2021 the Olympic Games included rock climbing for the first time. It also attracted more people’s attention to the sport. Whether new or experienced, a question that almost every climber wants to ask: How best I’d better climb?
I want to discuss this question from a data point of view. Analyzing the data one 8a.nu website, where it has one of the world’s largest rock climbing community.
First thing first, we wonder how well we can climb and how long it would probably take. Next, influenced by our different heights, we may have different climbing styles or different ways of moves to deal with a route (the “beta”). We can take a look at our heights and compare them to people in the community. Finally, we will look at some popular climbing destinations. Hope it will give you some ideas for your next climbing holiday! 🧗 🥳
So three questions:
1. How long could it take to climb my first 6a, 7a, or 8+?
2. How is my height compared with other climbers?
3. Where are the popular climbing places?
Q1: How long could it take to climb my first 6a, 7a, or 8+?
We take the shortest time between two adjacent grades of climbs sent by any of the climber. The mean and the standard deviation of many of such shorest time as a data points constitute the expected time between two grades. Add up these times over grades, and you will get a curve.
Expected Progress Rate
In the following curves, each square and dots represent the outdoor grade for climbers who have climbed outdoors for a given amount of time. By observing the distance between the neighbors on the x-axis, we can calculate the expected time required to push our grades to the next level.
The first is rope climbing and the second is bouldering:
For example, as an average climber who starts to climb outdoors, it takes about 1 year 3 months for men and 1 year 5 months for women to send their first outdoor 6a. From here to the first 7a, it will take an extra 1 year 1 month for men and 1 year 3 months for women of bouldering outdoor.
The rope climbing curves are composed of 96,115 men and 4,726 women. Curves on bouldering come from the climbs of 16,850 men 2,402 women. For data above grade 8, it is collapsed as one range.
Insights:
- Like many skills, it will improve rapidly at first, and then the time required to improve will increase. Or instead, I like to see the level up of each grade as a non-linear growth.
- The two climbing principles may not be completely equivalent in concept, but their curves are highly similar on a growth trend.
- As you can imagine, the higher the level, the fewer people can climb, so does the error increases. Similarly, we have a smaller group of female climbers, and it makes the overall female prediction errors larger.
- The difference on progress rate between men and women may exist or may be negligible, however, given the statistical error it has, it would be hard to say. In fact, it actually shows that the individual differences are greater than the gender differences.
Caveat: Climbers who actively log their ascent activities on 8a.nu are probably going to be pretty good. So take the plot results as a driving force.
Q2: How is my height compared with other climbers?
Height has always been a hot topic within climbers and it is definitely relevant when talking about the beta for some problems. Maybe you have heard a similar dialogue like this:
Small A: This hold is too far for me to reach! You are just tall so that’s so easy for you… 😒
Big B: I can’t move when I put my body in this small space! At least you can jump to reach it when you are shorter. No one can understand me… 😞
Well, these may reflect some part of truths, but since height usually cannot be changed, we may be able to learn how top athletes handled the same route with different heights.
The data has 25,593 male climbers and 3964 female climbers who left their heights in the information. Most of them are amateur climbers, or climbers who do not compete for a living. According to the order of height, the accumulated proportion plot is drawn and you can see where you are among the community. Then, I mark some Olympic athletes with very different heights upon the plot, so you can know whose moving signature you might be able to imitate.
I deliberately selected one or two Olympic athletes from different height ranges and marked where they are on the plot. This does not mean that the height distribution of athletes is even. Only some athletes’ heights were put on the official website, so we can not know the height distribution as a whole. On the other hand, the 8a.nu data contains many excellent climbers, so it is still referenced.
Insights:
- Cumulative distribution function (CDF) helps to quickly identify which height range you belong to among climbers, but it is not relevant to which height will be beneficial to climbing. It is more to help distinguishing a style or beta version that might be usful to you from others.
- The medium height of male climbers is 178 cm and that of female is 165 cm. If the distribution fits in a simple Gaussian, the results are 177.8 ±8.0 cm and 164.8 ±7.9 cm respectively. It is also interesting to compare it with contemporary national average. For example, the height ratio of male to female is about 1.08 in the climbing community, consistent with many countries.
Q3: Where are the popular climbing places?
