mar 26, 2009 - 08:57pm PT
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I allowed as how people are getting better. There are many reasons, one of which is the following. As climbing gets wider visibility (something I regret) you begin to involve a larger portion of the gene pool.
So what? Some years ago one of Phelps' competitors remarked, "Nice flippers!" when he came into the pool area. You begin to draw on a larger pool of people and you begin to pull in more of those who have inherent advantages.
Go ahead. Tell me Lance Armstrong is not a genetic freak.
As this process goes on and on any one individual has to ask what it is that is really important. Are you the best in the world? Or do you simply find the activity wonderfully rewarding?
Really easy question to answer.
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GDavis
Trad climber
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Mar 26, 2009 - 09:05pm PT
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No doubt about Phelps and Armstrong being genetic freaks... phelps looks like a g-dang tiger shark.
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Curt
Boulder climber
Gilbert, AZ
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Mar 26, 2009 - 09:26pm PT
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Stannard's point should be obvious and goes back to the discussions of the 80s, when sport climbing came of age. Certainly the grade numbers increased with the advent of sport techniques, but that was only because harder grades became easier--it was the dumbing down of climbing. Advances in difficulty would certainly have happened anyway, but in no way would the progression been so rapid and the higher grades would not have become available to such a large pool of climbers.
As far as the difficulty of individual climbing moves goes, I doubt much advancement (if any) has occurred over the last 30 years. Single moves done by Jim Holloway on his unrepeated boulder problems of the 70s are still, well, unrepeated. The best support that I can think of for this opinion is that most modern boulder problems at the upper end of the "V" scale today are quite long, endurance related routes.
Curt
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Porkchop_express
Trad climber
the base of the Shawangunk Ridge
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Mar 26, 2009 - 10:06pm PT
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The whole rating thing always rings somewhat hollow for me after being on 5.10s out west that were tough but doable and being on 5.8s in the Gunks that made me so frustrated that I almost questioned why I bothered climbing in the first place.
As far as the super high end stuff, I have never come close to that so I can't say. But I do think that if the 5.14s of today were boiled down to the grades at "traditional/sandbagged" areas there would be a lot lower "ceiling" so to speak.
I kind of like the B grading system because it takes into account the inherent subjectivity of ratings. A more effective scale would be one that had a set bottom and top, with more downrating to reflect consensus and advances. Otherwise the top end of the spectrum is something that even in theory is inaccessible to all but the elite athletes.
In track, you can be a three hundred pound couch potato and still recognize the world record for the 100m. The measurement is something that is universal.
Now i'm confused but it all sort of made sense to me at the time.
One last thing before i shut up, i really think that boldness ought to factor into the ratings. I like the point GDavis raised about southern belle. Makes sense to me.
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MH2
climber
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Mar 26, 2009 - 10:51pm PT
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The math talent is out of the house just now, but Ed will be able to tell me if it makes sense to ask; Can you have an upper bound with no least upper bound? I thought I saw language upthread to that effect. There could be an endless progression of harder and harder climbs which never got harder than some limit.
A pretty theoretical issue.
I last got into such a discussion when a contributor to Sqaumishclimbing.com called grades purely subjective.
I argued that grades can have objective reality and gave examples.
Grades have all kinds of problems but there is a kernel of truth in them.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 27, 2009 - 01:36am PT
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There are two different discussions going on here. One relates to how we quantify the difficulty of a climb. I think that is interesting but it was not my main point. I used the ratings as a point of reference because, whatever the system of rating, some climbs are harder than others. I don't think there is any debate about that.
The other discussion is the one I think I was wondering about five years ago, that is, are there limits to what can actually be accomplished in climbing. This is always a terribly polarizing question, there are those who say there are limits, and there are those who say it is limitless. Because we are asking about something in the absolute future no one can be right.
Limits are something no one likes to think about. But there is another way to pursue this line of questioning which James suggested. Let me twist his argument around a bit. What I could have asked was this:
How much training can you tolerate?
Training is very hard on your body, you challenge the various pieces and then you rest to recruit tissue growth and regeneration. Done properly, this builds your capabilities for a particular sport. I think training techniques are not unknown to climbers. How well you can tolerate training has to do with the type of body you have as well as your motivation and other important factors like nutrition and getting rest.
