grannies on the train (week 23 of 2024)
June 2, 2024•1,368 words
Today's post is about what I find to be one of the most interesting aspects of climbing! It is the interaction between analytic knowledge and bottom up intuition. It is quite an abstract concept and so I will try to explain this via a concrete example.
The problem
I am a frequent climber at Fit Bloc, a climbing gym in Singapore. My goal for the past year or so has been to send all the problems up to 5 bars in any set. It is a bit hard to say what the bars map onto in terms of V grades, but I would say that 5 bar = V4, 4 bar = V3 and so on. I have this as a long term goal because I would like to be a consistent, well rounded climber, and not just chase higher grades in a style that suits me. So far this has been a reasonable goal that has paid off, in the sense that it naturally forces me to work on styles that I don't particularly gravitate to (like slabs, coordination, dynos, pinches, slopers) and I have improved in those styles. The only downside is that it does take time away from projecting at a very high level, which I plan to introduce more into my training in the near future.
The left upper deck's set (May/June 2024) had a bunch of 5s that I managed to clear with some effort, except for the purple problem. This is a super weird problem with two cruxes: 1. hopping or whipping dynamically from a right side pull into a high left foot with no left hand hold and 2. standing up dynamically from an awkward position into a crimp without peeling off the wall. It may make more sense to see the Instagram video to get a sense of the problem, but it is not really the point of the post to discuss the details of this problem. Rather, I wanted to focus on the process by which the successful send came about.
The analytic solution
Since this is the last 5 bar in the set that I really wanted to send, I began the process of projecting. This usually means isolating the crux move and running a bunch of experiments to see what works and what doesn't. For the first crux I figured out that I could hack the intended beta with a hand foot match given that I am a shorter climber. The second crux is extremely frustrating. But after several attempts I believed that I have identified about 4-5 micro features in that one move that I could tweak and each helped me get just that bit closer. But it didn't come together.
Sometimes this is the part of climbing that can be pretty annoying and discouraging. I have in place an analytic solution involving so many details that I have gleaned from all the experiments - crimping the top most point of the edge, pressing down on the thumb to get more stability, adjusting the arc of the jump, identifying the exact placement of the foot holes, and many others - but the move doesn't succeed. It is frustrating because I am not the tallest or strongest or lightest climber around, and must rely more on technical precision to get through tricky moves like these. I have the technical solution, but cannot execute. Because this route is not a powerful one, fatigue cannot be the only reason for failure.
Waiting for the grannies
There is a really lovely and interesting discussion on YouTube about how one commits to dangerous and risky moves, especially in the kind of parkour that Toby Segar (and Storror) are well known for. I've linked the YouTube video below, but the main point of the discussion is that there is a kind of feeling that you feel before committing to the move (that you have full knowledge that you can definitely do - the move is well within your physical limits). Being able to identify and recognize this feeling is important to know to when to "go for it". Johnny Dawes called this feeling "the grannies on the train". There are two grannies on the train and when the train arrives they have to look and smile at you and at each other all sort of simultaneously. And that's the feeling.
A related concept in visual cognition is known as Quiet Eye. In a nutshell, it is a type of gaze behavior that experts engage in before doing some complicated thing. It applies to a wide range of domains, like in surgical practice, sports like billiards and archery, and free throws in basketball and many others. Experts look just that bit longer than novices, and have better performance. The hypothesis is that that extra time looking at the target gives visual attention more information about the problem, and more time for motor command systems in memory to formulate a motor response to the problem. Anecdotally, this idea of giving yourself time makes sense to me when I work on coordis or dynos - if I can slow down the sequences just enough (but not too slow of course) I usually have a much better chance of sending the moves, and that might be because that extra bit of time lets my body construct and initiate the motor commands needed for successful execution.
So, back to this purple problem. This stand up move is NOT the same as jumping off a bridge. It is not that risky (although possible to slip and cheese grate your way down the wall). But there are many parallels. The second crux (at least to me) was not a move where only one thing had to be done right. It felt to me that a combination of small details that to come together for it to work. On reflection, it would have helped on the first session to take more time in between attempts to clear my mind and try to let this feeling emerge and not just initiated the jump when all the things were set up. I may have needed more time and patience to let my mind do the rest.
The send (yay!)
So I went home disappointed from that first session where I spent so much on that one problem, and felt like I really understood the problem, but, no send. Two days later I was back for my final session at Fit Bloc before my long vacation. So there was a lot of extra pressure because this was my last session to send it. And it would be super nice to finish all the 5s in the set! I wanted to try hard for it.
I basically jumped on it as my final problem for the day and gave it real try hard send attempts. A really interesting feeling developed as I put in more attempts. It felt like the micro-beta (for both cruxes) were becoming integrated more and more with each try. Movements felt fluid and smooth, but strong and intentional. Timing of the jump felt better. After about 5 attempts I could sense that the send was near. In the attempt that resulted in the send, I noticed that I had a much longer quiet eye before the dynamic stand up as compared to my previous attempts (I filmed all the attempts in the second session). As the stand was initiated, perhaps the grannies were smiling with me.
Moral of the story? I believe peak climbing performance is that magical combination of not only just having a clear problem structure and your personal solutions to that problem, but having the time and space for your cognitive and motor systems to integrate this information for the perfect execution of the solution. I don't know how or why this process works but maybe that is the magical part about climbing. Such sends are the most memorable and meaningful, even if they are not the hardest or most exciting sends.
Related links
My solution to Fit Bloc Upper Deck Left purple 5 bar problem: https://www.instagram.com/csqsiew/reel/C7lVJxvO8_T/
Johnny Dawes and Toby Segar's discussion about commitment on risky moves (from 11:00 onwards):