First Ascentionists Over Time (Female and Male)

I have always been interested in the history of rock climbing. Lately, I tried to collect data about male and female first ascentionists to visualize climbing progression over tine. However, it turned out difficult to find a lot of data (particularly for female climbers). An exception to the rule is this really nice site http://stara.emontana.cz/climbing-milestones-from-6a-to-9c/  from which I got a lot of information.

It would be great if someone could point me to further sources, and help me correcting the existing data! I find it particularly difficult to get information about, among others,

• first onsights and flashes (who was the first to onsight 8a or flash 8b+?)
• first successful female and male bouldering ascents
• early first female ascents (does anyone know who did the first female 7a?)
• 'first' second ascents (who did the second 8c in the world?)

For routes with disputed gradings, such as Chilam Balam first redpointed by Bernabè Fernandez in 2003, I took the majority grade by all repeaters (9a+/9b in that case).

Graphs below, data (including sources) is available here via Google Spreadsheet or via ClimbStat GitHub (here you can also find the R-code to create the individual graphs. They have been merged together externally to one GIF). Further below you can find an excerpt.

Year	Ascensionist	Route	Grade (YDS)	Grade (French)	Sex	Confirmed?
1979	Lynn Hill	Ophir Broke	5.12d	7c	female	Yes
1985	Catherine Destivelle	Fleur de Rocaille	5.12d/5.13a	7c+/8a	female	Yes
1986	Luisa Iovane	Comeback	5.13b	8a	female	Yes
1988	Catherine Destivelle	Chouca	5.13c	8a+	female	Yes
1988	Isabelle Patissier	Sortileges	5.13d	8b	female	Yes
1990	Lynn Hill	Masse Critique	5.14a	8b+	female	Yes
1998	Josune Bereziartu	Honky Tonky	5.14b	8c	female	Yes
2000	Josune Bereziartu	Honky Tonk Mix	5.14c	8c+	female	Yes
2002	Josune Bereziartu	Bain de Sang	5.14d	9a	female	Yes
2005	Josune Bereziartu	Bimbaluna	5.14d/5.15a	9a/9a+	female	Yes
2017	Margo Hayes	La Rambla Extension	5.15a	9a+	female	Yes
2017	Angela Eiter	La planta de shiva	5.15b	9b	female	Yes
1961	John Gill	Thimble	5.12a	7a+	male	Yes
1967	Greg Lowe	Macabre Roof	5.12c	7b+	male	Yes
1970	John Gosling	English Hanging Gardens	5.12b	7b	male	Yes
1975	Steve Wunsch	Psycho Roof	5.12d	7c	male	Yes
1977	Ray Jardine	The Phoenix	5.13a	7c+	male	Yes
1979	Tony Yaniro	Grand Illusion	5.13b	8a	male	Yes
1983	Jerry Moffatt	The Face	5.13c	8a+	male	Yes
1984	Wolfgang Güllich	Kanal im Rücken	5.13d	8b	male	Yes
1985	Wolfgang Güllich	Punks in the Gym	5.14a	8b+	male	Yes
1986	Antoine Le  Menestrel	La Ravage	5.14a/5.14b	8b+/8c	male	Yes
1987	Wolfgang Güllich	Wallstreet	5.14b	8c	male	Yes
1990	Ben Moon	Hubble	5.14c	8c+	male	Yes
1991	Wolfgang Güllich	Action Directe	5.14d	9a	male	Yes
1995	Fred Rouhling	Akira	5.15b	9b	male	No
1996	Alex Huber	Open Air	5.15a	9a+	male	Yes
2003	Bernabè Fernandez	Chilam Balam	5.15a/5.15b	9a+/9b	male	Yes
2012	Adam Ondra	Change	5.15c	9b+	male	No
2017	Adam Ondra	Silence	5.15d	9c	male	No

How many years does it take to climb 7a or 5.11d?