Having a great body means a body that is suited to the physical insults of climbing. There is a large variation among climbers. Lately I've been training on offwidth, and my body's physical limitations determine how much I can train, and set my progress. Right now I've been down for a week and a half with an inflamed lumbar disk. That means little training of any type, until the disk gets right. In general terms I am loosing conditioning, not just for offwidth but for all climbing.
When I'm well I find that if I don't get a proper amount of rest that I will also "loose ground" in my training. Usually when I'm working out I need at least 7.5 hours of sleep, training hard means at least 8 hours. My usual non-training mode is 5-6 hours. My habits for working are to do it late at night, but my job has me at some time in the morning. What happens is I work out and then get little rest. This is a loosing proposition.
Finally, while I don't have a problem getting food, there are climbers who don't have the means to acquire sufficient nutrition to get a training benefit. You can't workout and not eat, at least not for very long. Your body "eats itself" and basically reduces caloric need, countering any training benefit.
I could blame all this on my mental attitude and commitment to climbing. It represents an avocation in my life, not a vocation, and takes on a secondary importance.
Now this is pretty much true for all climbers, actually probably all athletes. At some point you reach a limit to what you can tolerate in training. It could be that you break your body in some significant manner. You might not be able to arrange enough training time to survive. You might get bored. You might loose interest.
These are real limits, basically sampling the human population that is available to climb.
Maybe James is correct and we haven't seen the truly talented athletes take up climbing. If climbers could get a $10 million/year contract to climb perhaps that would motivate a real advance in the sport, breakthroughs in technique and equipment and training.
But there is not just a motivation aspect, but the very real physical aspect, the physical limitations of the human in the environment.
Limits?
The last hitter to hit a season average above .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. There are only 35 hitters in the history of baseball who have. There is an obvious motivation to be the best hitter you can be.... there's a lot of money in it. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs, his last in 1929, Hank Aaron hit his 755th in 1968 and Barry Bonds his 762nd in 2001. Ruth was obviously talented and lucky to live when he did. But there is little doubt that there are real limits here. Will anyone ever hit 800 or 900 or 1000 home runs? Will anyone every hit for a season average .500?
My attempts to look at the possible limits for climbing has been posted before. Let's say that there is some distribution of the ability to climb at the harder grades. The number of people who are limited to climb at the very lowest grades is small, as is the number of people who can climb at the vary harder grades. Somewhere in the middle are the largest number of people. I'm going to assume that this describes everyone.
So if I pick a person at random, most likely I'm going to pick someone in the middle and less likely to pick someone at either end of the scale. So at the beginning of the sport you pick the easy lines up the cliffs, almost everyone can do these. As you pick more difficult lines, fewer and fewer people can do them. Finally, as you pick the very hardest lines, only a relatively few people could actually climb these.
So the rate of increase of difficulty starts out very high, but eventually the rate of increase of difficulty starts to decrease, there just aren't the people around to do the climbs, for what ever reason. That is the classic "logistics curve" which looks exponential at the early times of easy route development, but starts to limit at the hardest grades.
I did one for Yosemite Valley because it has some many routes over so many years that you can actually do the analysis. Here it is:
Now if you look at "2009" on the vertical axis and follow it across you get to something like 5.16b/c around now for the "yellow" curve. If there were no limits, we'd expect climbs greater than 5.17c would have been done 10 years ago.
The limit seems to be around 5.17d by this analysis and this would be reached around 2040 or 2050.
So that is my prediction, I put it on the table. I'd be willing to make a wager for an appropriate celebratory prize that I'm right.
I might even live that long.
But I'm not saying you couldn't climb harder. I'm just saying you (or anyone else) couldn't sustain the physical and mental effort to push beyond that.
How could I be wrong? well the rate of population growth is increasing the number of people, which means that there might be more of those way-out-on-the-tails type people. On the other hand, baseball hasn't seen this effect even though the number of people available to play baseball now is much larger than say when the Babe played. So the limits seem real. We are cursed with our physical form.
ANYONE WANT TO TAKE THE BET?
What's the ante?
