12 Days of Psyche: Mountain Epics

For your 12th day of Psyche I present... Christmas. For your gift here are a few snowy adventures from climbing prodigy David Lama. As a teenager he dominated the World Cup circuit before parlaying his talents in the mountains. He's already doing some of the hardest and most coveted alpine ascents in history and is basically just warming up as he learns a new craft. We can't even imagine what the future holds.

Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas everyone! The 'dope will get back to business after the first of the year.

12 Days of Psyche: Girls Killin' It

... on hard, local boulders. Here are two vids of Brit Mina Leslie-Wujastyk on a recent trip, making mincemeat of some of America's hardest boulder problems. There's also a short synopsis about the trip in Rock & Ice, punctuated with her thoughts on heading back to training after the trip.

As we turn the corner into real winter, Leslie-Wujastyk, though liking outdoor climbing best, is unperturbed to face gym days.

“I like training,” she says mildly. “I like trying hard. I get a kick out of seeing the improvement.”



And since I said "girls", here's Alex Johnson flashing a very scary V9. And she looks casual. Super rad.

12 Days of Psyche: Why We Climb

This is a great interview with the late Patrick Edlinger. I don't generally find climbing interviews inspiring but this one is different. "Le Blond's" views don't seem tainted with jealously or disdain about the new generation, which is so common it's become cliche. He's extremely positive and insightful, and also gets at the heart of why we climb.

"You're obliged to to focus on here and now. To concentrate totally. All of a sudden you forget your problems. The things that don't interest you."

We also get to hear the story of Ceuse, still probably the single best climbing cliff on earth. How he stumbled upon it on the eve of a trip to the US, tore up his tickets, and stayed there for the next four years. It's like a climbing dream (literally for me as I've had so many dreams of finding epic crags I can't begin to remember them all.)

But, since an interview isn't enough for Psyche, here some "Dreammaker" action from 1982, the brilliant film Life By Your Fintertips. It's got one-arm pinky pull-ups, doing the splits between boulders, a sweet van, high white pants, German techo music about robots, drum solos; basically anything you'd need to get motivated to climb.

12 Days of Psyche: Buildering

Here's a 3- part Psyche for your Friday. When I first began climbing we buildered all the time. Gyms didn't exist and real rock was a pain to get to so we made up all sorts of circuits on the UCLA campus. Next, during the start of the sport climbing movement, routes of glued-on holds under highway underpasses became all the rage until,eventually, gyms became the standard and buildering mainly disappeared. These three vids show that it's still alive and well in some parts of the world. The first looks like better climbing. The second one come with this claim,

"At 2:42 min you will find a boulder called "FEINDESLIEBE" (EnemyLove) Font 8B+/8C, and in my opinion the hardest builder in the world."

I'm not sure how the guy would know, given it's a sport based on mainly lore (not to mention it's often illegal) but, whatever, it's pretty cool (click on the quote) and almost makes we want to look for some urban circuits around here.

Finally, we have an actual climbing vid that also features some buildering and makes it look pretty creative--perhaps even more fun than the route.

12 Days of Psyche: Rad Blind Guy

Dogs, friends, climbing, nature; what more do you need? Apparently not much. I have to say that I'm not usually inspired by stories of handicapped folks doing stuff. Not that they personally wouldn't inspired me, because I'm sure they would, but because those videos are almost always presented in the same hyperbolized light, as if there was a fundraising event about to follow. Drives me nuts because I find it embarrassing for everyone involved. Anyways, this video is not like that at all. It's just a guy out there, living life and having fun. And it's friggin' great. And super inspiring. And it's at the cliffs near Bruce and Alisa's home. And he has a very special dog.

12 Days of Psyche: Power Climbing

I love this style of climbing, which is a hybrid of bouldering and climbing. Routes like these require total focus once you leave the ground. You can never rest, or even recover, and the added element of rope and gear make them feel much different from bouldering. It's not the kind of thing most people associate with climbing, where the common sentiment is higher, longer, better. But the way I look at it, the longer a route is the easier the movements must be, leaving for more margin for error. Short climbing require, as Todd Skinner said, "laser-like focus". Most of my favorite routes have been similar.

12 Days of Psyche: Climbing Alone

The Almighty: A Climbing Story with Tyrel Mack from Fisher Creative on Vimeo.