If you talk to beginners, you often hear how long does it take to climb 7a (5.12a)? In this post, we approach this question in a first out of a series of posts. We will look at average grade progression of rock climbers. The aim is to visualize individual improvement over time and to check whether the maximum performance tends to peak around a certain experience level.

We are looking for this purpose again at the 8a.nu data, and start with male and female climbers who have started climbing between before turning 25 (we will look at the role of starting age for later climbing performance in a subsequent post). We consider only climbers who have logged at least three years and who enter their first ascent in the database within four years after starting climbing. These and a few other smaller restrictions leave us with 3225 climbers (2801 males and 424 females). In the following graph, you see on the x-axis experience in years (defined as current year minus starting year) and on the y-axis the performance. For each climber, we consider the highest three redpoint ascents by year. 

Each light blue line in the background depicts an individual experience-grade curve derived from a multilevel model (we will come to that also in a following post). It is obvious that the average climber in our sample climbs hard and starts strong. We have seen this already before, and it is not surprising because better climbers will be more inclined to save their ascents and to make their profile public. But it might well be the case that sometimes climbers rather state the age they started to train and climb seriously as starting age.

We start here with a simple linear regression separately for male and female climbers in which we regress experience in cubic terms (experience, experience^2 and experience^3) on grades. The coefficient of determination (R^2) is around 0.21 for the joint regression including both males and females (with a separate intercept and separate slopes for both sexes). This shows that experience is an important factor (who would disagree?!) but far from being definitive.

We see that there is a steep improvement in the first three to four years which flattens subsequently. There does not seem to be much improvement (on average) any more beyond 6 years of experience. We have displayed only up to ten years of experience, but the results look similar if we extend that time period (the sample just gets smaller and smaller). There is no sign of an average performance decline for highly experienced climbers.  

Female and male experience-grade curves look very similar, with the female profile being parallelly shifted lower by two grades. Statistically, the slopes do not differ between males and females climbers.

Coming back to the question in the title: How many years does it take to climb 7a or 5.11d? For males in the sample it seems just around 1.5 years and for females ca. 3 years. This shows that the 8a.nu dataset is likely not very representative for the average climber you will meet in a gym. The shape of the curves looks in my view however quite reasonable.  

In a following post, we will look at boulderer and compare the experience profiles between climbers and boulderer to see whether boulderer, for example, improve faster because experience might play a more decisive role in long endurance routes compared to short and obvious boulders. 

In the next post, we look at climbing profiles of elite climbers such as Adam Ondra.     

The disadvantage of being tall in rock climbing seems to be driven by higher weight

Previously, we observed that being tall is a disadvantage for male rock climbers. One argument which is often made is that this is due to the fact that taller climber also carry more weight than smaller ones.

Let us investigate this matter. We want to try to shed new light on two related questions here:

1. Is body height negatively related to climbing performance, even if you are (relatively) slim? 
2. Is the fact that taller climbers tend to climb worse due to their higher weight?

To answer this question, we will look both at height and weight simultaneously. We will first look at relative weight, here measured with the body mass index (BMI). The BMI is calculated by dividing the weight by the square of the height. The division leads to a measure that is almost uncorrelated to height because all climbers can potentially have a low or high BMI regardless of whether they are tall or not (weight in contrast is highly correlated with height).

We will use a technique which is called non-parametric regression, which allows us to model or visualize also complex multidimensional relations without strong assumptions (in contrast to methods such as the linear regression approaches which require rather strong assumptions).

We will focus only on male climbers who are between 165 cm and 190 cm with a BMI between 18.5 and 25 (a range which is considered to cover normal weights) and female climbers between 150 cm and 180 cm with a BMI between 18.5 and 23. We make these assumptions to ensure that we have everywhere enough data available (non-parametric models make fewer assumptions, but they usually require larger datasets than let's say linear models; there are for example relatively few female climbers who have a BMI above 23). Furthermore, we consider only redpoint ascents 7a and higher.

