World Class: The Story of Aidan Roberts' Bouldering Breakthrough | Climbing Film

[Music] i think over like period of five years i maybe had like a couple of sessions each year until this year i'd been trying it but it never really felt achievable like i never i was never going to it thinking oh i'll do it today it's a level above the other problems that you got done for me it's certainly 8c plus i don't think outdoor climbing is ready for the level of talent coming in [Music] the lake district has some of i think the most diverse and rock types of any area i've ever traveled to it's got anything from like really red sandstone insane bees to like really rough gabriel carrick foul you've got like such a range of different styles of climbing on that really different rock types it kind of feels like you're going to loads of different countries at once i literally think it's a world-class bouldering area i do think things are fast spread and you often have to go on big walks to get to these things it's not a place you can come and combine lots of crags in a day very easily but yeah you're rewarded for your big walk-ins and things like the boulders when you get to them are fantastic [Music] my name's aiden roberts and i grew up here in lake district at the moment we're in like central lake district uh a little village called rydal um and yeah i've lived here my whole life uh this is my training room i've spent a lot of time here um probably more time than at the desk [Music] when i was growing up i didn't have easy access to climbing walls so this was kind of my climbing fix i had a friend who was a carpenter who helped me build the board but with the holds my good friend dan varian he he makes a lot of holds through beast maker and he made a bunch of holds for me to like my first setup and over the years we've kind of made some holds together switched out the bigger holes replaced them with some smaller crimps and yeah it's gradually involved into the borders today i've been climbing for a few years and i went to eden rock and carlisle and they had a little like competition league and i think it was my mum who actually spoke to dan first well they wanted me to coach him initially and i did like a month or two of coaching and i was like oh this is for me it felt wrong because i had always been taken out by local car climbers and they just really helped me learn how like this is climbing this is bouldering so i i've had all that experience of being like dragged to crags and like just nudged at things and then and yeah i guess i was i was keen to to help aiden in that way and after i finished school lots of the time he'd uh i'd either go up to the climbing wall or if we were going out outdoor climbing he'd pick me up from school and we'd head off whether it's down boradale to carrock fell we'd kind of explore the lakes a bit and lots of time developing new things finding new clients to do at the time perhaps i never quite realized how much of an impact it was having on my climbing but yeah now at this point i kind of realized how beneficial that was i give people advice and a lot of people will say like oh well that's not for me i'm like oh you know like oh it doesn't count because you're really good or you know like they'll they'll create people will create an excuse barrier with aidan i always felt like he went like all right and sort of went home and then two weeks later he came back and be like i've been trying that actually i've done this better and you know i'll be like oh really and so he was just always really into anything weird i told him then he would decide whether it was for him or not [Music] alright [Music] i think between dan and greg chapman over the recent years have done like the majority of the development in the lakes uh greg just brought out his new guidebook which is it's great it's got like i think like 3 000 boulder problems in and like he's put in so much work developing all that there was always a backwater so when i was climbing as a kid carrick was a rumor it was like hawk and calves the needle sports venue and it was like um i remember going into needle sports and seeing trev and being like oh what's this what's this spot then like greg has been by far the the sort of pariah of showing away in the lakes i feel like i would totally be a sham saying like oh yeah i've been you know up and down the valleys like i haven't there is definitely a lot of development yet to do here in the lakes uh i know there's like certain areas which like still haven't really been explored so there's like loads that i'm keen to look into as well it it's really interesting because with like the rock type in the lakes is actually quite rare to have like really antacidic rhyolitic volcanic rock types it makes it very frustrating to search for boulders because they're often over featured but there's very very rarely a blank bit wall truly blank bit of wall so because there's very rarely truly blank bit walls they're often covered in tiny edges [Music] i think pretty much all of the projects i've tried this summer i initially like sought out with dan this like this year i've been like oh [ __ ] well you try this like try this like and he's just been hoovering them up i guess my kind of my approach has always been