Yesterday's Loskot vid got me thinking about climbing alone. I might have climbed alone in my life more than with other people. I certainly do at the moment. Now it's because I'm busy and never sure when I'll have some time. Once it was because I was so un-busy that I couldn't find others with enough free time to always be out. In actuality, much of it's choice. I like being outside, in nature, alone. Because everyone else seems to think it's so weird I enjoy vids like this, if just to remind me that there are others out there like me. Today's Psyche has a totally different tone but what it lacks in rad is made up for in mood, at least in my opinion. So there.

12 Days of Psyche: Klem

How do you one-up Haston? You don't, but Klem Loskot is back to climbing and that's pretty cool. He was always one of the biggest characters in the sport. Not just because he was strong and put up ground-breaking ascents, but because his style of both finding the routes and recording them were, well, different. He's was always off the beaten track and always very.... something. Austrian? The video is one example.

He quit climbing for some years but is back and, apparently, still very strong. Here's a really good interview on Rock & Ice. Click the excerpt for the rest.

It matters a lot because it gives you access to the flow, the feeling of climbing weightless, dancing up with smooth moves. It’s amazing, like in skiing or surfing! This feeling is what "sport" is all about. It is hard to get it in climbing because you need to be very fit.

Revisiting Psyche

Yesterday Bob Banks posted an article titled Revisiting Psyche. The gist of it is that he ran across an old bouldering guide (written by me) that he had all marked up in his quest to do every problem in it and couldn't believe how psyched he'd once been.

Today I picked up my old copy of Edwards' Santa Barbara Bouldering (1997) and thumbed through it for the first time in over a decade. Marked on the inside cover with my name and The Castle phone number should I lose it, it's quite a walk down memory lane. The book is bound together with a rubber band, torn up and marked up with scribbled field notes and comments on nearly every page. At my current state of climbing psyche, it's hard to believe how psyched I once was, spending every rest day walking through the hills looking for more stuff.

We all move on in life. Bob went on with those notes to write the definitive book on Santa Barbara bouldering. But this is a cool post for another reason. Reminiscing of bygone days also plants seeds. Those days are gone, sure, but reflecting on them helps create new ideas, dreams, and motivation.

It's inevitable that priorities shift and single-minded focus becomes fractured. But with life comes experience. An invaluable tool for sorting things out efficiently. "Youth is wasted on the young," said everyone's favorite wit spewer, Oscar Wilde. It's a sentiment hard to argue with,especially doing a workout at P3 or seeing teenage girls do this. But I do fight it or, more accurately, roll with it pretending it's not happening. My life is better than it was, I can continually improve it, and there are still lifetime goals out there, even purely physical ones, to be obtained before I ride off into the sunset.

Finally, it's important to note that I am not alone in this belief. I can be a tad optimistic, as Bob likes to point out, but I'm still getting stuff done and there's no good reason that you can't, too. Thanks to my job I get to witness people who change their lives on a daily basis, at almost any age. And while we never get our youth back we simply don't need to. We can do anything we want. And we can do it now.

pic: cover lore - yes, that's tuco the rat, standing on top of one of the better boulder problems i've established. more shockingly, it's phil 1) bouldering 2) outside 3)not at the tor. finally, it's a jason houston shot, bringing back even more memories of psyche and singlemindedness.

Adventure Monday: Turkey

After countless breakfasts, lunches, dinners and even dreams, this summer the time finally came to remove the photo off the kitchen wall.

Here's an outstanding account of an off-the-beaten-track adventure in the mountains of Turkey, not a place generally associated with high-end alpinism. My favorite part is how well it conveyed the games climbers play in their heads dreaming of ascents. Most of these go unfinished. It's much easier to spy a line up a rock face than it is to make it a reality, especially in far off lands. But without such visions our sport would not exist. Occasionally we live our dreams, and this is a tale of one of those times. Be sure and click through to the photos at the bottom. There are still many amazing remote areas left to be explored. For those of us with an inkling of adventurous spirit, it's guaranteed to set your mind in motion.

The story of the new route on Cima Vay Vay dates back to 2005. It was then that Larcher first heard about the great wall of splendid limestone from his friend Recep Ince - the alpinist and owner of the campiste that has always been the base for climbing expeditions in this mountain chain. Ince knows these mountains like the back of his hand, far better than anyone else and a year later the first "contact" came about. "I set off with Recep" explained Larcher "and after walking for two long days, having climbed over numerous passes, following no path at all and with only a rough map which ended 2/3 of the way there, we finally reached the Barazama waterfalls. We bivied ad the foot of the majestic Vay Vay amphitheatre and managed to photograph the face in the fleeting early morning light... At home I hung this photo up in my kitchen and I knew that, sooner or later, its time would come."

