Uncategorized

Palmersutra 004: How To Improve Your Virtual Climbing Experience

Ω Tired of the same old virtual climbing experience? Sick of logging in to find that everyone else’s lives are as dull as yours? Been banned from your local climbing forum for reading somebody their pedigree?

Well, here’s Palmersutra’s 5 top tips to improving your ‘climbing’ internet experience:

1. Don’t bother visiting any websites other than Powerband, and perhaps Flickr. In particular, stay away from climbing fora; they will only lure you into writing something that you regret.

2. If you must post on climbing fora, make sure you suck up to the forum hosts/moderators as much as possible. Research what climbs they’ve done (or at least would like to have done) and ask them lots of really silly questions about those climbs. Agree with everything they say, and make sure you remind them (and the rest of the climbing world) what a great job they’re doing, at least once a day.

3. When creating an account, use this picture of Justin Bieber as your avatar. Chicks love it when you do that. Also, make sure you use an obscure pseudonym so that nobody knows who you really are. Mine is “JP”. Nobody has a clue who I am.

4. Resist the urge to respond to endless posts from people who are completely without initiative asking: “Is there any climbing in New Zealand?” or “Where is Castle Hill?” or “Can I buy food in New Zealand?”. If you really want to help, suggest they visit Australia instead - their boulders don’t polish as quickly as ours.

5. Last but not least, remember to scramble your IP address - you never know who is watching. Eh Derek? Ω

2010: Year Of The Freak Accident

Ω ‘Get Well’ wishes to Rach the Muss, who nearly lost her finger recently while tending to her horse. Apparently her finger got caught in a rope attached to the frisky equine, and (more or less) desheathed. She is now recuperating at home, training the ‘back three’. What is it with this year… Ω

Hard Grit

Ω Ex-Dunedin boulderer Oliver Miller (now based in the UK) has been firing on the grit lately, with ascents of many grit classics including Brad Pitt V10 (his first problem of the grade), Tetris V9, The Terrace V9, Blind Date V8 and the old skool Zippy’s Traverse V7/8 Ω

Guess Who Now?

Ω One for the ladies! Ω

Guess Who?

Ω Zac Orme has repeated Mr Olympia Redux V10 in the Bronx Cave at Turakirae Head. But more importantly, who are these two chaps? Ω

Palmersutra 003: Three Cheers For The Human Body

Ω Last time, I promised that Palmersutra 003 would provide dating tips for the fulltime climber. Regrettably, those desperate and date-less amongst you will have to wait a few weeks longer (not a material deferral for most I expect) for my ‘sure to rise’ romantic insights because, as a consequence of a recent serious gravitational interaction I was privileged enough to endure, I feel compelled to pay homage to the truly incredible object that is the human body.

Gravity is “the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped” (Wikipedia). In other words, gravity is the force that makes climbing a contact sport. It is (more or less) the force that rips your skin, tears your muscles, pops your chads and snaps your bones.

Yet gravity is also the force that makes climbing…well…climbing. Without it, it would be called floating. And yes, at times (actually most of the time when I’m climbing) gravity is an indomitable foe, yet we all struggle on in the vain hope that, like Derek Thatcher, we too may escape the space-time continuum one day.

On reflection, in the last 15 years of climbing, my body (hardly the most robust specimen) has taken a bit of a beating. Yet, broken neck aside, I don’t recall taking more than a few weeks off. It is amazing how much you can climb with popped shoulders, busted pulleys, lateral epicondylitis, chronic back, knee and bicep pain. Some of my proudest climbing moments have been achieved in spite of a host of injuries, complaints and ailments. Seems a little silly in hindsight, but it is not an uncommon thing.

Most of my climbing friends (with a few notable hypochondriacal exceptions) have suffered for the cause. Repeated shoulder dislocation has been popular with a few, smashed legs and heels have been reasonably common and soft-tissue finger injuries and all-over-body tendonitis are seemingly always in fashion. Some days, climbing seems more like war than sport.

If there was an easy way to measure and compare the amount of energy expended by me and my climbing mates (a) climbing and (b) healing as a result of climbing-related injuries, my guess is that the ratio would 1:1 - and we have done a lot of climbing. Yet, day after day, week after week, we all hit the wall, the crag and the mountains and just expect our (hardly super-human) bodies to soak up the punishment. And for the most part our bodies oblige.

