Date: December 26th, 2012
How to hold an ice tool: Three grips.
note–I just shot a little video of this, I’ll try to add it shortly, having issues. Until then here’s one I shot two years ago–it doesn’t have the nice “relaxed grip,” but it does show the hand rotation from “swing” to “grip.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChNVI4eZ_k4&list=UUK_d-RVpGjtvIYsCuXLAguA&index=2
It’s clinic and ice coaching season, and I’ve been learning a lot of small things about ice climbing and how to teach people to ice climb better. I really enjoy finding these little teaching methods that allow people to go from beating their way up the ice to flowing up it with purpose, security, style and fun. I obsess about how to communicate subtle refinements that make a big difference to the people I’m working with. I recently figured out a better way to teach people how to hang onto an ice tool, or at least it helped them swing and climb ice better. Here it is:
On modern leashless ice tools I use three different grips, often in seconds: There’s the “Swing” hand position, the “Hold On” position, and the “Fist of Rage.” The “Swing” grip is, captain obvious here, for swinging, and very few people do it right. To swing well I start with my hand fairly relaxed, and the upper part of my fingers aligned with the SIDE of the tool. If you make a “Karate chop” hand with all the bones in your hand lined up totally with your wrist and arm and then open the thumb up a little and just relax your fingers and hand that’s about the alignment for swinging a tool (bit tighter with the lower fingers, but the bones in the upper parts of your fingers, bones in your hand, and bones in your lower arm should all be aligned). Most people grab an ice tool and grip it with the upper parts of their fingers in a “fist” position, with the upper part of their fingers facing the ice, and not at 90 degrees to it.. This “fist” position does not allow the tool to swing properly at all, the wrist just won’t flex right. It’s the wrist that acts as the “hub” for swinging an ice tool; lock the hub and you can’t swing an ice tool fast, and if you can’t swing an ice tool fast it won’t go into the ice…
The “grip” position is fairly loose again, but with the lower fingers rotated slightly around the tool. Almost all of my “holding” is done with my lower two fingers. I was playing with this recently while training, it’s quite interesting how little the upper two fingers do in general ice climbing, even when it’s really steep. Your hand should be pretty relaxed, comfortable, there should be some degree of space between the upper fingers and the tool. Try it, you may be surprised how this works. Opening up your hands will keep them a lot warmer, and also relax your mind, which will make you climb better.
The “Fist of Rage” is primarily used when you’re gripped, on hard mixed climbs, and by most novices and even those who should know better but have enough power to substitute that for skill. As it sounds, the tool is gripped in a fist, all fingers holding on and at 90 degrees to the ice. It’s impossible to swing the tool effectively in this position; try holding a tool in the “first or rage” position and you’ll see that the pick points off at about 45 degrees, and the wrist blocks the swing. But this is a great grip for hard mixed climbing; you can lock your little finger down into the bottom of the tool.
So every time I build a placement I rotate my hand slightly toward the outside to get it into a “swing” orientation, swing away until I’ve got something bomber (no pecking like a chicken, we’re ice climbing here, make it SOLID unless it’s a hook deep enough to hold a 500 pound tuna), rotate my hand slightly to the “grip” position, and relax. If I’m going to cut loose for a big swing or something then I go for the Fist of Rage. But it’s this rotation between the swing and grip position, every single placement, and opening up my hand and relaxing that allows for an effective swing, warm hands, and secure placements. Of course, you have to remember to rotate back to the “swing” grip after each placement too…
There are of course a thousand refinements to this idea. Sometimes I’ll put my thumb on the back of my tool when pecking on very thin ice where it’s more like chipping your way up than climbing (I know I just said not to peck, ha ha!). Or flipping my hand totally over on the tool for big reaches on mixed climbs… Lots of variety, but understanding how to get your fingers relaxed and properly oriented when swinging will really help your swing.
