You may not be interested in a rock climbing history lesson; you may just think, “I just want to get better!” But the best part of the story is this: all the mistakes have been made before, not just once, but over and over again. So it makes sense to learn from what didn’t work and what worked for other climbers.
Climbers have always wanted to improve. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, John Gill was light years better than his contemporaries. However, Gill was a lonely visionary. This does not imply any disrespect; far from there But his methods did not reach a wider audience. He felt that gymnastic prowess could translate into dramatically improved rock climbing performance. In 1967 in Ireland, a 14-year-old boy (me!) pondered the same argument. Of course, he had never heard of Gill. People thought he was crazy; people thought he was crazy. (Perhaps we both were!) He trained in specific problems and journeys. I trained on specific problems and traversals on, of all places, the walls of a disused country house. It was off limits but within sight of my boarding school. If they had seen me, they would have expelled me. He added spice!
By the late 1960s and early 1970s the rock climbing standard had risen to 5.11 in the US and the then HXS (roughly E3) in the UK. Although climbers did some bouldering, they didn’t really train in the modern sense. But then came a breakthrough. In the UK, charismatic John Syrett went from beginner to terrifyingly good in about a year, climbing almost exclusively on a 13-foot-high wall at the University of Leeds, primitive by modern standards. Brick edges, polished grips, no matting, and a relentless landing. On the wall in Leeds, there was always the unsettling feeling that you could crack your head open. It was rumored that people had done it.
But it worked. John made the second ascent of the infamous ‘Wall of Horrors’ at Almscliffe. E3/5.11 sounds pretty tame, doesn’t it? Well, John did it with protection that we would now find ridiculous, and believe me, that wall was shrouded in reputation. He had waited 10 years for it to be repeated, and not for lack of suitors.
John was a climbing genius, sporadic but, at his best, a genius. His amazing progress was noticed by a guy named Pete Livesey, who wasn’t a climbing genius, but he was probably a genius at catching anything that worked. Pete had been a national-level athlete, running a mile in 4 minutes 1 second, tantalizingly just outside the magical barrier. He had been an elite whitewater canoeist and a top-notch caver. But he had always been held back from being the best by lack of natural ability. With rock climbing, he realized that the athletic curve was not that high; training (even without natural ability) could push him much higher.
Pete pushed hard – from E3 to E5, that is, 5.11 to 5.12. Doesn’t that sound awesome? Well, consider this: Pete could climb the British 6b with or without protection. For him, 5.12, 5.12 R and 5.12X were practically the same. Drink!
After Pete came his protégé, Ron Fawcett, and after him, Jerry Moffatt and Ben Moon. Jerry hit the ground running and got seriously injured from overtraining/inadequate training (a lesson for all of us). So did his partner, Andy Pollitt, who did the hardest climb at the time in Australia, ‘Punks in the Gym’, 5.14a. , after many (20?) days.
Probably the next big breakthrough was made by the underrated Mark Leach, with his 46-day siege of ‘Cry Freedom’, one of the first F8b+/5.14a routes in the UK. (Now believed to be F8c/5.14b.) Leach trained for his projects on them, much like Chris Sharma seems to do today. Interestingly, towards the end of his career, Leach came to the conclusion that he might be better (and more time efficient) to train for projects away from projects, typically on climbing walls/basements/boards. People started creating simulations of specific routes/crucial points and found it motivating to ride routes knowing that he had done much more difficult (but similar) moves in training. This ‘climb hard, train harder’ approach was taken to its logical extension by the late Wulfgang Gullich in the campus board moves he developed specifically for the first climb of ‘Action Direte’, the world’s first F9a, 5.14d.
That’s a brief (as brief as it sounds!) history of climbing improvement. You may not want to scale 5.14, or 5.13, or even 5.12. But the lessons are clear to all of us. Climbing training has pushed the limits from 5.10 to 5.15. Climbing training can be on-project or off-project, or, probably better, a combination. And, perhaps most importantly, it is essential not to injure yourself through improper training or overtraining. As Gullich said, “Anyone can get strong. The trick is to get strong and not get hurt.”