And there, at 3000m, is another clue as to why someone can be so in love with such cumbersome toils. For they were awaited by "an idyllic place, a hectare of happiness, a place of tranquillity amid the moraine. It was our small, provisional paradise: a perfectly trimmed lawn ideal for our tents, a snowfield to the side which acted as a fridge, a crystal clear lake fed by a stream, two boulders which provided shade on rest days, both in the morning and in the afternoon..." And, what is more, this was all located directly opposite Vay Vay, that authentic sheet of rock, 1 km wide, 600 meters high and even with glacier at its base. Marvelous!

Hardest Onsight, Climbing Circus Tricks, & More

Weather's looking perfect for a long weekend (at least here) so get outside and do something to earn your feast. For inspiration, here's the hardest route ever onsighted, courtesy of Black Diamond and, of course, Adam Ondra.

We don't exactly know it's the hardest but Ondra onsighted two 9as this day, downrating both, and said this one was harder. Since both would be the world's first 9a onsight we're assuming the title. Anyway, it's pretty clear from the vid that he can go deeper. Very, very impressive climbing from the guy with, by far, the most impressive climbing tick list in the world.



However, until he onsights something like this (go to 1:20) he can still raise the bar. The move in this video (maybe onsighted--have no idea) is the most bizarre climbing move I've ever seen. It's like a circus trick and I had to watch it 5 times to figure out what happened. Competition climbing has changed to the point where it's almost more like watching Cirque Du Soleil than how people ascend a rock face.



Check out this last video of a climbing comp from the 80s. Quite a difference, eh?

Le Blond: RIP

Another climbing legend is gone. Details are completely lacking but a French newspaper has reported that rock legend Patrick Edlinger passed away last week, well before his time at 52. It does not seem as though it was climbing related.

Edlinger was a pioneer in the sport climbing movement but will be most remembered for his soloing on film, as well as his amazingly fluid style, which seemed to matter more to him than his achievements as he once said, "(sic) To only reach the top is a waste of time. What's important is that we do it in a way that is pleasing." DPM has a great compilation of his videos here. The one I've posted is a very French look at one of his rampages around the US, doing all of our hardest climbs at the time.

Sadly, there's no 'net postings of his showing at the first World Cup climbing competition in the US. This is the place I first saw him climb and it had a huge impression on me. Not only did he dominate the field, he did it as though God was on his side. After two days of climbing in dark cloudy conditions, the sun decided to make an appearance only after "The Dreammaker" (a name that seemed to be made up by CBS) latched the jug at the very lip of a huge roof, which not only lit up his face and highlighted his flowing blond locks, but sealed his victory and electrified the crowd. It was the stuff of legend, but only another day in the life of Le Blond. May he rest in peace.

Don't Let Night Ruin Your Day

Here's a cool video on running at night. Headlamp technology has become so good that darkness isn't nearly the obstacle to adventure that it once was, and not just for running. It's becoming more and more commonplace to plan hard climbing routes at night (Caldwell et al worked on these pitches in the dark), which seems insane. And for tomorrow's challenge I'm charging my batteries right now.

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. Work and organizing my birthday challenge have my time pretty well used up. Upside is that I'm saving up some good stuff for the New Year when more people are paying attention.

Rock Tasting

"People go to France to taste wine. I came to England to taste rock." - Caroline Cialvaldini

In need of a some Psyche to get your Monday going? Thanks Hot Aches productions for making their film, The Odyssey, is available to download from free for the next week by going here.

The Odyssey follows four climbers on a tour to some of England's most history trad climbing locations. This means, aside from a lot of varied and beautiful scenery, in lieu of the standard crank-o-philia associated with most climbing vids you get your trad on with a heaping dose of scary.

The crew, all world-class (professional) climbers, take Joe Brown's "if ya didn't fall off you must not 'av climbed anything 'ard then" philosophy to the hilt and take to the air regularly. They all have amazingly good heads, laughing where average climbers tend to freak out, but the seriousness of what they're doing still comes out in subtle ways. It's a very different look at climbing than what's played up in the media. Truly scary falls are somewhat rare in climbing films. If you miss that aspect, this is film for you.

Punks, El Cap, and The Red

October may be the best month for climbing but early Nov tends to have the best days. So it's hardly surprising that rad stuff is happening all over that place. As usual, it starts with Adam Ondra...

