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 from 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 U.S. or abroad. The fastest time ever recorded on a speed wall is 5.48 seconds, but could that time go down? New world record! Today, we're gonna look at why climbing a speed wall in five seconds flat is almost impossible. To find out what it takes, I climbed with one of the fastest American speed climbers. Okay. Talked big wall speed climbing with Alex Honnold. Yeah, it's funny because when you're speed climbing big walls, you don't think about your lactate threshold, you just do it over and over and just, you know, it improves. And the physics of flying up the equivalent of a four-story building with a biomechanist. Like in speed climbing or swimming, the step procedure 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 we'll see for speed climbing in the Olympics has only been around for a few years. The very fastest climber, Iranian Reza Alipour, set the world record at 5.48 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 to sprint up the wall. So we're here today at Earthtrek'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 in speed climbing, right? Yeah. All right, 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 have never climbed the speed wall. Awesome. This is gonna be great. All right, I haven't either. I am 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. All right, Alex's turn. Then it was Honnold's turn. Not surprisingly, he was much faster. He made it to the top in just under 30 seconds. 29 seconds. I feel all winded and kind of shaky. So the progression was 75 seconds, 29 and a half seconds. Let's see it, Jordan. Even with a couple of missteps, he scrambled up the wall in eight and a half seconds. Just a walk in the park. I know, it's pretty classic though that with mistakes and as a warmup, it's still eight and a 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 holds 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, climbing very slowly. Now take a look at Honnold 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, Honnold 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 warmup run. A few slips too. And you missed a couple of holds. All right, 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? Just so that I didn't have to think about the footholds as much. Basically so I could focus on just making big moves between the handholds. All right, and then you just blazed through it, eight and a half seconds. So how do you trim off 20 seconds? Well, part of it is that he didn't have to think about anything because he knows exactly what to do. So his body's 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 to do but improve. That's the spirit. How did you get faster? For one, knowing the route helps and knowing the holds, like where you have to grab them and when you have to grab them. Because 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 have to think about that either. As you might expect, the start is crucial. If you have a bad start, it can kind of ruin your run because as you push off, you have to carry that momentum all the way up through the entire route. So if you don't get as fast at the start, typically your run isn't as fast, even if you can catch up speed. What fishmen and many other elite speed climbers do is bypass an entire hold. You want to go foot and hand at the same time. So you get back, you generate, as you pull, you push off of this foot, cut, and then you catch like this. And then you kind of start to barn door but you want to carry the barn door through. And then fly upward. 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 the 15 meter wall to 5.48 seconds. Like it just shaves so much time off and it almost makes you flow better through the next like three or four moves because you're like better set up there already. But the Reza is not easy. I struggled. So did Honnold. But even without the Reza start, could we get faster? We each went again to find out. Yeah, nice. That's really good. I shaved 40 seconds off my first time, running it in 35 seconds. Honnold took five seconds off, doing a 24.5 second run. And Fishman, Fishman crushed it. 6.62 seconds. And your record is 6.38, right? So that's crazy. And that's like, you know, you were saying on just on any given day you come out. I feel like your record could be a lot lower. Yeah. Because if any random morning, we're not even that warmed up. We haven't even, you know, I mean we just showed up and did a little climbing. Most, most days I'll get average anywhere from like 6.5 to 6.8 or 9. But it all just depends on the run and the day you're having. So would you consider that a good run? Yeah. I think that's like surprisingly good. Yeah, it's a decent average for me. I think for being like semi-warm too. And how many of those do you have in you on a given day? Anywhere, sometimes we'll do two runs a day. Sometimes we'll do eight or nine. But yeah. Yeah, but it doesn't take many and you're cooked, right? Yeah. It's funny to think that doing six seconds of exertion six times and you're done for the day. You're like, man, I worked out for 45 seconds today. That's a tough one. Totally anaerobic, right? And what you're doing is much more aerobic. Yeah, what I'm doing is 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 ropeless 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 fast. Which is part of the reason why people aren't climbing the nose in minutes. Right? Yeah, yeah. That's the reason why it takes a couple hours to climb pretty much most big walls outside. Could you apply indoor speed climbing tactics to big walls? Not exactly. The thing about the speed wall indoors is that there's absolutely no risk. So you can be as free as you want. Like, you can take risks. But outdoors, if you take risks, 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 Florine. It's 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 nose 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. Ching, ching, ching. Yeah, 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. Climbing there to rest the outside of my hand. Sort of. We went to the gym's crack wall, which simulates the fissured 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 then there's the weight of all the safety equipment you have to take. You've got this extra added weight. This is probably, you know, 11, 12, 13 pounds. 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 Florine 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. 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 an indoor climbing wall to El Cap, I mean, yeah, you could do it in half an hour. But it's just hard to imagine climbing that quickly while still placing protection and clipping the 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 Lagrenier. And I was the first champion, speed climbing champion in France in 1989. And now I'm working in biomechanics, in climbing. Lagrenier has studied speed climbing data and found that the fastest athletes optimize their route to the top. It is like the fable of the hare and the turtle. The hare goes very fast and spends his time skipping and walking along the path. So it will travel a lot of way and it will take a lot longer than the turtle 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 Lagrenier's research. The blue line is the path that a climber's center of mass takes from the bottom of the climb to the top. The red lines are the furthest that a climber's 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. When the route was created, the idea of the route setter was to position the climber to the left in the starting position, like so. And thus the first four handholds of the route are positioned to the left of the routine lane. 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 Reza, it's necessary to arrive on the third handhold with a very high speed. But not all 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 fishers was therefore to standardize the surface of the walls to allow climbers to invent new strategies that will allow to climb faster and faster. Fishman coached Honnold 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 Honnold pulled one off in 22.3 seconds. Neither of us ever completed the Reza, and I struggled with the dynos, big leaps from one hold to another. Le Grandeur thinks that one of the ways for climbers to go faster is to eliminate as many dynos as possible from their climbs. Let's face it, those big dynamic moves might look awesome and bouldering, but that doesn't make them fast on the speed wall. Here's a chart of climbing velocity up the speed wall. It's constantly rising and falling, as the athletes progress up the climb. But the greatest variations come from dynos. I think that the dyno is a very, very technical movement that doesn't help to gain time, but which can lose a lot. Find a way to maintain contact through that same sequence of holds, and climbers could go even faster. Le Grandeur thinks that with other optimizations, the ultimate time in this already fast sport could drop by a lot. I think that the current limit is around 4.50 seconds. So about a whole second faster. Yeah, yeah. So speed climbing is very young discipline that will greatly, greatly evolve with integration into the Olympic Games program. 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. That is absurd. But with more athletes and coaches working on the wall, more variations like the Reza might be found to smooth and speed up the path. That will be, in my opinion, the greatest challenge for coaches and baromechanics. 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.