Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Munchkin Climbing
There is something strangely arbitrary about climbing and the routes that everyone takes to be monumentally hard.
It’s not that a V15 isn’t a hard boulder problem, for instance. You can scarcely see the holds, much less lock one off at your knee and do a footless dyno to a crimp that’s a 1/16” wide on a 45 degree overhang on them.
It’s just that a big part of what makes climbing routes as hard as they are is that we are all built the way we are built, and we all built within pretty much the same small range of abilities.
Imagine if humans had evolved to only be 3 feet tall and weigh 80 lbs. Then what would we think was a hard route? We’d certainly be able to comfortably crank on stuff that we just you for a crumby foothold now.
But your wingspan now is a good bit longer than 3 feet. So for tiny humans, little holds would be jugs, but there would be a lot more reach problems.
Conversely, what if we had all developed to be 12 feet tall? We’d have a huge wingspan, of course. And the top of the bouldering wall that you’re currently struggling to get to in a Touchstone gym would be at eye level. (Picture Shaquille O’Neill skipping the first several moves of the 5.14 you can’t get started on.)
You’d weigh double or even triple what you weigh now. So you’d be able to reach much farther between holds. But the only holds that would support you would have to be just huge. You’re finger would be the size of polish sausages, so they’d be no stuffing them into tiny finger pockets. Even if you could, you’d be hanging that enormous, gangly body off of it, so you’d blow tendons for sure.
Let’s hope that if we had turned out really big or really small, we still would have found suitable cliffs to get our fix.
There is something strangely arbitrary about climbing and the routes that everyone takes to be monumentally hard.It’s not that a V15 isn’t a hard boulder problem, for instance. You can scarcely see the holds, much less lock one off at your knee and do a footless dyno to a crimp that’s a 1/16” wide on a 45 degree overhang on them.
It’s just that a big part of what makes climbing routes as hard as they are is that we are all built the way we are built, and we all built within pretty much the same small range of abilities.
Imagine if humans had evolved to only be 3 feet tall and weigh 80 lbs. Then what would we think was a hard route? We’d certainly be able to comfortably crank on stuff that we just you for a crumby foothold now.
But your wingspan now is a good bit longer than 3 feet. So for tiny humans, little holds would be jugs, but there would be a lot more reach problems.
Conversely, what if we had all developed to be 12 feet tall? We’d have a huge wingspan, of course. And the top of the bouldering wall that you’re currently struggling to get to in a Touchstone gym would be at eye level. (Picture Shaquille O’Neill skipping the first several moves of the 5.14 you can’t get started on.)
You’d weigh double or even triple what you weigh now. So you’d be able to reach much farther between holds. But the only holds that would support you would have to be just huge. You’re finger would be the size of polish sausages, so they’d be no stuffing them into tiny finger pockets. Even if you could, you’d be hanging that enormous, gangly body off of it, so you’d blow tendons for sure.
Let’s hope that if we had turned out really big or really small, we still would have found suitable cliffs to get our fix.
Labels: climbing
¶ Wednesday, January 16, 2008
