Why It's Almost Impossible to Climb 15 Meters in 5 Secs. (ft. Alex Honnold) | WIRED

rock climbing is getting a lot more popular there's indoor gyms like this one opening all around the country and in 2020 for the first time it will be an official sport at the Olympics made up of three events the first is lead climbing that's scaling a tall wall using a rope that you use to anchor yourself along a route that changes from competition to competition the second is bouldering no rope this time because it's closer to the ground but the problems are physically and mentally a lot more demanding like lead climbing the routes change free competition to competition and the third is speed climbing which is exactly what it sounds like climb a 15 meter wall as fast as you possibly can here's the twist unlike lead climbing and bouldering the route stays the same every single time the holds like this one are standardized and they're in the exact same position in the exact same place along the route whether you're climbing today a year from now in the US or abroad the fastest time ever recorded on a speed wall is five point four eight seconds look at that time go down new world record today we're gonna look at like climbing a speed wall in five seconds flat is almost impossible [Music] to find out what it takes I climbed with one of the fastest American speed climbers okay talk big wall speed planning with Alex Honnold yes many Jewish becoming big walls you know think about your lactate threshold you just do it over and over in this you know it improves and the physics of flying up the equivalent of a four-story building with a biomechanist like it's big father most women's and selfless issue is very very important climbing fast in and of itself isn't exactly new people have been racing each other up walls since at least the 1940s but the standardized route that will see for speed climbing in the Olympics has only been around for a few years the very fastest climber Iranian Raisa a leap or set the world record at five point four eight seconds in 2017 but not even a decade earlier the record was in the mid six second range today that's how long it takes this 16 year old champion sprint up the wall so we're here today at Earth Trek's gym in Englewood Colorado we're gonna do some speed climbing and with us today to help us out is two-time national champion Jordan Fishman you have a couple Records and speed climbing right yeah alright he's very fast at it and also with us is Alex Honnold he is a speed climber of a different sort he works on bigger walls and you've actually never climbed this either right I've never climbed the speed wall off of them this is gonna be great Larry alright I haven't either I'm super nervous let's try this I went first so exciting let's just say that I did not set any records he's off like a rocket it took me more than a minute to get up the wall okay one minute 15 seconds ha all right Alex's turn then it was Honnold stern not surprisingly he was much faster he made it to the top in just under 30 seconds only nine seconds if y'all winded and kind of shaky so the progression was 75 seconds twenty nine and a half seconds let's see you Jordan he's even with a couple of missteps he scrambled up the wall in eight and a half seconds just to walk in the park and though it's pretty classic that with mistakes and as a warm-up it's still either half seconds just for comparison here is a shot of each of us on our first climbs as you can see I'm picking my way slowly up the wall figuring out the hold as I go to be totally honest my main focus here is on not falling so I'm being very deliberate with my movements and as a result cleaning very slowly now take a look at Hana here in the middle like me he's climbing this route for the very first time so he's figuring it out as he goes but he's still much faster in the time it takes me to reach the top puddles could have climbed this route two and a half times and a lot of that has to do with his strength and confidence but also pay attention to his footwork to move fast he's using not just the holds on the wall but the wall itself climbers call this smearing and on the speed wall it spares them from looking down to find footholds saving them valuable time and then there's Fishman on the far right he knows this route by heart so he's relying on explosive strength and muscle memory to blast himself up the wall like Honnold he's also smearing his feet he's moving so fast that he stumbles a couple of times but even with those missteps he still soars up this wall in the time it takes me to climb it once Fishman could have climbed it and tagged the buzzer at the top nearly nine times I was obviously the slowest it took me 75 seconds to complete the run Alex was a lot faster than I was he took just under 30 seconds to complete it and Jordan you took about let's see that's eight and a half seconds to run through that as a warm-up run few slips and you're alright but that's a huge difference and I feel like a lot of it boils down to the style with which we were climbing it like I was being a lot more delicate about it Alex you were smearing a lot so you were just putting your foot directly on the wall I was trying to but obviously there was a lot of room for improvement so why were you doing that we just so that I didn't have to think about the footholds as much basically so I could focus on just making big moves you turn hand holds alright and then you just blaze through it eight and a half seconds so what what how do you how do you trim off twenty seconds well partly he didn't have