like with like really hard climbing it's i'll just get better and to the point where they're like not that hard which is kind of probably why i've never spent loads of loads of sessions on the client super powers i kind of i think over like a period of five years i maybe had like a couple of sessions each year i think it was probably about like nine sessions or something until this year i'd been trying it but it never really felt achievable like i'd never i was never going to it thinking oh i'll do it today that was actually one of the things from this summer which was like quite significant for me i think it started it was actually when i it first happened when i went and did outliers that was kind of like the start of my like run of good form and when i went to go try that boulder i didn't i didn't have any anticipation that i'd do it i didn't i actually thought i wouldn't do it i was going there to climb to see jack i don't know if he actually believed he could do it that day i think he thought he couldn't do it he'd not done the first two moves and he then started like tentatively trying them and he did it from a move in to the top um and then he started sitting at the bottom but not filming which i thought was i think that's like a negative thing to do so i said like turn the camera on [Music] yes aidan come on [Music] come on mate try hard one more move come on [Music] come on [Music] come on nicely done i think it is the hardest limestone problem i've seen in this country certainly if it's styled there might be more stretched out sort of climbing um a very different style like magleim or eastern lime but of its style like almost board-like climbing it's definitely harder than the wilderness and things like that which are the other contenders [Music] you always hear wilderness mooted as swiss 8 cr or 8 it would be 18 if it was in another country sort of thing so like i didn't wasn't really expecting to to do that climb at all uh it wasn't that like the expectations of what i could do altered differently it was more that i like tried to make sure that they didn't dictate how i climbed like loads of the projects that i was trying like before i actually did them i wouldn't have thought that i could have done them like but i just tried like i think it was like a little mind readjustment in that i i tried to just not listen to like the voice which is telling you like you probably can't do this uh inevitably like it did change a bit as i started doing things which i didn't think i could have done like obviously i was like ah i'm clearly like a lot better at climbing than i have been over the past few years so like i kind of obviously that did change my expectations as well but i think it was more my like mental approach to it which changed if he can get the best he can out of his body and he's he's got close to that this year although i think i actually think some of the things aidan's done this year have been more of a realization difficulty oh wow i feel good today so his body has been cashing checks that his mind wasn't quite ready for but i actually think his mind lags behind his body a bit and when that catches up or even goes ahead and starts thinking oh maybe this is possible that's when like i think and that will come like what is like 22 well after he did that then he did isla first go and then he says he did one lap of shallow green i don't know why he said he'd roll them up a shelter if he literally did cello groove twice that [Music] day okay [ __ ] what a day oh man i mean i know it's that one's a repeat you've done three of the hardest folders that i've like yeah what a day i realized i was in good form then then suddenly started like kind of touring around the projects which i'd had [Music] i had like a project which i wanted to do on the brown stone which it's got good moves but it's like a very tight eliminate line kind of that was more like my own [Music] project come on come on [Music] [Music] yeah that's it come on come on yes it was really fun i enjoyed it but it's never going to be like a high quality line it's very uh squeezed between some lines and you can escape it at different points so like it's an unlimited but for me it was quite nice it was like because i tried it like a few times like it was a nice gauge of where i was at yeah a little crimpy crimpy i thought oh i was all right at crimping and then i've watched aidan this summer with like jaws open you know stood next to jack and jim and nobody needs to say anything we're just like that's clearly the next level like it's clearly the next level on small edges and things like that i would wager like i would be amazed if he wasn't in the top five in the world on a strong day for like pure crimp spring yeah good work aiden's really good at high angle and pinky bent if it's like that i think he's by far best in the world but if it's like that type of crimp and if the pinky goes straight suddenly like there's a lot of people better than him on a fingerboard it's it's not like he's some sort of levitating messiah of climbing like he gets shut down on i don't know if we could we could go through like five fairly easy dinos on the grit and i don't think he'd have a spectacular day would he do monk life at kylo in wait there's a very high