Ideal difficulty for skill-enhancing "projects"

Jon Frisby wrote:

I think one reason why people would have flatter pyramids higher up is that your work capacity gets really good over the years. people like megos can send many routes within 1-2 grades of his max in a week long trip, while most of us don't get enough burns in to pull that off. I also think the onsight/top send gap decreases as the grades increase because the better your technique gets, the less drastic your improvements between burn 1 and burn 4 are. I'm a really shitty onsighter, and my 4th burns look way different than 1st. I think this is less the case at the top end.  

I think that it's highly dependent on the climber, but mostly that the inverse is going to be true for most people. Flashing, sure, but onsighting definitely becomes limited at some point. I can think of a few people that have climbed 5.14 that have never onsighted a single 13. I think it's highly dependent on the rock you primarily climb though.

Let's take wild Iris (because we're familiar with that): I have on the same day failed to onsight the 5.10 warm-up and immediately onsighted a 5.12 right after (please excuse the spray). I was just coming off a shit load of granite climbing. the 10 was a roof with obvious huge moves, the 12 was vertical and cryptic as hell. This personal anecdote leads to the point I'm about to make which is:

Maybe you're "a bad onsight climber" because the sport routes you're climbing are highly nuanced and require learning individual moves to send, even if it's just the second burn. You mostly have climbed in the new, the gunks, rumney, and wild iris from when I've known you. None of those places are conducive to onsighting anywhere near your limit. I bed you'd onsight pretty darn hard after 3 weeks in the red River gorge or Indian creek. (Provided you could gain some endurance as opposed to just savage power brutality). I think a lot of it has to do with time on rock that is conducive to being read and personal style/interest. 

Onsighting has a lot to do with wanting to be good at onsighting, which is mostly not what people do when they start touching the upper levels of their current physical limit. Perhaps outliers like Megos can onsight really hard, but it's still probably closer to a number grade or more from his actual physical limit (that being a project where you're putting in upwards of 50 burns, which Megos doesn't do at this point as far as I hear). Plus no one spends as much time on rock as that guy.

That said I could totally see a flatter pyramid because of the time investment it takes to hit that top grade vs a letter below. For me right now it's the difference in one letter grade is like 4 sessions. Projecting at some point gets to be more arduous than it's worth.

Pavel Burov wrote:

I would say this approach lacks a very important step. It does not train intellect (especially decision making and long-time laser-like focus keeping under strong pressure) that hard as long hard routes projecting.

Basically to become a hardcore climber one should throw themselves into any kind of battle. To name a few - hard bouldering, hard projects, long hard multipitches, speed climbing (yes, I insist any climber should invest a decent amount of time to speed climbing training to get anywhere close to theirs so called "genetic limits"), etc, etc, etc.

Dude, this is the sport climbing forum. Your hardcore-ness either have nothing to do w/ sport climbing or aren't specific to climbing at all.

There are plenty of tactics in route climbing, but you either have somebody tell you or just watch what other people do. 

aikibujin wrote:

I don’t agree with this. While grades are very subjective, the difference in difficulty between adjacent grades does not get wider as the grade gets higher. 

So for you, if you were to chart grade vs difficulty, you would draw a straight line, such that the diff between a 5.6 and a 5.7 is the same as between a 11d and 12a as well as 13d to 14a?  I'm under the impression that the consensus would plot a widening difficulty gap as grades get higher.  YMMV....

snowdenroad wrote:

So for you, if you were to chart grade vs difficulty, you would draw a straight line, such that the diff between a 5.6 and a 5.7 is the same as between a 11d and 12a as well as 13d to 14a?  I'm under the impression that the consensus would plot a widening difficulty gap as grades get higher.  YMMV....

Ummmm, yes? Grade = difficulty. So if you plot grade vs. difficulty, then it should be a straight line.

What you're actually thinking is to plot grade vs. climbing ability.

Jon Frisby wrote:

people like megos can send many routes within 1-2 grades of his max in a week long trip, while most of us don't get enough burns in to pull that off.