You have to come up with an analysis of your own prediction that can be tested against the yearly "hardest rating" in climbing. Talk is cheap... let's see the reasoning.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Mar 27, 2009 - 02:40am PT
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Ed,
My main disagreement with you concerns our limits to measure absolute, rather than relative difficulty. The YDS was, originally, an ordering system, not strictly a measuring one. Put slightly differently, most of us find one climb more or less difficult than another (in other words, we can order their difficulty), but we have much greater difficulty measuring that difference. Is the left side of Moby Dick 1 time, 10 times, 100 times harder than Church Bowl Chimney? I don't think we have any way to measure that.
This problem particularly shows in the arbitrariness of subdivisions of YDS classifications. Your graph would have predictive power only if there were some relationship between grades that could be defined in some sort of linear transformation. Your graph assumes such a relationship, but I know of no measurement that fits.
The reason I used swimming and track and field examples in my earlier post was that we have well-defined measurements for achievement in these sports. Even though no one has done a 9.50 hundred meters, we know what it would be. What is 5.16 or 5.17? All we know for sure is that it's harder than 5.15. If you tell me free climbing's limit is 5.16, I have no idea where, in real life, that limit lies, because I have no climb against which to measure 5.16.
You've started a great discussion, and I see all sorts of interesting mathematical and measuring issues. Unfortuantely, I don't see their resolution yet. Thanks for a good start, though.
John
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 27, 2009 - 02:52am PT
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The way I see it, my limit analysis is on track to predicting the limit... based on the assumptions that you think are incorrect. So I could be lucky, or I could be right.
I'd say that we do have a good idea of what those climbs would be, and that the grading system is a good approximation to a linear system. And if you make those assumptions, the current difficulty is close to what you'd expect. While we know what the measurement of a track time would be for a much faster time, we don't know how an athlete would go about preparing to make that time. It isn't doing more of what they do now.
Now I'd like to see your analysis, John... or perhaps you'd just like to say that it's not possible and no one can do it.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Mar 27, 2009 - 07:52am PT
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Insomnia has its virtues -- I got a chance to read your reply, Ed. I don't have the data to perform these analyses, but let me suggest them, since you might. What would your graph look like if we used the British, French, Australian, the "V" bouldering ratings, or some other rating system, rather than the YDS? If it continues to be asymptotic, that would tend to confirm your position and undermine mine.
I'm not questioning the existence of limits; I'm really questioning whether the YDS can serve as their measure.
Thanks again, though, for your good work here.
John
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MH2
climber
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Mar 27, 2009 - 01:00pm PT
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Wow! So, like whether the Universe is open, closed, or flat?
Or is the question re-cast as what constitutes optimal training?
Gymnastics is my own prefered reference point. If climbers trained intensively from an early age with excellent coaching, then what?
Too many conjectures needed. Soon genetic testing may allow "optimal training" to be tailored to the individual. Many unknowns will probably remain, though.
Climbing just doesn't lend itself to analysis of high-end performance. Too many variables.
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jstan
climber
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Mar 27, 2009 - 01:38pm PT
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In the recent past i have heard the numbers 5.14 and 5.15 bandied about. A point at (5.14,2008) falls above both the yellow and red curves. Have we got a cosmological acceleration here also? Perception versus reality?
In my middle thirties it was a constant battle to avoid tendonitus. The day after I decided, "OK. That's enough" I felt immensely free. I could have tendonitus now! Felt good.
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drc
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Mar 27, 2009 - 07:04pm PT
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bump for hyperintellectual analysis
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aldude
climber
Monument Manor
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Mar 27, 2009 - 11:13pm PT
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The X factor here is genetic engineering as well as theoretical advancement in mind control/utilization ie. telepathy,levitation and matter transformation. Will we evolve and mutate at a set rate or experience a quantum leap in the near future ???
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 27, 2009 - 11:51pm PT
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ugh, the thread got spammed... oh well, maybe I'll take it down...
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Mar 28, 2009 - 12:38am PT
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No need to worry. I expect the local computer wizards can think of some suitable retaliation. In addition to ratting her out to CMac and getting her current address banned, that is.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Mar 28, 2009 - 01:21am PT
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I think you have to consider the "Yosemite Granite Sandbag Factor"
For example, the free Nose was rated 13b ma (My ass) and nobody could repeat it for years, despite the high prestige for anyone who could. 5.14+ climbers failed.
