Avoid Speed DESTROYING Rope Issues on a 3 Person Climbing Team

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There are much stronger climbers than myself.

And at the boys’ level of climbing, we happen to live at the epicenter of youth climbing in our country. Of the six American climbers at the 2024 Olympics (three men and three women), 50% of them came up through the same local climbing gym, about 25 minutes from my home. So, while the boys are very talented, they are not budding Olympians.

All that is to say that there are many climbers who make the physical movements of a climb faster and more efficiently than we do. But of those super fast climbers, there are plenty who come from gym settings or specialize in single-pitch sport routes. So, where we make up the difference is system efficiency. The reason the boys could climb 1500 vertical feet, around 12 pitches, of climbing when they were seven was because we, as a team, can get in and out of the various systems (anchor systems, belay systems, etc.) pretty fast.

My boys think very mathematically and have an interest in all things engineering. Both of their grandfathers were engineers, one nuclear and the other in fluid dynamics. Like with climbing - because of me - the boys have grown up around engineering - because of their grandfathers. So, they have always been drawn to understanding the climbing systems that we use. They love understanding why to use one system, maybe over other choices, and understanding the pros and cons of the options. With that passion comes motivation to learn and keep learning. Harnessing that passion to learn about our climbing systems has made the boys quickly become trusted partners. For example, I now trust them to lead, build our anchor, and belay from the top.

So, when it comes to efficiency, we know we are limited by physical talent (although the boys are much more gifted in this way than I am). And while we spend time working on our weaknesses, there is a whole other school of thought that says we can, instead, focus on leveraging our strengths. So, while I need to get physically stronger as a climber - hard to do, but not impossible, at my current age of 48 - I also work on systems: choosing a system that strikes the right balance of robustness without being overbuilt and time consuming, getting the system set up, and getting out of the system and on to the next one (which usually means planning ahead so that the system you are about to build flows easily into the system you will need after than - think of positing the team at a mid-climb anchor, for example, to allow the leader to set off quickly without shuffling body positions).

This, ultimately helps keep us safer. If we can get up routes faster, in our case by not wasting time at transitions, we can climb more in the same amount of time. Other climbers do it by physically moving fast. We do it by spending more time climbing and less time transitioning. That speed means less time subjected to hazards like rock fall or the threat of storms.

Ultimately, this video is a prime example of this. A few simple techniques can save many minutes by using just a few moments. That’s a great tradeoff in the vein of “speed is safety.”