likelihood you might flash my life certainly do it in a few goes would he do catapult on the same day i'd put 100 quid on him not doing carpool on the same day [Music] [Music] [Music] i got kind of got to know a bit about the specifics of like the conditions that were good for each of the projects i was trying this year for example on copper line i know if it's a sunny day it comes into the shade like mid-afternoon uh it's quite exposed um it's quite like an aesthetic venue and it's not like hemmed in much at all it like faces out over all of coniston [Music] you can climb on it in on very sunny days as long as you go like in the afternoon yeah bruise really helps that's like the best hard problem in the lakes i would say and also a really good example of like just great climbing at the hardest grade [Music] it's a face with nothing else on it and in terms of quality one of the best climbs i've done [Music] come on come on come on come on get it on yes made it the last month where i did the development of like all of my hardest things basically it was uh it was generally very short sessions very few goes and it was yeah like really high intensity but incredibly low volume uh i think like it on paper people might think oh that's like he's done so much climbing in that time i probably did like about like less than 10 climbs in like a month but they all like mattered loads to me so yeah a bit of perspective on that it's like kind of a long steep face uh looks a bit like a board got most of the hard climbing at the bottom and it finishes with like a jump to the over like to the lip i don't think the move is too bad in itself but uh you kind of take a swing like over a river basically i think it'll be quite a gnarly fall if you fall off there [Music] [Music] so yeah yeah definitely uh didn't want to drop that but uh yeah so i was kind of like a nice little uh new dynamic to climbing hard i most of the climbs i've ordered like hard climbs i've done this year will be very safe grading grading all these climbs has not been my favorite part of it i think i found it very confusing in that like the grading system feels uh has a lot of inconsistencies whether you're like country to country or area to area i didn't really know what to benchmark i was like definitely confused by that [Music] i look for most of my guidance from dan because he'd often put more like more time into those clients as well like he tried them in the past so like had a bit more of an idea about where they lay i i think the lakes has been heavily heavily influenced by trying to uh chase gaskin's achievements and because those have been unattainable one that we're not going to be climbing shadow play very soon which is only a b plus for me for all my problems we're always ever graded against shadow play and this they forever will be because i would until that gets sorted out i'm never gonna change how i grade my climbs let's let's call it like weightlifting for the entirety of my life if i've been trying to lift 300 kilos or whatever there's been someone that said oh i've lifted 500 and uh and i've gone round all the other areas and i've been like oh these 300 kilowatts are pretty light these are fine and then i've never been able to like tickle the the heavy 500s nearby but i've pushed enough and i think aiden has pushed beyond what i can do with like all the mistakes i've made you know like everything's a conveyor belt for like he started off on a much better level earlier on with some really good talent i feel like he's he's really run with that and i think he's he's uh he's pulled some pretty hard moves so right this one's a good one um he's grading um so i guess at the start of the runner not a lot of people know but at the start of this little run of form one of the first hard things he did was probably little women and on the day he did little women he got home and he texted me a picture of a hole in his hand not the crag anymore attached to the rock and he said guess what this is and it was a hold of little women the crooks hold no not the crooks hole but after the crux hole that enables you to get into the stand so i assumed when this hold was now gone i assumed the problem was defunct but as the conversation went on it turned out i'd done it and he later told me it was now 8b um which i think it was already probably in my eyes it was already a b plus little women i think like very good climbers have spent a lot of time trying getting to do it they're taking a lot of time so i think it was already probably eight b plus and i think when he says things like that it's now hate big uh probably underselling his achievements a little bit and i think maybe that's continued with [Music] some of the tentative grades he's given stuff and some of yeah have you talked to him like if you talk to him he is dubious even once he's given something a big number like i'm not a big number but an appropriate grade he then almost goes back on it a week later he's like i'm not sure it is and it's for me unequivocally as surely they are i think as climbers we are all um i think we just tend to certainly for me i think and i do think a lot of people do it they do something and they instantly dismiss it as maybe that's not that hard because i've just done it i