Fresh off establishing the world’s hardest route, Ondra came to the US for the first time, heading straight for the only place with enough hard climbing to entertain him, in theory anyway. A few days ago he flashed a 9a+ and, yesterday, he onsighted two 9as. He downgraded all of these but we must keep in mind that nobody had ever onsighted a single 9a, much less two in a day, or flashed 9a+. Adam has onsighted more 8c+ than the rest of the world put together so, as Jonathan Seigrist suggested, he may be too strong to know. Or maybe he’s just being modest. Uk CLimbing has a full report here. The downgrades won't really stick until confirmed.

Speaking of Siegrist, he’s on El Cap with Tommy Caldwell on the latter’s decade-long Yosemite odyssey with what will be, by far, the hardest wall route in the world should anyone ever do it. Siegrist offers this great post where he shed’s some light on the difficulty of this monster. Maybe Ondra should head to The Valley.



My favorite post by far, however, comes from Oz where October doesn’t even matter. Mayan Smith-Gobat has given Punks in the Gym, the world’s first 5.14, its first female ascent. But it’s not the route or the grade that made her tale special. It’s her personal relationship with the climb. Realizing life long dreams is very cool, especially when they take this much effort. Mayan nails the travails of just how hard redpoints at your absolute limit can be.

Punks in the Gym put me through a full range of emotions. It caused me a huge amount of frustration, forced me to examine myself and my motivations for climbing. Before heading down to Australia on this last trip, I seriously debated the amount of effort I have invested, and whether it was really worth it… Eventually, I came to the realization that this route does hold a special importance to me. Therefore, I chose to sacrifice other goals and put a month into training specifically for this route. As a result, I felt much stronger this year. However, it was still a struggle… both mentally and physically.

vids: mayan’s been on an incredible roll lately. she’s also free climbed el cap so, since the punk footage is lacking, the el cap vid picks up the slack. she’s makes some nice observations on why we bother with such nonsense as climbing and, if you’re intro freeing big walls, she gives you blow by blow beta on the crux of the salathe—-incidentally another monumental climb and the first big route to get freed on el cap. the pitch she’s describing in the vid was so out there at the time that most of the climbing world didn’t believe it had really gone free.

First Female V14

With October sending season in full force how about the first female V14 for your weekly Psyche? Congrats to Tomoko Ogawa for completely her three-year project, Catharsis, at Shiobara, Japan, and taking the sport to another level.

If this looks familiar it's because the problem was also featured in this Daniel Woods video last spring. With over 20 moves it's almost more of a route than a boulder problem. No matter, it's one of the coolest looking boulders I've seen.

Uk Climbing posted a short interview with Ogawa on how she trained for Catharsis, which you can read by clicking this excerpt. These perfect fall conditions won't last forever. Get out there!

I thought I need more finger strength and reach. I did "finger pull ups" for a long time that I had seen Daniel Woods do in a DVD. It is like hanging on a campus board with open hand and close it to crimp and open and close over and over while you are hanging.

And I started to straighten up my body. Actually I was hunched. I thought because of my backside muscles got too big since I started climbing, I wanted keep my chest and body open to extending my reach. But it took a year to get better...

60 Year Old Climbs 14a

Think you’re getting old? It’s all a number. 30 years ago there were no 5.14s in the world so what’s this guy’s doing, at age 60, is the sports equivalent to dominating the NBA during the Magic Johnson/Larry Bird era. Pretty rad, eh?

Sure, he lives in Spain, where there are more 5.14 climbers than the rest of the world combined, and has a couple of crankenfrank kids who push him along, but there is simply no way to deny the elite athleticism and dedication it takes to do something like this. When you watch this guy climb there’s no way to tell he’s not 21.

Also on the Psyche meter, this route is in Rodellar, one of my favorite climbing destinations on the planet. Happy Friday. Do something hard this weekend.

So what was the first 14 in the world? Punks in the Gym, in Oz. Here's a bonus vid of my friend Jarmilla on it.

When To Deviate From The Plan

This is a follow up post to my training article that appeared in Dead Point Climbing Magazine last month. I’ve been on the plan myself so here are some observations that will answer some of the questions I’ve been getting about recovery and lock-off hangs.

Yesterday I got on an old nemesis, a 140-foot traverse that I used to train on many years ago. The crux has been underwater for ages, so I hadn’t been able to try it in a decade. I figured it might be dry, finally, and a decent barometer of how my training is going since I’ve only done the entire thing a couple of times and it’s always felt right at my limit.

I began this training cycle in earnest on Sept 1 following the plan I wrote for the article. The board workouts were exactly the same. We added a set of lock-offs on the wall, superset with bicycles (see them here as a part of Sean’s training) which one of us would do while the other did their rice bucket. I didn’t do the weight training, since I do plenty of that in general, and have been mtb riding or running/hiking on the off days.