People like Megos are pro climbers. It should be expected they'll have way more mileage under their belt, better endurance and work capacity than a talented amateur with similar ceiling simply because they get to train/climb a lot more (not that I know any amateur near Megos's level). Bascially, the bigger/less accessible objectives, the more you'll see the differences. But on local single pitches/boulder problems, you tend to see less known climbers sending/FAing pro level difficulty.

aikibujin wrote:

Ummmm, yes? Grade = difficulty. So if you plot grade vs. difficulty, then it should be a straight line.

What you're actually thinking is to plot grade vs. climbing ability.

well, aikibujin, Adam Ondra states in the 11/17 Rock and Ice, on page 35/36 "The gaps between certain grades, at least for the harder routes, are so large that it would be impossible to mistake a 9b+ from a 9a+."  This certainly implies the gaps, meaning difficulty, between grades on easier routes are not large.  Thus not a straight line.   

It is a straight line.

See it as lifting weight. Going from lifting, say, 100 pounds to 25 pounds is a 25 pounds gain (on whichever exercise for which this is a appropriate lift/pull/push). Then going from 200 to 25 pounds is also the same increase. It's just that going from 100 to 125 will be a lot faster & easier than 200 to 225. Maybe a simple adjustment in technic may do the trick from 100 to 125, and perhaps if on a good day you may not even notice mistaking the 125 wieghts for the 100 pounds one.... but not going to happen once you've been traning for that exercise all year and now lift twice as much.

Same for grades....

snowdenroad wrote:

well, aikibujin, Adam Ondra states in the 11/17 Rock and Ice, on page 35/36 "The gaps between certain grades, at least for the harder routes, are so large that it would be impossible to mistake a 9b+ from a 9a+."  This certainly implies the gaps, meaning difficulty, between grades on easier routes are not large.  Thus not a straight line.   

I'm a fan of Ondra, I think he's a great climber. I'm especially impressed by how he got to where he is today mostly by training himself. That said, Ondra is still human, I don't hold on to his every single word as some sort of gospel. In this case, it's the opinion of one climber and I don't think he's right. He's talking about grades that are close to his climbing limit, so of course he feels a huge gap between one grade to the next. I'm sure if you interview a 5.12 climber, they will tell you that it's impossible to mistake a 5.12a with a 5.12c. If you interview a 5.10 climber, they will tell you that it's impossible to mistake a 5.10a with a 5.10c.

Put it in another way, I personally think 5.8s and 5.9s are not all that different. But I can point you to some routes where people feel enough difference to give grades of 5.8+ or 5.9-. So obviously, some people feel that there is a large enough gap even on the easier grades to warrant the use of minuses and pluses.

Franck Vee wrote:

@aikibujin: Sounds great man - I hope mine may go in a year or so (next fall). The route is known for being though to link but not that hard (Predator in Rumney). May not go though, it's the first time I commit to such a longer-terme endeavour so we'll see. And yeah, muscle memory goes a long way. I assume a longer-term project gets lots of repeat anyways, to the point where you somewhat reach diminushing returns on those (since the initial question was about improving PE solely by working a given project). If you're going to increase PE, you need a number of attempts (be it handdog or full route)... therefore probably getting closer to the point where you don't learn so much more, but mostly improve physically. I guess there's a point (on a relatively easy project) were you would win out by training muscle memory and just giving it more attemps, assuming muscle memory will get you somewhere in redpoint land. Then on the other hand you have that tipping point where, after working that thing for say 30 attemps in total over a couple weeks/months, you may have been better off cutting on some of those trips & invest the time in specific training instead. But then I don't really know - I don't think I have ever made more than 7-8 attemps on the same route before. 

How’s your training going? Still keeping the psyche high for Predator? I’ve been slowly chipping away at SY while working on a couple of 5.12s at the same time (sent the 12a I was working on a couple of weeks ago). I normally put in one or two sessions on SY every week and made really good progress on it in the last couple of weeks. Last Friday I linked all the moves on the initial overhang for the first time, and got a high point just six moves shy of the anchor. The last six moves to the anchor are fairly dynamic, hard and desperate for me especially when pumped. So I’ve started doing one session of power endurance work a week on the woody in my garage to up my PE and train myself to climb through the pain. With the supplemental PE work, I have a real good feeling that SY will go down before the winter is over. I’m super psyched!