think it's certainly something i do and i just get i do something and i kind of it could have been it can be like i could have before i've been there i can think oh this is the hardest thing in the world i'll never do this and then i do it and i'm that's not that hard it can't be that hard i think hayden maybe does that same thing even at his top world class level i was definitely unsure about a lot of the things i've created and i might have got it wrong but it's kind of hard to i'd like i'd really like for the grades not to matter as much like but uh i can kind of also understand why why it's quite important to have them ladstones is very picturesque it's probably about half an hour walk through steep hills and boggy marsh but once you get there you get some pretty incredible views it's quite surreal in that it's one of the few places you can go where you can't really see any signs of civilization so you can see like one path which we use to get there but most of it's like you can can't see any roads or houses it's kind of like a secluded location definitely one of the things i quite enjoy about the lake destructive field like you're a little bit more in touch with nature landstones consist of two they're well they're huge boulders it's the rock's very sharp uh so like creates very small features the face which superpowers on is yeah generally all very small in cup [Music] crimps [Music] super powers um the start is very jade-esque i won't go into grades but aiden did describes me as harder than jade those start moves are very jade's but harder than jade in difficulty you kind of pull on two gastons put like in a really a really quite extreme drop knee you do like a small move into like a two-finger crimp and then reach like almost like full span into kind of like a small edge which is like a bit of a slot you have to get it quite accurately i end up getting it like two fingers because it's really wide and then kind of bring my right foot off and then adjust into four fingers and it's tension to move feet and you're tic tacking on i mean they're absolutely terrible holds um big wide moves on terrible holes with bad feet until you get into a high left side pull that's basically rubbish which is the aa stand and yeah you then basically do an 8a move um and you exit right as aiden did but the original manpower's exited left he could have taken an easier option even after it even after he'd done the aaa move he didn't bail off into the left i think he added hard climbing after that still [Music] impressive [Music] come on come on so uh i think like the style of the climbing is relatively similar to well it's just like very basic crimping so when i spent some time in like the likes of colorado the style of the moves were quite similar lots of like very small edges and like removing more statically between them so i kind of like could compare it to certain climbs i did out there it's been quite nice in that between all my trips away to uh around the world i've always been able to try it in between so then it gives me a relatively good idea of where it fits in amidst all those different climbs i've done abroad the last couple of years i've yeah i have traveled abroad two years ago i spent a long time in rockland in south africa which was amazing that was kind of like that was the first time i've really like committed a long trip to like a specific venue it was just that it was after a season where i'd mainly pursued competitions and it came to the end of the competition and season just committed like i think five weeks out there and yeah that was a real wake-up call to me like how much outdoor climbing meant to me sick and then last year i took a trip to colorado uh and stayed out there for a little yeah a similar amount of time nice come on chill sauce come on you've got it you know what to do out left really good stay tuned yeah much more picking up on like how much outdoor climbing meant to me and yeah i kind of really felt like i got into my stride a little more there all right won it come on come on mate come on really good nice come on solid aiden really good cool mate you've got it come on come on come on nice you know nice one there's almost an illusion that all of the world-class climbing lies in different countries or different continents and it was kind of out of my control this year but i ended up spending some time at home in the lake district and felt it took time now for me to really appreciate the quality of the climbing i had locally for me i've always been a little bit of a home bird and maybe that's become being more of an ethos this year actually is people are maybe looking into the back garden more than like off into the distance for me i like it's always been about trying to be happy if you're way less happy because you don't like flight or red river gorge or the buttermilk or something and have your bouldering trip then you know try it you know sort it out and get your trip organized and fly there but if you can be just as happy climbing somewhere nearby like if you can have like really nice experiences go to bed put your head on your pillow at night and be content why do you need to book you that plane ticket and you know burn all that fuel to get to somewhere that you don't really care about