to think about anything because he knows exactly what to do so his body is just executing without thinking about it yeah that's the other thing this is the first time I've ever done it this is the first time alex has ever done it so there's nothing for us that he would improve that's the spirit yeah how did you get faster for one knowing the route helped and knowing the holds like where you have to grab them and when you have to grab them because I just like just thinking takes time off so by doing that you can get faster and that also helps with your feet because you know where to place them so you don't think about that either as you might expect the start is crucial if you have a bad start you can kind of ruin your run because as you push off you have to carry that momentum all the way up through the entire out so if you don't get as fast and start typically your run isn't as fast even if you can catch up speed wood fishermen and many other elite speed climbers do is bypass an entire hole if you want to go foot and hand at the same time so you kind of you get back you generate as you pull you push off of this foot cut and then ya catch like this yeah and then you kind of start to barn-door but you want to carry the barn door through and then fly over and then fly upward exactly the move is now called the Reza for the iranian climber who has used it to slash the record up to 15 meter wall to five point four eight seconds like it's just shaved so much time off and it it almost makes you flow better through the next like three or four moves cuz you like better set up there already but the reza is not easy i struggled so did Hahnel but even without a reza start can we get faster we each went again to find out I shade 40 seconds off my first time running it in 35 seconds Donald took five seconds off doing a twenty four point five second run and Fishman Fishman crushed it six point six two seconds and your record is six point three eight yep right so that's crazy and that's like you know you were saying on just on any given day yeah I feel like your record could be a lot lower yes any random morning we're not even that warm that we have yeah yeah we I mean we just showed up and did a little climate most most days I'll get average anywhere from like six five to six eight or nine but it all just depends on the run and the day you're having so would you consider that a good run yeah like surprisingly good yeah for like some I warm to and how many of those do you have in you on a given day ah anywhere sometimes we'll do two runs a day sometimes we'll do eight or nine but yeah yeah but it doesn't take money in your cooks right yeah yeah it's funny to think that doing six seconds of musician six times and you're done for the day man I worked out for 45 seconds - yeah totally anaerobic right and what you're doing is much more aerobic yeah what I'm doing is a completely aerobic it's basically what you're doing is basically a marathon and you're doing a sprint yeah many people know Honnold as the subject of free solo the 2018 documentary about his Robles ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park but he's also set a number of speed records in the park including the 3,000 foot nose route of El Cap which he scaled with Tommy Caldwell in record time in 2018 this footage of the record climb comes from an upcoming film from real rock it takes most people multiple days to complete that climb but Honnold and Caldwell did it in just under two hours speed climbing outdoors is more about precision and smoothness than it is about being sloppy and and fast which is part of the reason why I like people aren't climbing the nose in minutes right yeah yeah that's the reason why it takes a couple hours to climb you know pretty much the most big walls outside yeah could you apply indoor speed climbing tactics to big walls not exactly in thinking about the speed while indoors is that there's absolutely no risk so you can you can be as free as you want like you take risks but outdoors if you take risk you're gonna you know you could potentially die on something and the climbing style is completely different I went to Diablo Rock Gym in Concord California to talk with Hans fluorine is tough so I usually will go off to the footholds on the sides Florine literally wrote the book on speed climbing big walls and has owned the knows record numerous times he was a speed climbing star in the 90s but he's still really fast this is the first ever World Championship speed climbing cup team teaching yet fully drinkable he's in his 50s and last year broke both his legs and both his ankles falling on El Cap he still beat me up the wall twice then he showed me what it's like to climb on El Cap outside my hand I sort of we went to the gyms crack wall which simulates the Fisher granite that you find on much of the nose route and requires a completely different style of climbing remember just rotate your hand or your wrist and find where it's most comfortable or least painful it only took me you know three four minutes right but then again that's only 30 feet so yeah 3,000 feet on El Cap you do 99 more laps and this would be a really long show but that would be doing the nose in a day at the gym right and so and then there's the weight of all the safety equipment you have to tape you've got this extra added weight this is probably you know 11 12 13 pounds and that's about what you'd carry if you were just gonna climb the nose of El Cap in a single day still experienced climbers like fluorine and Honnold think the time for a classic route like the nose