Returning from Orkney

On Rats Stole my Toothbrush E5/6, Mucklehouse Wall

I wrote this on the way home from our trip to Orkney, having had a great time. The final days were mostly spent gathering some really cool footage for our film about the Longhope route which we’ll prepare for the autumn.

Ed Drummond revisiting St John’s Head. Photo Lukasz Warzecha

For the last few days we also had a nice visit from Ed Drummond who stayed with us and walked back in to St John’s head to see his route again, 41 years after his original ascent. We filmed his return to the climb, his perspectives on it and it’s place in his life, which were very interesting. He felt the reports of my ascent were a little unfair in describing his ascent in 1970 as an old aid route, given that apart from the complete aid pitch on the top headwall, they only used around 10-15 points of aid up to the A2 crack. Of course this was a remarkable climbing feat and in what sounds like the ethic of the day for big wall routes. It’s hard for people to imagine how hardcore it was to venture onto the world’s big walls before anyone else and without cams etc.

Nowdays, I guess things are a categorised a little more cut and dry. There is less room for caveats and details in sport. In my opinion this has it’s good and bad points. Simplicity raises the game. For example - a point of aid makes it an ‘aid route’? Yes or no? It sounds like in 1970 the answer would maybe be no but now maybe yes as the climbing game has evolved. Oliver Hill referred to my ascent of the Longhope as a rehearsed ascent. I’m totally happy with that even though I climbed 4/5 of it onsight. If I rehearsed only one move it’s still a redpoint. It has to be. There is no room to make compromise look like success with redpointing - it has to be in one push with no falls. A side effect is it makes it easier for others to quantify it later when they are not familiar with the details. More importantly, on a personal level it’s good when the finish line between success and failure is absolute, binary. You either succeeded or failed to redpoint.

Simplicity can be a bad influence when it obscures or distorts the real picture or just dumbs everything down. Even words so central to sport like “winner” and “loser” must be applied carefully. If you have been watching tennis recently they keep talking about “great champions”. But there seems to be so many great champions they need a new definition already to stand out from them. It’s not enough even to refer to them as just “champions”, never mind “players” or even “people”. Edi Stark didn’t seem to want to accept my response to her question about how it felt to have done some climbs that are out of reach of some or most others. I said it was ‘nice’ to have found such a good connection with an activity like climbing. “Nice?” she repeated back to me with a mocking sarcasm. ‘Nice’ didn’t seem to cut it. Either that or it cut me out as an awkward personality? With the exception of an overflow of enthusiasm which is a fine excuse to dispense with caution, I feel there is no need to always attach larger than life language, deeper meanings or metaphors to my experiences in climbing or elsewhere. A climb is the expression of the climber through vision for the line, preparation of the skills and movement. And it is an appreciation inherent beauty of the rock and the place as well. These things are already special in their own right. They do not need sweetening or plumping up.

Having succeeded on my own climbing vision on the Longhope route with Andy, my feeling is not of me, the climber, being at the centre of the story and I do not feel any bigger or more worthy as a result of it. Rather completing my climbing involvement on this particular cliff leaves me with a greater appreciation of the scale, permanence and impermanence of different things in nature and this has been what is awe inspiring about it. I think that climbing and mountains have a great effect on peoples lives when it helps them to appreciate their true insignificance in the world both in scale and time. Paradoxically though this actually adds to the sense of meaning in life because you simply see more clearly how you fit into the world. In the process of appreciating your insignificance, you also get closer to a true sense of your significance.

How then, do you deal with another great paradox of a major effort on a big climb; that of the feeling of invincibility that climbing can give when you are performing well and at your limit. Of course if you step back it’s obvious that the feeling cannot really be invincibility or anything approaching it. So if it’s a misinterpretation, what is the correct one? I have felt happiest in climbing when I’ve seen this feeling not as wielding personal strength or power over my climbing environment, but as aligning to it, understanding it well enough to work in harmony with it. This idea of harmony with the medium, in this case rock, is so well known that it’s a cliche. Where does the difference lie between these two subtly different interpretations of the same raw feeling. The most frustrated, isolated or bored climbers I’ve met have been those who appear to chase after brief flashes of invincibility in themselves over nature instead of seeing brief flashes of the invincibility of nature in themselves.

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More on MRTs

I’m back home from a couple of good days with the Mountain Equipment team in Manchester. I was speaking in lecture at the ME store talking about trying to arrive at a confident state for heading back up to Orkney again for sessions on my project. To help with that I finally got a nice day to head out with Anna and do some tradding. This is the difficulty in Scotland sometimes - Although I feel quite fit now from Steall and board sessions, there’s no substitute for going out and leading a lot of long routes (if your training for a long trad route). So I made the most of it and did some of the lovely multipitch E5s on Dirc Mhor while watching the Golden Eagle soaring about at the other end of the glen. Wet holds at Steall defeated another new route from happening, but the main thing was that workouts were had...

My post on mountain rescue a few days ago attracted some attention as I thought it might. Most seemed to welcome or share my thoughts. I had one long comment that was rejected by blogger because of it’s length (addressed below) suggesting many of my suggestions for raising funds had been adopted, at least by some teams. Thats great. I hope it’s working well. My feeling is that it certainly could be given the strength of the resource. My underlying point with my post was that I hope the temptation to blame the outside world for not offering as much support as they could or noticing the products etc that teams produce for them is resisted. 

