Climbing equivalent of running a marathon?

what do y'all think the climbing equivalent of completing a marathon, let's say in under 5 hours, would be? as in same level of effort/training required for the average person.

Climbing RNWF Half Dome or Lurking Fear.

Climbing 5.4.  Running is very very easy.  Climbing is very very hard

It’s impossible to compare a skill based activity with a pure endurance activity.

Climbing is about movement and efficiency. Strength and endurance are definitely important but the need for each is dramatically different depending upon your movement skills.

Running is not learned, it’s just running. You can make the argument that movement skill is important for faster runners, and it is, but not for the 5 hour marathon. That’s just a matter of getting out often enough that you don’t succumb to fatigue.

But I’ll try to play along. Most able bodied people can run 5 hours or under with approximately 5 hours of running a week. 2 shorter (1 hour or less) and one longer one, building up to 18-20 miles. (The 5 hour figure will start shorter and end up a bit longer depending upon which week you are in this super generic plan.) It’ll take 2-3 months depending on your background, but for this I’m assuming a very very minimal background. Just basic fitness.

What does 5 hours a week get a beginner in terms of climbing? Very little. That’s one quick sesh at the gym and half a day on a nearby crag. Following that protocol, the beginner should be able to lead easy 10 pretty consistently. Or switch it up to trad,  instead of time at the gym and sport, and you should have someone who can get up basic 5.9 multi pitch routes.

It’s not the same physical effort but at least that’s an equivalent amount of time.

highaltitudeflatulentexpulsionwrote:

Following that protocol, the beginner should be able to lead easy 10 pretty consistently. Or switch it up to trad,  instead of time at the gym and sport, and you should have someone who can get up basic 5.9 multi pitch routes.

As someone who is pretty bad at both running and climbing, this is exactly what I was going to say. For me, a 5 hour marathon would be the same as leading (redpointing, but not necessarily onsighting) easy 10 sport. Note, I bailed out of my full marathon training plan at the 18 mile long day because I still had like 5 more weeks of training before the event, and I was just over it... It wasn't that I couldn't but just that I stopped caring and 5 hours was my target time.

I think that raw athleticism would also correlate highly where a person who goes out and does a 4 hour marathon (9 minute miles vs 11 minute miles) after a "couch to 5k to marathon" style training program, might also be the same sort of athlete who might be flirting with hard 10 easy 11 with the same level of effort.

I will say, most "couch to <whatever>" training programs are pretty quick in terms of weeks/months and I think the climbing progression would take longer calendar time, but would likely involve the same actual amount of training time (and that's even ignoring that much of your time "climbing", isn't actually climbing but belaying, playing with gear, and approaching)

It's hard to compare. 

I've run one marathon, but I run 10-13 miles on a fairly regular basis. I did my marathon in 4.5-ish hours. By the end, my knees hurt, my feet hurt, my abs hurt, my shoulders hurt, my GI was messed up, and I was losing the ability to regulate my emotions. Afterwards, it took several days of recovery to feel normal.

Is there a climbing equivalent? Roped climbing usually has briefer periods of intense effort separated by rests, while the challenge of a marathon comes from unrelenting effort over several hours. But maybe climbing four or five long, physical offwidth pitches with marginal gear, near your limit, would approximate the physical and emotional commitment? But in running you're never in any danger (unless your heart explodes), so it's not really the same.

The physical recovery felt similar to a long car-to-car day in the mountains, like the Hulk, or a punishing big Valley route like Steck-Salathe. But obviously those take much more time than a marathon to exact a similar physical cost.

I run ultras and climb big walls. Let me say climbing a big wall is way harder than running 50K! Way, way harder!

50K- sure there’s training. A few hours a day for 3-4 days a week. I climb that much easily during the season. The actual race is @7 hours for me- I’m slow, don’t judge. And all you have to carry is … water. Like 1 liter!

Big Wall- you train to be sure. But then the climb- hike in with 50#, and do it again, and again until you have your load at the base. You work and climb maybe 12 hours a day. Etc etc. This goes on non-stop for a week or more. 

After a big wall, running a marathon seems rather easy

M Awrote:

Climbing RNWF Half Dome or Lurking Fear.

Not even close. Have run boston and rnwf kicked my butt twice as hard. Maybe astroman or doing the hulk c2c

Charles Winsteadwrote:

I run ultras and climb big walls. Let me say climbing a big wall is way harder than running 50K! Way, way harder!

50K- sure there’s training. A few hours a day for 3-4 days a week. I climb that much easily during the season. The actual race is @7 hours for me- I’m slow, don’t judge. And all you have to carry is … water. Like 1 liter!

Big Wall- you train to be sure. But then the climb- hike in with 50#, and do it again, and again until you have your load at the base. You work and climb maybe 12 hours a day. Etc etc. This goes on non-stop for a week or more. 