you don't integrate with a community you don't have any roots there you're like a pebble skimming across the surface just to go and tick a climb what the climbing has to offer locally is definitely as fulfilling if not more fulfilling but it has been for me this year anyway right at the end before i went back down to london i had two days one where i did superpowers and the next day i did calm with the trees uh the sits start to calm and the trees are tranquillitus i've always thought that's an amazing bit of rock as well like that's why i've sort of tried to show him stuff that i think does the lakes proud but that also like he would enjoy and suit his styles [Music] for me i think surprisingly like i said super powers was much harder i think it suits my style much more specifically like statically isolating on really small holds okay i have a session like two days before on superpowers where i've got i dropped the last hard move twice so i kind of went to that with the real intention to do it like i knew i could do it that session so but for me like the next day going to cut tranquilities that was like that was much more unexpected because the last session i had on that there was still a move i hadn't done and well i kind of figured out a new sequence and basically originally i on the second move i went straight from the start hold up to the slopey edge which you do the jump the final jump off and i used to go all the way from the start holding to that and then i found like a really small kind of crisp two-finger like kind of sloppy edge which was much more finger intensive but just allowed me to like slow down the move a little bit so i could i could kind of get it a little bit more reliable and i hadn't actually done the move into that two-finger edge the session i tried before and then like it felt like a bunch of very very low percentage moves thrown together i think it's hard to get that last jump reliable as well so i kind of was that was like a total shock when i topped out that was a bit surreal but i was like yeah i think i reckoned it was probably easier than superpowers but for me was like much more of a surprise for me when i actually did it what i think is incredible about what the last couple of months is um there's been a situation where we've had a really young talented kleiner who hasn't really got going but has the medium around this house to express himself and then i think globally how many instances have we ever seen of that if we take that into perspective that for me i was like oh [ __ ] like you haven't just had a good month like you've done something that's pretty impressive here for me it is inspiring but i can see for others how it would be a little bit dismaying almost his level this last three months has been stratus very he's almost pushed it onto him he has he's pushed it onto a new level british climbing in just like a six eight week period aiden didn't climb a load of like acs this year or whatever but what he did do was finally hit a resonance between his potential and what he can actually achieve and for him that level is like a world-class level if you ignore that and just look at the fact that someone that's trained their whole life and has put loads of effort into the sport into a subset of the sport managed to find something to express it on outdoors and then that the kind of happiness you get from that is i think something you'd never take away whereas he could go to an area which had easier grades or a different style and smash out a load of acs or something but it's the two are totally different and that's for me why the reason why maybe you don't need to travel is because if you can find a residency between what you're searching for and what you have nearby then that's when the sport suits you there are people developing really hard boulders around the uk but it didn't really get put in the spotlight i think because of that people will like see all these videos of some yes super wants in other countries like talking about how it's the best bouldering in the world and we'll think like that is like that's what they need for like a fulfilling climbing trip and then kind of lose sight of like the actual quality of the climbing they have like nearby and end up like flying halfway around the world like even myself i like to think i'm somewhat like environmentally conscious and definitely fell down that trap and this year would have would have likely flown halfway around the world to climb on some problems which i could probably have driven 15 minutes from my house and climb on equally good and hard problems [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Lattice Training

Views: 187,444

Keywords: climbing, training, climbing training, lattice training, rock climbing, climb, climbers high, climbers exercise, climbers, sport climbing, Aidan Roberts, bouldering, world class, story, boulder projects, elite boulderers, British bouldering, first ascents, trad climbing, Aidan Roberts Bouldering, aidan roberts training, aidan roberts climbing, Superpowers 8C, Outliers 8C, Railway 8C, Tranquilitas 8B+/C, Copperline 8B+, Hathi Junior 8B, Lady of the Forest 8B, multiple 8Bs

Id: ATE-tZo12mg

Length: 40min 5sec (2405 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020