These restrictions leave us with a sample of 9,775 male and 897 female climbers.

The following graph visualizes the relationship between height (in cm), weight (BMI) and maximum redpoint performance (7 corresponds here to 7a, 7.5. to 7b+ and 8 to 8a) for male rock climbers

     

and for female climbers (the visualization is smoother due to the smaller sample size):

The results show a clear picture. Both being taller and being (relatively) more heavy is a disadvantage when it comes to performing in rock climbing. Particularly concerned are those who are tall but not thin. One should however again note that the relationship is not particularly strong: Climbers who are 15 cm taller climb on average less than one French (sub)grade lower than their smaller peers.

The visualization also shows that the relationship looks indeed quite linear. This indicates that the assumptions behind the linear regression approach seem to be fulfilled. A linear regression therefore (unsurprisingly) confirms these results. Height and relative weight (BMI) are both (significantly) negatively related to maximum redpoint performance. If we look at standardized measures, we see that the negative effect of being heavier seems to be somewhat stronger for (relative) weight than height.

Having answered the first question about relative weight, we will now give some insights about absolute weight. This question is harder to answer since there are, fortunately, no tall climbers with (very) low weight. Nor are there small climbers in our sample with a high absolute weight. The non-parametric methods we have used so far are not very well suited for such (sparse) data. Please take therefore the following results with a grain of salt. The nonparametric results for male rock climbers look as follows (the algorithm seems to not work for females correctly due to the lower sample size):

Height does not seem to be a big disadvantage anymore. The only exception seem to be climbers who are either very thin or comparable heavy. For the majority of climbers, we do not see a negative relationship with body height (or even a positive one for climbers weighting around 70 kg). 

Results look in general again rather linear. Hence, we will again quickly have a look at linear regression methods. A simple regression indicates for both sexes that only absolute weight is negatively (and statistically significantly) related to climbing performance. The sign of height is positive in both cases, for male climbers even statistically significantly on the 10 percent level (the magnitude is however rather small). This might indicate that the negative height effect is simply due to the fact of higher absolute weight, even for thin (tall) climbers.

Summarizing, our results show that

1. Being heavier seems to go hand in hand with lower rock climbing performance (on average).
2. Being taller is a disadvantage if the relative weight (measured by the body mass index) is taken into account.
3. But this might be simple driven due to the fact that taller climber are on average heavier (in absolute terms)
4. Height does not seem to be much of a handicap anymore once we take absolute weight into account. 

What is the share of climbers who can send 8a or 9a?

In our previous post, we have looked at the distribution of grades across almost 3 million rock climbing ascents in the 8a.nu data. Today, we will take a very similar approach and look at the highest climbing grade mastered by more than 30,000 rock climbers (both male and female).

The average peak grade is closely below 7b, and 8a is the mode grade (the most frequent individual maximum grade). In contrast to the distribution of all ascents, we do not see a clustering around 7a for the individual top performance. There are a similar number of 7a to 7c climbers. There are however much more climbers with an 8a limit than we would expect for a smooth distribution. Keeping this in mind, let us gauge how much more difficult is 9a compared to 8a and 7a: In the 8a.nu database, there are more than 4 times as many climbers who have achieved 7a compared to 8a, but there are almost 50 times as many climbers who sent 8a than 9a. Moreover, this is most likely a severe underestimation of the difficulty since I assume that elite climbers are over-represented at 8a.nu compared to other climbers (and top-level ascents which help you to receive publicity and sponsors are recorded more often).

Here, you can also see the distribution of the maximum grade achieved separately for male and female climbers only (85% of all registered climbers in the database are male). Let us start with female climbers:

For female climbers, the average top grade is close to 6c+ and 7a is the most frequently recorded top grade. Male climber's average grade is close to 7a+ and 8a is for them the mode grade. Interestingly, there are much more females who report 6a, 6b or 6c as peak grade compared to 6a+, 6b+ or 6c+ but we do not find this pattern for men.