could still be brought down and we thought it was kind of like the marathon that it would you know get close to two hours but then it turns out it's actually wasn't that hard to break two hours I it's not like the marathon it'll probably go down to 120 I think that if you applied the climbing pace that's used on on an indoor climbing wall to El Cap I mean yeah you could do in half an hour but it's just hard to imagine climbing that quickly while still placing protection and clipping your rope and managing all the other systems but the speed wall is pure climbing could it get any faster the start is clearly key but there's more elements to the climb than that so I called up French researcher Pierre la grenouille although I was the first champion speak Chinese champion in France in 1989 and now I'm working biomechanics in climbing laguna has studied speed finding data and found that the fastest athletes optimize their reach the top it is like the fable of the hair on the total so her goal was very fast and spends his time sleeping and walking or once apart so it will cover a lot of way and we take a lot longer than torture that never stops and moves in a straight line and the speed climbing is similar if the path of the body mass Center is very very long the time at the end will also be very high take a look at this graph based on like runners research the blue line is the path to the climber center-of-mass takes from the bottom of the climb to the top the red lines are the furthest that a climber center of mass moves left or right the straighter the blue line and the narrower the red ones the faster an athlete can climb that is exactly what Reza did when he eliminated that fourth handhold what's the word to us created the idea of the would settle was to position the positron back to the left in the starting position likes us and that's the first for hunt part of the word a position to the left of the Waseem name here's video of Reza in 2013 as you can see he makes this big arc going to the fourth hold here he is again in 2017 this time pulling off his signature move it straightens the curve and makes him considerably faster to make a website it's necessary to arrive on the third handhold with a very high speed but not how people use the Reza it requires a lot of strength and coordination and there's another variable as well that's the texture of the wall itself so the holds might not change their position might not change but some walls are super rough which is good and others are super slick which can make it really hard to get your shoe on it and get yourself that push you need to move up the wall a very important point for the foot we're there for to summarize the surface of the worlds to allow climbers to invent new strategies that will allow to climb up faster and faster Fishman coached Donald and I through some other tricks of the wall and in the end we both got a lot faster I notched a run in just under 30 seconds and Hahnel pulled one off in 20 2.3 seconds neither of us ever completed the Reza and I struggled with the Dinos big leaps from one hole to another libanon thinks that one of the ways for climbers that go faster is to eliminate as many dinos as possible from their clients let's face it those big dynamic moves might look awesome in bouldering but that doesn't make them fast on the speed walk here's a chart of climbing velocity up the speed walk it's constantly rising and falling as the athletes progress up the climb but the greatest variations come from dinos it's things that the diamond is a very very technical movement that doesn't help to gain time but which can lose alone find a way to maintain contact through that same sequence of holds and climbers could go even faster legged owner thinks that with other optimizations the ultimate time in this already fast sport could drop by a lot fifty seconds so about a whole second faster yeah yeah very disciplined that will greatly greatly evolved with integration into the NB games problem so consequently very large scientific and financial resources will be invested on improving performance those resources could go to studying ways to maximize climbing power although after seeing Fishman's training routine it's hard to imagine this sport getting any burlier than it already is absurd but with more athletes and coaches working on the wall more variations like the Reza might be found smooth and speed up the path that will be and my opinions our greatest challenge for coaches and biomechanics but until all of those things happen just keep in mind that what elite climbers are doing on the speed wall and on big walls like El Cap is already almost impossible [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 5,777,443

Rating: 4.8831902 out of 5

Keywords: alex honnold, bouldering, climbing, free solo, free solo climbing, rock climb, rock climbing, speed climbing, rock climber, summer olympic games, almost impossible, alex honnold climber, alex honnold climbing, hans florine climbing, olympic climbing, climbing rocks, indoor rock climbing, speed rock climbing, speed climber, wired almost impossible, almost impossible rock climbing, climb, rock climbers, jordan fishman, jordan fishman climber, hans florine, rocks, wired

Id: e863Qr0jaYo

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Paulythress]

Felt like Alex didnt want to be there.

[u/BigRed11]

Not sure how this doesn't get included in the video when talking about speed climbing big walls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0yXMa708Y

[u/Natrimo]

I always enjoy this series from WIRED.