So I wish to propose a toast to the human body. Thanks for being impressively relentless and relentlessly impressive. Ω

Mechanical failure

Powerband mastermind and all-around nice guy John Palmer has sufferred a ten metre ground fall while climbing in the Gorges du Tarn in France. Information suggests he landed on his back after his belayer’s grigri failed to lock (reason unknown). John has a broken neck and is in hospital in Montpellier. There is no evidence of spinal cord damage at this stage. Best wishes John.

Palmersutra 002: Are My Long Levers Holding Me Back?

Ω When I started rock climbing, it seemed that being tall(ish) with a positive 6cm ape index was a distinct advantage. On the slabs at Baring Head, and later in Quantum Field, the ability to reach that extra centimeter (or extra metre) further than some was the difference between being O for Orsome and being too short to be awesome. To be honest, I felt kinda smug about it too. I used to titter away as, on any given day at the bottom of some below-average reach-dependent slab or other, the assembled midgets would thrash with their T-Rex arms, like dolphins in a drift net. I knew I was weaker than them all, but it didn’t matter. I loved rock climbing then.

Sadly, something has changed in the last decade (ie. since Zac Orme was born). I call it ‘The Global Conspiracy By Midget Climbers To Spoil It For The Ectomorphs’ or TGCBMCTSIFTE (which is Czech for ‘9/11 was a hoax’). It is no longer fashionable to be tall and skinny. Indeed, the World Health Organisation (‘WHO’ or should that be ‘Dr WHO’?) reports that in 2005 approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight, and at least 400 million adults were obese. Dr WHO predicts that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese. All other things being equal, that means lots more short, fat climbers. And they’re gonna need something to climb, and it’s gonna need to have BIG holds.

That brings me to the point of this apparently pointless discourse: all the hard problems these days have big holds; not necessarily positive holds, but BIG ones. Gone are the mono-stacks and those graton cruxes that invert the first joint of your fingers so that they make little ‘S’ shapes. Now you don’t need to be tall to climb hard, you just need to be strong.

I doubt any of today’s muscle-bound midgets have any idea what it feels like to split a tip or to crimp so hard that the edge of your fingernail slices through your cuticle. They won’t be able to distinguish between the ‘snap’ of a severed flexor tendon and the ‘pop’ of a ruptured pulley. Most certainly won’t have the slightest inkling how miserable climbing can (and should) be. To quote American climbing filmmaker Mike Call (circa 1993), “climbing is pain”.

Some more statistics: 99.6% of all climbing walls build since the iPod was invented are overhanging. Excessive pride, ego and avarice are the composite cause of 92.3% of all knee pain (excluding knee pain caused by something else, like damage to the knee). 3 out of 4 of the best boulderers in New Zealand are less than 5ft tall (Stuart Kurth being the notable exception). Last but not least, the hardest ‘completely less than vertical’ problem in New Zealand is V8, the grade that Charlie Creese climbed in 1962.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that climbing is no longer the sport for me. Regrettably, there is little else that I can do now – my tips are bleeding, my fingers have turned inside out and my knees are completely shot.

Coming next: Palmasutra 003 - Dating Tips For The Fulltime Climber Ω

Tanks in Hueco

Ω Derek has edited together some of his footage from Hueco. Goooood. Ω

Hueco Tanks 2010 Kiwi Tour from derek thatcher on Vimeo.

He’s So Super

Ω ZacAtak™, fresh from his sodden demolition of the Cave, has made an ascent of Sharma’s Superman (V10) at Flock Hill. The lad is unstoppable. He described his ascent as “just fulfilling my daily quota.” He and James were left with a bitter taste in their mouths however, as they arrived home to find their pad burgled. LAME!

Meanwhile, Rach the Muss gained an elegant ascent of Mullet Arete, keeping her spotters interested the whole way. See the video below.

In the first ascent category, Derek wandered around trying to find a trench to wedge himself into, but eventually found a new squeeze. He made juice out of the slopey arete left of Rastamonkey (on the Leopard boulder). Name unknown. Go try it and give it a name yourself, that’s what Stoo would do (or me for that matter, though I wouldn’t even have to climb it…) Ω