After a big wall, running a marathon seems rather easy

Liter of water and 40 gu shots, run the pdl and really go for it 

Edit: I would say that a climb that you can completed in 5 hours will feel like a marathon ran in 5 hours? Idk iv never ran a marathon and wanted to go run more but have topped out many of the mentioned climbs and gone bouldering after 

My background is competitive running, currently mostly a climber. As others have pointed out above, climbing and running tend to be very challenging to compare...however, there is a slice of stupidity where we cut out the stopped parts of climbing (i.e. belaying), and the overlap is actually pretty minimal and comparisons are easier. Speed climbing the Naked Edge is probably a similar effort to a trail 5k or 10k (22 - 30 minutes of redline aerobic effort), and the corollary to a marathon is probably something like speed climbing the Diamond (current car-to-car record on the Casual Route being 3:09 by John Alcorn this summer). However, these are ultimately less "climbing" objectives as we would commonly consider them. For comparison to a traditional style ascent, maybe our marathons need to have a break every mile or so to just sit on the ground and have a snack.

Final thought, and to partially address my Front Range bias in the examples above, but the Triple (or Quad) in the Valley seems like a complimentary effort to an ultramarathon...more climbing involved, and more suffering.

Charles Winsteadwrote:

50K- sure there’s training. A few hours a day for 3-4 days a week. I climb that much easily during the season. The actual race is @7 hours for me- I’m slow, don’t judge. 

It can’t be overstated how big of a difference it is between “running” and “racing”. Sure shuffling along at 14:00 miles is mostly about blister management and stubbornness. But if you’re really trying to peg it for a fast time, running hours at at time without stopping or walking, sitting high tempo/sub threshold the entire time? It’s *brutal* in ways that are hard to describe.

And no, I don’t think there’s any meaningful correlation between climbing and running races. Any races for that matter. 

Mark Vigilwrote:

Climbing 5.4.  Running is very very easy.  Climbing is very very hard

5 hour marathon is a long, very brisk walk. But it takes time, is painful, and not everyone can do it. So maybe a climb like the E face of the Third Flatiron?

What about mountaineering---moving continuously up a steep snow/ ice slope, especially at altitude ( Rainer, Denali), might be relatively equivalent.

I think climbing your first of the grade and not telling anyone about it could be close

If you're fat like me then it's all hard. 

Alan Rubinwrote:

What about mountaineering---moving continuously up a steep snow/ ice slope, especially at altitude ( Rainer, Denali), might be relatively equivalent.

Don’t know about Rainier, but the percentage of the population who could summit Denali (conditions permitting) is far lower than those who could complete a slow marathon imo.

There are just so many variables that it’s tough to compare the two. I know a really fit dude who gets destroyed by altitude. Some people struggle with exposure, some are just awful at manipulating gear. If the only criteria is time spent training, HAFE’s breakdown above is as good as any. 

I’ve ran several marathons.

I’ve also climbed hard trad and sport.

I did a little high altitude hill walking

The big walls I’ve done were more of a free becoming French free style, rather than full on walls, so that’s a gap in my understanding.

There’s a ton of different ways to look at this.

1. The easiest way is to look at it as a percentage of the participants. What percentage of runners have run a marathon, now, what grade does the same percentage of climbers climb? I don’t know the answer to either, but I’d imagine that the climbing equivalent is a lot closer to mid/upper 11 than the 10’s we’ve been talking about.

2. Chance of failure. If you aren’t going for a time, your chance of failure on a marathon is very low. Fatigue, stomach issues, soft tissue injuries. In most cases it’ll slow you down but not stop you (I once rode a century stopping every few miles to explosively shit, I finished, eventually). A climbing route is either a 0 or a 1. At a certain point, no amount of physical effort can get you up a route that is beyond your grade that day. So that puts us somewhere around 5.7.

3. How you feel when you’re done. A marathon leaves you stiff for a few days with some muscle soreness that gets better over a week. That’s pretty consistent IME. I’ve climbed the Steck Salathe twice, for example. The first time I got back to camp at 2am and could barely walk for a week. The second time, we were back at camp in the mid afternoon chillin. So uh, I guess it depends.

4. The conditioning required, whether it be BMI, V02 max, or core strength, whatever. I don’t know how to compare the two. There might be a formula somewhere that states that someone with a bmi of x, and core strength of y, can perform decently at multiple unspecified activities. I think that’s just called being in shape.

Another way to think about it would be something like "the average climber can do it but it will take them around 4hrs." This seens fair, since thats basically what a marathon is to most recreational runners. In that case, I think it would be similar to like a 6-8 pitch multipitch climb, probably at 5.5ish difficulty. It's hard to overstate how much mentally easier it is to run a marathon (people are cheering you on, you are never in any danger, people are literally handing you food as you go, etc) and how much physically easier the climbing is (you probably aren't going to be super physically worked by climbing 8 pitches  compared to 4hrs of running). 

Jonah Swrote:

Another way to think about it would be something like "the average climber can do it but it will take them around 4hrs." This seens fair, since thats basically what a marathon is to most recreational runners. In that case, I think it would be similar to like a 6-8 pitch multipitch climb, probably at 5.5ish difficulty. It's hard to overstate how much mentally easier it is to run a marathon (people are cheering you on, you are never in any danger, people are literally handing you food as you go, etc) and how much physically easier the climbing is (you probably aren't going to be super physically worked by climbing 8 pitches  compared to 4hrs of running). 

I think this is a good start for comparison, but it misses the effort of getting in shape. I could (and have) climb Cathedral Peak off the couch with no problem. I could not run a marathon off the couch. 

I feel like some of y'all think climbing is so much harder than running cause you got them thunder thighs from running so much. I have a much better chance of climbing 8a tmrw than I do of doin a sub 5 hour marathon.