Posted in: Blog
Date: December 17th, 2012
Newtown Shootings: It’s our whole North American culture that’s sick, and that likely includes you and me. Let’s top blaming segments and look at the whole: too many kids sitting around alone in dark rooms playing violent video games. Too little good health care, especially mental health care. Ridiculous NRA idiots (and I own guns, don’t start that). A society that widely believes in delusional idiocy like “The Secret” and religious fundamentalism is going to produce citizens who can’t tell the difference between reality and shooting other citizens. Eat complete garbage for decades, mix in anti-depressants, anti-hyperactive drugs, never exercise, never get smacked in the face with a tree branch or smell a fresh pine tree and reality will become something else. Watch greed-head TV where money and fake boobs are worshipped over taking care of others or being a good citizen. Continue poisoning our environment and ourselves with complex chemical interactions that are only faintly understood, but even what we understand is bad. Drill the hell out of everything with ever-more damaging environmentally disastrous methods so we can delay the inevitable transition to running our economy on something other than fossil fuels. Pay so much interest on the debt and money into the military budget (yet not spend enough on our serving soldiers or vets, another crime) that there’s not much left over. Mix in huge class sizes and low-paid teachers, and to me it’s not surprising insanity like Newtown happens, it’s only surprising it doesn’t happen more often. No one component in the above screed is fatally toxic (and I missed hundreds), it’s the mix that’s toxic.
So, North America, anyone want to actually CHANGE how things work? Get outside more often, eat better, have decent health care, get some reasonable gun laws on the books, stop driving around in cars so much, love each other more and be better humans? If the answer is yes then things might change, otherwise expect more Newtowns. So let’s stop looking at the one pet cause we all want to blame, and recognize that if things continue on as they are we are truly screwed. Change.
Posted in: Blog
Date: December 14th, 2012
Bozeman Ice Festival “Learnings”
A friend of mine calls lessons learned while out doing mountain sports, “Learnings.” “Learnings” are things gleaned from intense experiences and pensive reflection in the mountains and life; sometimes they are fundamental truths that re-shape personal reality, other times just little things learned that make the passage of time more pleasurable. I thought a lot about what I’ve learned this fall, all of which came together over the last three days at the Bozeman Ice Festival.
The Bozeman Ice Festival is a ritual tribal gathering grounds, a place where normally responsible civilians from all walks of life put on their Goretex battle clothes and spend a few days listening to the tribal explorers tell tall tales from far-off lands; get half-frozen, fully drunk; and ritually scarred from flying ice. There are memorials for the dead, celebrations of the living and always, always a sense of community and shared passion that is only found in the ice tribe’s gatherings. I attended my first Bozeman Ice Fest back when my slideshow had actual physical slides, so that had to be well over ten years ago; a lot has changed since then, and I found myself thinking back over the last 15 years of training, competing and mixed climbing. It was 15 years ago that I quit a great job to go climb, fly and adventure full-time. For some reason I really felt that passage of time at Bozeman, and kept reflecting on it all, and learning.
Learnings about climbing ice:
-The steeper the ice gets the more important it is to really finish your movement by getting your hips into the wall with your legs straight. If you look at a person’s body in the locked-off position on steep ice it makes a mild back-bend, or “C” with the pelvis the centre of the arch. This moves the upper body out away from the ice (especially important on really steep ice) and allows room to swing, and puts the most weight on the crampons and not the arms.
–There is a simple, repeatable pattern for climbing steep ice. I first taught “cycles” of movement at Bozeman more than a decade ago. One tool high, arm straight, move feet over, move feet up to the same height, stand up, place tool, relax, repeat. Only the arms or legs should be bent, never both at the same time. Repeat to the top. I see this style a lot in Canada, but it still needs to spread more. Too many climbers are stuck in the 70s for ice climbing, and have both their arms and legs bent at the same time. It’s possible to climb any piece of ice with bad technique, but the goal is to float it with a high level of security, safety and fun.
-If your knees are slightly below your hip joints, or your femurs slightly “less” than parallell to the ground is about perfect for starting the stand-up move each cycle. This puts the lock-off in the right spot for most people; if the femurs are more than parallell with the ground (feet too high) then the lock-off hand position will be too low. Femurs less than 80 degrees and the lock-off hand will be too high. Neither one is good.
– Put your helmet toward the ice, don’t look away from falling ice. Not one of my clinic participants required steri-stripping this year. I really drove that home during my second clinic as the ice was brutal, and we got out without blood.
