Australian Editor’s note to issue fourteen of Vertical Life. Download the Vertical Life App from iTunes or the Kindle Fire App Store here.
A new bouldering gym has opened in Melbourne – Northside Boulders – and one also in Sydney – 9 degrees. It is striking the similarities in aesthetic shared by the two gyms. The spaces are generous and well illuminated. The walls are white, the volumes are black and the holds are big and vibrant. Indeed it’s obvious that both are representative of what’s in vogue for new gyms. And both are fantastic additions to the plastic climbing landscape.
Things have been super hectic of late and my training has been sporadic-to-nonexistent. But last week I did get along to Northside and smashed around gleefully on all-new holds that made up all-new problems. My immediate reaction was one of joy; the wall’s surfaces forced different movement and the holds were novel and frictionful; the architecture generated a new vibe; and not being in a permanent cloud of decades of accumulated chalk-dust was liberating.
It was upon reflecting later, once I had stopped running around like a wide-eyed child, that I realised what the result of this new style of gym would be. My body was trashed; lats and delts from squeezing, triceps from pushing, hips from twisting, ankle from being slightly sprained after leaping. I was a very satisfying full-body sore but my fingers were completely unaffected, they were as fresh as daisies. The gnarled joints didn’t ache at all. The spot between the first two knuckles on my left index finger that is always painful to the touch – I could poke and poke without wincing. ‘Fuck’, I thought, ‘if we keep this up we are going to be body-monsters with iron cores able to generate more torque than a Mack truck engine, crush fridges as a party trick like our drunk uncle used to tear phone books in half, have shoulders like axe-handles and the balance of cats. But our fingers are going to weak as piss.’
I guess this is that far-away comp climbing thing that we have been looking at late at night on glowing laptop screens (though I’m not saying comp climbers have weak fingers). And what it represents is a schism in climbing. This is not the first such schism, technology and fashion have seen climbing split, splinter and specialise numerous times in the past, and there have always been weird cliques of devotees devoted to obscure climbing practices. But there is definitely another schism happening now.
Anna Davey is deep amongst the angles and trying to break free of unfamiliar Northside geometry during the Victorian Bouldering Titles. Simon Madden
These new boulder-palaces are designed to be open and welcoming, particularly to noobs, because you gotta grow your market, mate. But that is not what is interesting to me. I’m interested in blowback.
For a long time snow skiing was personified by the Austrian Technique. In this rigid framework knees were glued together, as were ankles, long skies were as rigidly parallel as the legs, the chest was up and open and the arms were dangled out beside you and to the front. Then came the barbarian snowboard hordes and with their new technology they developed new ways of moving that spurred new ways of thinking about moving, which in turn generated more new movement. The upstarts broke the mould for moving on snow, fluid and flowy from edge to edge, floating on pow with a loose body, all dips and spins and pops in the park and then in the big mountains and tipping the board way up on the edge and carving the shit out of the slopes. Skiing was dead.
But it wasn’t dead it was just sick. And over time the new ways of moving developed by boarders blew back into skiing. Skis got shaped and skis got fat, the knees got divorced and the double-daffy became lame as spins and corks were the new airtime currency. Skiing became rad and people started doing things that were not so much impossible before as they were unknown-unknowns. Before snowboarding we didn’t even know what we couldn’t do, couldn’t even conceive of it. New thoughts, new movement. It was as if Oedipus tried to kill his old man but only wounded him and then the old man came back and retook the throne from the young usurper.
And that is what’s going to happen in climbing.
The pattern is not exactly the same as the ski/board relationship, there is absolutely no chance that indoor is going to kill outdoor, but the communication of ideas and of movement will follow a similar pattern. The indoor bouldering of the near-future will transmogrify what is done outdoors.
We have seen the results of this communication before; trad blew back into mountaineering on big alpine rock routes, sport climbing blew back into trad breaking the leader never falls rule, bouldering has blown back into roped climbing with hard, hard routes often broken down in terms route grade then v-double-digit problem to give astronomical-grade. The unique movement being contrived by setters to protect tendons and make comps more challenging and better spectacles is going to blowback hard into the outdoors and the stuff that gets done as a result is going to be outrageous.
Simon Madden
Great article Simon. Mirrors my thoughts exactly.
Also, nice for us old blokes to be able to hold that bottle of stout at the end of the day without having to think about using it to ice the knuckles.
We’re all going to disappear up our own navels if people keep writing and reading tosh like this. The next generation of wing suit clad alpine big wall enthusiasts is already here, and they don’t go bouldering in gyms.