Okay, now you say you’re ready to climb your next level, so give me something that can make you excited. Let’s see where other climbers like to go.
The top 3 countries where the most rope climbing routes had been sent are in Spain (22%), USA (10%), and France (9%). Same ranking for bouldering, are USA (30%), France (11%), and Spain (7%). The numbers only indicate which countries have most climbing logs have been recorded in the data. Some countries may have many crags, so there accumulate many climbs. Or it is just that most climbers in this community come from these countries and they climb nearby. So the crags I list below are the most popular within these countries, while it can not guarantee also be the most popular in the world. Moreover, the exact numbers change time by time when we have more climbs.
Nevertheless, when you happen to be in the US or in the East Europe, consider the following places to go:
Rope climbing
Rodellar in Spain:
Rodellar is known for limestone, huge caves and long and steep roof routes offering technical climbing. The climbing style is powerful and athletic requiring plenty of stamina but looks very spectacular.
Red River Gorge in the US
Red River is in Kentucky. The climbing style is steep with large pumps, from jugs, pockets, slopers, and horns. Often the pump is the challenge, not the moves or holds themselves. The rock is heavy iron sandstone that offers great friction. Though it’s best known as a sport climbing destination, the Red actually has almost as many traditional climbing lines to be led.
Céüse in France
Limestone. It is known for long, hard, and steep routes but there is also something for everyone here. The cliffs are perched on top of a 2000m mountain with a majestic view on the south of France. It has some historical importance such as ‘Biographie’, the first 9a+ in the world.
In addition to the above places, Kalymnos in Greece is also very popular. It occupies the most popular 7a/7b routes in the data. A place sits back to the blue sea and blue sky, down with food and wine, who can refuse such a vacation? Also, the Antalya area in Turkey is also worth checking. It is being more and more popular these years.
Bouldering
Bishop in the US
Bishop is in California. It is blessed with perfect climbing conditions with just a little rainfall. The magnificent backdrop of mountains, semi-deserts, and rocky foothills create an unforgettable scenery. The rocks are volcanic tuff and granite providing world-class high quality problems.
Fontainbleau in France
Fontainbleau located in a forested area south of Paris. It is the most historic in the well-developed bouldering area today. Fontainbleau has fine-grained white sandstone with many interesting shapes and a variety of problems waited for you to explore.
Albarracín in Spain
Like Fontainbleau, Albarracin has many huge ancient sandstone blocks and situated in a forest. The rock here is a distinctive red sandstone, a little rougher than Fontainebleau’s white sandstone, which are broken up with small crimps or massive pockets.
I could only list three popular places each. Apart from these, there are also some places that have grown much attention and visits these years, for example like Magic Wood in Switzerland, and I was lucky enough to visit there too. I’ll leave those to you to discover.
P.S. I try to post more athletes other than the Olympic finalists. I hope you like these pictures. There are also many inspiring and spectacular climbs sent by professional athletes or amateur climbers in the same places or other places. I bet you will start to get excited when you visit more climbing websites and start planning your next climb.
The dataset
The data can be accessed on “kaggle 8a.nu Climbing Logbook”. It was prepared by collecting the information on 8a.nu website by web-scraping. The 8a.nu website has one of the world’s largest climbing communities online where climbers can record their climbs and check other's ascents here. This dataset was prepared in September 2017 by David Cohen, with information regarding users, their ascents, grades, body indexes, personal information, etc.
Conclusion
The code can be accessed on my github or kaggle Notebook.
This analysis is not intended to provide a certain standard. On the contrary, as the data show, there are great differences among individuals. I simply wish to know where I am statistically among climbers so I can optimize my training and expectations the best.
Besides, there are also many principles of climbing that cannot be reflected in this data, for example, ice climbing, trad climb, Alpin climb, big wall, high altitude expeditions, etc. The climbing world is so specialized, but at the same time it is also so all-inclusive that everyone explores their way and defines their favorite.
For me, the happiest thing about climbing is to grow up with people around, share the present in a beautiful place, and keep crushing the limit.
Reference
- How long before you get “Good” as bouldering, kaggle kernel, by Aaron Trefler
- Plotting progression times per grade, kaggle kernel, by Durand D’souza
- Climber-characteristic-analysis, github repo, by stevebachmeier