I guess I’m weird. My hardest redpoint is 5.13a, yet I feel the difference between 5.7 and 5.9 is greater than the difference between 5.12a with a V3/4 crux and 5.13a with a V6 crux. Currently projecting a couple .13b’s that seem like they’ll keep to that observation. Maybe it’s just a local phenomon as there are lots of sandbagged routes around here in the 5.8-5.10a range. Or maybe the grades start expanding above this. 

aikibujin wrote:

How’s your training going? Still keeping the psyche high for Predator? I’ve been slowly chipping away at SY while working on a couple of 5.12s at the same time (sent the 12a I was working on a couple of weeks ago). I normally put in one or two sessions on SY every week and made really good progress on it in the last couple of weeks. Last Friday I linked all the moves on the initial overhang for the first time, and got a high point just six moves shy of the anchor. The last six moves to the anchor are fairly dynamic, hard and desperate for me especially when pumped. So I’ve started doing one session of power endurance work a week on the woody in my garage to up my PE and train myself to climb through the pain. With the supplemental PE work, I have a real good feeling that SY will go down before the winter is over. I’m super psyched!

"Slowly" is the wrong word here. You're crushing that thing 

Jon Frisby wrote:

"Slowly" is the wrong word here. You're crushing that thing 

Ha, thanks! I don't know if "crushing" is the right word either, but I've been able to make some progress every time I get on it, so it's definitely keeping me motivated. I hope the interview on Friday went well!

aikibujin wrote:

How’s your training going? Still keeping the psyche high for Predator? I’ve been slowly chipping away at SY while working on a couple of 5.12s at the same time (sent the 12a I was working on a couple of weeks ago). I normally put in one or two sessions on SY every week and made really good progress on it in the last couple of weeks. Last Friday I linked all the moves on the initial overhang for the first time, and got a high point just six moves shy of the anchor. The last six moves to the anchor are fairly dynamic, hard and desperate for me especially when pumped. So I’ve started doing one session of power endurance work a week on the woody in my garage to up my PE and train myself to climb through the pain. With the supplemental PE work, I have a real good feeling that SY will go down before the winter is over. I’m super psyched!

Great man, good that you can climb outside year-round!

For my part, well temperature not so great theses days, and for 4 hours drive with very uncertain weather at this time of the year, I'm really going to just be investing my time in training these days, not so much actual climbing... Also the seasonal end of semester time crunch coming into effect. Maybe that's also a bit of excuses - I guess if I were to make the drive every week-end anyways, I would perhaps get half climbing weather?

Still really psyched though, and I do feel I'm getting a lot out of my training. If I can keep this pace up training-wise, I think I'll be in great shape comes spring & summer. Last summer was my best ever climbing-wise, I'm pretty sure I can beat that if I keep the training up. So climbing these days is mostly indoor bouldering. I'm getting to like this thing actually - it used to be just a training tool, and now it became a fun training tool. I like how you can really spend time focusing on specific moves, in a way that I find hard to do in a route. You also focus on moves you can't really do - while in a route, there may a crux you struggle with, but it's not as much about a specific hard move, most of the time. I also feel that since it's so much longer, you don't really get to spend as much time analysing each sequence. So I guess my time training is probably better spent than time driving for potentially not much climbing...

Franck Vee wrote:

For my part, well temperature not so great theses days, and for 4 hours drive with very uncertain weather at this time of the year, I'm really going to just be investing my time in training these days, not so much actual climbing... Also the seasonal end of semester time crunch coming into effect. Maybe that's also a bit of excuses - I guess if I were to make the drive every week-end anyways, I would perhaps get half climbing weather?

Keep your goal route in mind, that will keep the psyche high as you go through your winter training. Have you been doing any training on the bouldering wall that targets your PE, lockoff, pinch, or any of that weaknesses you mentioned before?