It finally gets a repeat and is upgraded to 14a, but is still hardly repeated?
Any repeats on Yosemite's hardest single pitch (is it Magic Line?)
So who says it's really only 14b if the hardest pitch in one of the worlds most famous areas never even gets attempted since it's so hard?
It's just a bunch of habitual sandbaggers and the sand is so thick that the sandbagging is expected.
Also, who is to say if there is an equal distance of difficulty between the ratings? I think it's clear that it's not really a big stretch for even the worst gumby to go from 5.4 to 5.6. 5.7 to 5.9 is a bigger stretch but not too bad. 5.9 to 5.11 is a big jump but NOTHING like the run between 5.11 to 5.13. 5.13 to 5.15 is another ball game. Why think it's linear just cause numbers are used?
Peace
Karl
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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Mar 28, 2009 - 12:47pm PT
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I don't think sand bagging is always intentional. To me it sometimes comes across as an act of humility. I.e. I couldn't be the first person to climb 5.12, therefore I rate this route as 5.11, and so forth. And of course that completely throws off the scale to figure out exactly when limits got pushed.
I have no doubt limits will continue to rise, both from advances in training and techniques, as well as technology.
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MH2
climber
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Mar 30, 2009 - 03:18am PT
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A Yosemite 5.17C? I bet that it will not happen within any forseeable future.
I would much prefer to see an objective measure of difficulty based on the number of onsights a climb has seen.
A slightly different look at questions that have been asked, from a discussion in May 2008 on Squamishclimbing.com
While I'm at it though, I wonder where you get the idea that the interval between grades should be the same. In the early early days I was told that the scale was exponential: roughly, 5.6 should be twice as hard as 5.4, 5.8 should be twice as hard as 5.6, etc. This is the way perception usually works, when they sit down people and ask them to make judgements about increase in light intensity or sound level.
At the time they told me that I thought I understood what was meant by 'twice as hard' because I had an intuitive notion of it. Lifting 200 lbs should be twice as hard as 100 lbs. Climbing was more complicated, of course, but I didn't see anything wrong with the idea going from 5.2 to 5.10.
I was also told that 5.10 was the hardest climb anyone could do and you can see how well that idea has stood up.
Much later I figured things out for myself, sort of. At school I studied physiology and one of my professors once said, "I don't get excited unless there is a factor of 10 involved." That put things in better perspective. When it comes to sports there isn't anyone who can run 10 times as fast or lift 10 times as much as a fit average person. In fact, in sports where measurement is simple, like a time or a weight, it is hard to find more than a factor of 2 separating a dedicated amateur from the world's best.
If climbing is at all like other sports, then in some sense the hardest climbs may only be twice as hard as a climb of average difficulty, say 5.10a
So where do we get all the spread between 5.10a and 5.15x? From the ability people have to detect differences, small but significant differences.
Which is my small and only point.
Whether we call those differences 11c/11d, 23/24, 7a/7b, E6/E7 is a geographical lottery and whether you agree with other people on them is a genetic lottery (they aren't usually assigned by people well over 6' or under 5').
Nevertheless they exist.
*
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Mar 30, 2009 - 04:39am PT
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The ratings won't be just 5.15, 5.16, etc.
The ratings war will be fought at the Grade VI level.
The onsight free ascent of El Cap is only days away.
As an old man, I can only hope that my hands can still place C1 gear in any El Cap cracks I choose to go up.
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MH2
climber
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Mar 30, 2009 - 04:52pm PT
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The ratings won't be just 5.15, 5.16, etc.
The ratings war will be fought at the Grade VI level.
An apt observation.
As part of my own thinking on the overly simple 'factor of 2' separting the elite from the hardworking amateur, I considered the marathon. Plenty of my friends could run a marathon in less than twice the world record, but if I and 25 of the fastest people I know ran mile relays, a world class marathoner would still beat us running the full 26 miles by themself.
I'm guessing a Yosemite 5.17 might arrive before someone with a full-time conventional job, and wife and kids, onsights El Cap.
Howwwwever...maybe that is just mental baggage. Kids just don't seem to realize what they can't do.
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