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| The author giving a burn on Hard Up V3 at Goat Rock State Beach, CA. |
I've been thinking a lot about climbing grades, and whether or not they're subjective. It's my contention that they're NOT subjective, or at least not as subjective as people think. Saying "grades are inherently subjective" has become a refrain in the climbing world, one usually not backed up by evidence, and one that I find intellectually lazy. I've heard some arguments as to why grades are subjective -- each climber has a different body type, height, etc. -- and some of them are valid (at least to a certain extent). In this post I hope to explain why I think this subjectivity only goes so far, and why grades -- be it the the v-scale, font scale, Yosemite decimal -- are unwittingly based on something more scientific and thus less subjective.
But before I get into THAT, my homies, let's talk a little bit more about where I am and the photo that started off this post. I'm in Willits, CA (yeah, THAT Willits) and yesterday I drove up the coast and climbed at Goat Rock State Beach, site of where I tore my LCL two years ago. In fact, I tore my LCL on the exact boulder problem in the photo, on one move before the move I'm trying, getting my left hand from lower than where it is in the photo and trying to use a heel hook to get it higher.
It was a little weird going back to these boulders. It had been two years. I was a much different climber then, probably just as strong, just as psyched, but also more reckless and much worse at reading beta. Honestly, the being worse at reading beta part was the only detractor. I wish I could be as reckless as I was back then, but, you know, the low back. I guess I don't wish I was as reckless as was I used to be in how I approached boulder problems, i.e., from the ground, just giving it everything I got. Now my tactics are much better. In the boulder above, for example, I worked it more from the top down, or at least the middle out. I knew I wasn't gonna flash it, so first I started dialing in the moves.
I didn't send the boulder, but yesterday was still glorious. After the sesh I stood by the Subee up above the boulders, looking out over God's green earth, the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, my palms facing the sky, and gave thanks to the Universe and the Tao. I gave thanks for that session, for having another day on this planet, for my relative health, and for many other things. And then I started driving north.
Now back to grades, though I don't know how much I want to get into it today. Basically at some point I'd like to write a well-structured, well thought out piece and submit it to Climbing Magazine, and I consider all of this just prep for that.
So here's my contention: Grades are (unwittingly) based on a scientific system that takes into account a multitude of factors, the most important being: A) angle of the wall, B) angle of the holds, C), depth of the holds, and finally D) placement of the holds (how far they are apart, which way they face, where they are in relation to each other).
If, on a systems board, you took a series of holds, all one inch deep, completely neutral in angle (i.e. neither positive or negative, neither incut or slopey), and placed these holds in a latter fashion, you could create a very simple, boring ladder problem, that would sort of look like this:
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Now, if you set the angle of the board at + 5 degrees (i.e., 5 degrees less than vertical, i.e. slab), the difficulty would undoubtedly be around VB. Then, if you tilted the board up to vertical, the difficulty would increase a bit, maybe still VB, maybe V0 at this point.
Whether or not the problem is VB or V0 at this point is up for debate. This is where different body types come into play, and conversely the SMALL degree of subjectivity involved in grades. For some body types, the problem would feel like VB. For others it might feel like V0, or even V1. But for no one would it feel like V5, or V10, or V15. This is our first hint that grades aren't entirely subjective.
Now, say you tilted the board to -10 degree, i.e., slightly overhanging. This would increase the difficulty of the problem significantly, maybe somewhere in the V1-2 range. And if you kept tilting it back, the grade would keep increasing. At 20 degrees you might have a V5 or V7, at some point you'd have something on the very limits of what's climbable right now, i.e. V17, and at some point you'd have something that's completely impossible. The point is: this would be a measurable phenomenon. Certain angles of the board with this specific hold setup would produce specific grades, plus or minus a grade or two depending on body type (note: "body type" assumes a certain height, say the mean human height plus or minus 6-8 inches on each side. If a person is 2'6'', then certain problems would be MUCH harder or impossible. But for the purposes of my argument I'm not taking into account the 2'6'' human).
You could then do this same experiment with different hold angles and different hold placements, and ultimately with wall angles that vary throughout the problem (as they do outdoors). Ultimately, with enough data, you could come up with an algorithm that would take ALL of these factors into account (hold angle, hold placement, wall angle, and many others) and accurately predict the grade of the problem to within one or two V-grades. You could also input the body type of the climber, making it even more accurate. I'm sure someone will come up with this algorithm at some point and write a program with it, because you know what? We've all already come up with this algorithm on our own after years of climbing. Our bodies and minds experience the problem, take into account the angle of the wall and the angle and placement of the holds, churn that data into an algorithm, and then we spit out a grade. It's not scientific, but, well, actually it sort of is, and it damn well could be even more scientific. Beause again, grades are SOMEWHAT subjective, a little bit subjective, but not nearly so much as people claim. That V1 you climbed could be a V2, or a V0, or even a V3. But it's not a V15. This is backed by science, but not science that has been necessarily thought out/discussed in formal settings. But that doesn't mean the science isn't there.
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