-Staying warm is an active process. Yesterday my clinic and I did about 150 squats to stay warm at -15C., plus ran up and down the hill, etc. It was tolerable even though I had to talk a lot due to the clinic’s size. I take for granted all the things I do to stay warm, from swinging my legs to squats to windmills etc. If you’re cold it’s own damn fault…
Competition and Training Learnings:
I last competed in climbing about six years ago, but I got psyched to do the Bozeman Icebreaker mixed comp because so many of my friends were involved with it, and it looked like a lot of fun. I was also having a really good fall of rock climbing, and got in some good days of mixed action too. I don’t think I’m in the best shape of my life, but with a good base of hard (for me) rock climbing and a month of harder mixed climbing I started to feel decent this fall. I was shooting to win the over-40 division, but ended up flat-out winning against what I consider to be a pretty darn strong field.
-Winning is fun. Losing sucks. I’ve done my fair share of both over the years, and I wish athletes and non-athletes would be more real about both these emotions. Competition brings out huge emotions, storms of internal dialogue, demons and angels, but actually showing or even truly feeling these emotions is somehow taboo; the athletic ideal is a big smile for a win, and a bit of solemn reflection for a loss. I have never felt in the centre of the emotional range after winning or losing; I want to rip the walls down and dance on tables when I win, and crawl into a black pit with spikes around the lip when I have a shitty performance. I think pretty much every competitor who every really tried feels this way. When you put yourself fully into anything there will be mental repercussions. So let’s stop pretending that competition is some sort of new-age self-awareness clinic, it’s just not. It can be massive fun at best and head-on car crash carnage at worst. The trick is to use both the negative and the positive to examine everything that led to the experience; emotions are fuel for achievement in my view, but only if the athlete is honest about how he or she feels, and why. Covering intense emotion with psycho-babble anesthetic does not lead to athletic improvement or self-knowledge.
-Training partners really, really matter, as does a good training scene. I had the good luck to get out a lot this fall with a whole host of really good people, which turned into a good scene. Three weeks before the comp I belayed my friend Ben Firth when he sent an M10 despite having no right bicep and severe nerve damage in his fingers from a bad skiing accident; he very nearly died and everyone said he would never climb again, but there he was going hard! It was one of the raddest sends I’ve ever seen, I damn near cried with joy to see it. Four days before the comp I belayed Sarah Hueniken when she sent a solid M11, the first woman in North America to do so, and the stoke was again just insane I had a really random experience with this at Bozeman; I taught a clinic all day with Whit Magro, and then we jumped on a classic local M11 and got after it for a few hours. We totally destroyed ourselves, got super psyched, and both sent the route in Bozeman. I wouldn’t have sent the comp route without his training psyche.. So many other good examples of this in the last two months; every one of my climbing and training partners was with me when I clipped the chains at the top of the route. Cross Fit and other training communities have this figured out; bad days and good days are better with other motivated people.
–Perfection in training doesn’t exist. No day will ever be “perfect,” nor will any month or year, or even competition. But doing your best to train is perfect. One of my best workouts this year was in a hotel room in England. I was jet-lagged, couldn’t sleep, and finally just got up and did finger-tip pullups on the bathroom door jambs (they were steel and strong enough), pushups, squats and some other stuff with the desk, which I at one point pulled over on top of myself…. I’m pretty sure that workout gave me the juice to finish the route at Bozeman.
-Flying, climbing and paddling comps are all obviously different, but they share one common theme: You’ve got to complete the course/time/whatever the standard is before going faster. I always worry more about climbing to the top of a route or flying a comp paragliding course completely than I do about going fast or trying to make the experience fit pre-conceived metrics of speed or position relative to other competitors. If I’m flying well I am fast. If I’m climbing well I am fast. If I’m bouldering well I don’t worry about the time limits in bouldering comps, I just climb the damn problems. Trying to be fast or other external metrics just results in bad results, of which I’ve had quite literally hundreds if not thousands over the years. Every time I’ve won I’m just doing my sport as best as I can. Most every time I’ve lost I’ve been thinking too much and not just executing as I’ve trained to do. In Bozeman I just climbed; rested when I needed to, but goal 1 was to send the route. I knew I might come second if I rested too much, but I could come last if I fell off…
Posted in: Blog