Though I’ve done this plan before I knew it might be ambitious for me right now. For one, I’m old—probably older than DPM’s entire demographic. And while I’m fit, age matters. You don’t recover as fast. The other factor is that mountain biking isn’t a perfect rest activity and I didn’t want to stop riding. So I was expecting that training with only one rest day might be challenging and I was right.

After two weeks I needed to back off because I feared getting injured and my workouts weren’t improving. I added some climbing days and lengthened the time between sessions. My climbing was awful. I expected it to be bad but I was so worn out from the training that everything was a struggle. This is why I don’t usually recommend much if any climbing during the program. It worked, however, and the extra recovery time allowed my workouts to start improving. I also started to get stronger on rock as I adapted and was able to integrate the strength gains I’d made.

This pushed my schedule out longer than four weeks. Week 5 just ended and I still have a few workouts to go in order to finish the planned 4-week cycle. I just took a week off of training and did two very hard days back to back outside. My climbing wasn’t great, I still feel effects of the training/recovery holding me back, but I’m much stronger than when I started. The longer schedule with more rest and some actual climbing seems like it was the right course, this time. What you do should be based on your own recovery.

I’ve had to adjust my lock-offs and most of you will, too. Full lock-offs felt too stressful on the elbow, so I start locking off as high as I can, then medium, then low (but not all the way down). Repeat for a set of 6. The actual angles don’t matter much. Do what you can and STOP doing them if you’re elbows get touchy. We actually started the phase attempting lock-offs on the first workout and scrapped the idea less than one set.

So, yesterday, after a day of traveling and office work I got to the traverse pretty tired. I was still feeling the effects of my hard two-day session and wasn’t sure if I’d even climb. But the traverse was dry so I stared re-acquainting myself with the movements that I once had wired but were mostly forgotten. It seemed impossible. I thought about leaving and going for a run, instead, so that I didn’t waste the afternoon.

But because I hadn’t seen the thing dry in so many years I figured I might as well try. I did the first 80 or so feet of 5.11 to warm-up. I botched a bunch of the sequences but managed to hold on to the rest before the business end, and felt it wasn’t as hard as I was expecting.

Then I began a move-by-move assessment of the second half. The ground had washed away, adding some new footholds (making one of the cruxes substantially easier and probably taking a grade off) and tacking a scare factor to the finish, but it still seemed way too hard for my current condition. Oddly enough, as I warmed up it started to feel doable and, then, even stranger, not all that bad. Just before dark I gave it one good go and, shockingly, it went. I’m now even more psyched on my training program and can’t wait for the next session.

Original article

Part II

Part III (diet)

Part IV (crazy sciency shit)

Other good ideas

vid: couldn't find a pic of the sandbox so here's another traversing nemesis of mine.

The World’s Hardest Climb...

...just went down. Not so shockingly to Adam Ondra (congrats, man!) I wasn’t going to put this here until the full video came out but then I saw the above pic of him on the upper crux (Petr Pavlicek photo). It reminds me that I need to try harder. Not just at climbing. At everything. Yeah, yeah, this kid’s got natural talent but all people at the top of their fields, ultimately, succeed because they try harder than everyone else. When I watch people like Chris Sharma and Ondra climb I feel lazy. Today’s Psyche is to remind you not to give up. Have a sending weekend!

That is, if you don’t blow your shoulder out watching this video of Adam on the first part of the route. Romney was saying “that doesn’t look like the world’s hardest route...” until he started the lock-off/gaston sequence when she got silent and then went “...oh”. Sick. Just sick.

Ring of Fire

Following yesterday’s mind-fest it’s time for some light entertainment. For today’s Psyche I present not one...not two... but three videos, all featuring American rock star Jonathan Siegrist climbing some of the hardest routes in the US.

Le Reve - Jonathan Siegrist from MAXIM DYNAMIC ROPES on Vimeo.

le reve, arrow canyon, eastern nevada and algorithm at the fins, southern idaho

An interesting coincidence is that these climbing areas are all similar distances from my house in different directions and, oddly enough, I’ve not been to any of them (at one time I’d probably been to every published climbing area in the western US so this is saying something). And even though I’ll never do any of the routes in this post I absolutely need to experience the areas. It's a veritable ring of fire around my house, calling out my name. Fall is here, finally. Time to get some road trips on the agenda.

ARC'TERYX Chasing JStar - Utah from ARC'TERYX on Vimeo.

the hoop, an obscure crag hidden deep in the uintah mountains, eastern utah