The difference between a campaign to raise funds that either falls short of a good result or does spectacularly well can be so subtle and dependent on countless aspects of how it’s presented, timed and mediated. In the case of mountain rescue the challenge seems clear to me which is to reach the vast majority who despite being very interested in climbing, are not interested in supporting mountain rescue, as harsh as that sounds. That majority are very unlikely to find themselves on an MRT site unless there’s a very interesting article or video taking them there. 

Some of the comments focused on my idea about books. If the book produced by the MRT isn’t on Amazon and that’s the only place you go to shop for books, then it doesn’t exist. And just being there is not enough, it needs to pop up beside those books you are searching for. Have you seen how popular the dramatic tales of climbing epics are on Amazon? It needs to be a ‘book’ not a ‘booklet’ (I’ve never bought anyone a booklet for Christmas) and the fact that the proceeds go to mountain rescue needs to be more in the background so as not to raise a question in the mind of the buyer about the quality of what they are going to get. And does the cover ‘work’ at 150 pixels high?

Here was Judy’s comments below in italics, with some responses to each point from me:

"Hi Dave

Great to see you talking about mountain rescue and coming up with some thoughts. Entirely agree with you on the tweeting and retweeting!

Just a few points though in response to your points.

The safety angle: both at team level and nationally, we spend a great deal of our time spreading the message about what to take with you (map, compass, correct kit etc,) what to do before you go (weather checking, training in appropriate skills etc) and how to stay safe whilst out there. You'll find info like this on any team's website and it's certainly contained on the Mountain Rescue England and Wales site. Team members spend a deal of time, every week, giving talks and slide shows about their work, including the safety aspect.

We also write and publish books on the subject. 'Call Out Mountain Rescue?' is available for £9.99 from mountain.rescue.org.uk - all proceeds to MREW.”

Its great that MRTs spread the word on safety. If MRTs could act as a catalyst for climbers at large to spread the word about safety, rather than having to shoulder the effort so directly, it might increase the reach greatly. What video or writing do you have or can get that climbers will want to show eachother? 

“Re the topos idea - although we DO count several MIs in our ranks, we're not instructors. Our job is to pick up the pieces, if you will, not be prescriptive to people about which routes they take or how they rope themselves.”

That’s unfortunate. Prescriptive maybe not, but advisory on where and how the accidents happen on specific spots would be most welcome. How else are you going to get that vast majority who aren’t interested in what you do onto your site?

“That said, we DO work with both the AMI and the BMC to promote safe practice.

Stories: yep we have them in bulk and they're sent to the press/radio and TV by all teams and nationally probably every day of the week. The problem is, we have no control over whether these make it into print.”

Yes you do. Present the stories well enough and the press can’t afford not to follow. Besides, you are the press now anyway. The internet leads the press. The variables limiting reach are the strength of the presentation of the stories and the best use of the channels to present them.

“Local press DO support their local teams but it's not easy to persuade the bigger fish to run stories. Nationally, it's stuff like floods, missing children or smartphone apps that make the papers and TV. That said, the last couple of years have seen an increase in mags and Sunday supplements, and documentary makers showing an interest in our work. It's a constant work-in-progress.”

This gives me two thoughts - are the subset of everyone who you need to reach (the ones who might buy a book about mountain stories, watch a video, read a good article etc) best reached using newspapers or TV? Do those media catch the right people at the right time, and make it easy enough for them to take one of the fund raising clicks you want them to take? I would have my doubts. For example, I’ve never taken my newspaper home and typed in a URL at the end of piece.

"Re the books, there's 'Mountain Rescue', by myself and Bob Sharp, which contains lots of anecdotes, history and details about mountain rescue in the UK. I look forward to your order via the MREW website!!”

I’m never on the MREW website. I didn’t know it was there as I’ve never seen anyone link to it.

“Mechanism for contacting those we rescue? You're working with it. The net. Teams will generally keep in touch with those they have rescued, and those rescued are frequently our best advocates and fundraisers. We also keep in touch with people through Basecamp membership, Facebook pages and in our Mountain Rescue magazine.”

Great!

“Many teams use Twitter, although I believe there are inherent problems with this as a medium as there may be circumstances where it is neither sensitive not advisable to post on-going details of rescues, for example in missing persons searches or fatalities, before these have been officially released.”

Sure.

“And we're not really in the business of posting weather updates - there are Met Office and mountain weather websites and apps set up specifically for this. Many teams and MREW have links to these sites.”

That’s unfortunate. It seems a shame to send users away from your site rather than attract them to it using the one piece of information they need to check every time they go climbing. There’s an emerging massive gap in the web market for carefully aggregated local information for mountain users that’s presented in a useful way. It’s a web design and marketing problem. Someone will take the space, soon. If it’s not you it’ll be a gear retailer, or maybe even just some geek who also likes to climb. That would a shame. It comes back to my original point - MRTs will never be able to raise funds by appealing to fear or responsibility. It will have to deal in something that climbers want to have, do or experience. Chris Anderson’s book has a lot that would be useful for MRT fundraisers I think.

“Bigger business: Again, yes we DO have various sponsors in place as you describe. Not QUITE as easy to get big companies on board as you might think but those we have are very supportive of MR. They include Victorinox, btw. Many companies support teams and many clothing manufacturers work closely with teams and MREW in the ongoing development of kit.

Finally, we are always looking for ambassadors for mountain rescue who can spread the word and help us raise awareness. Fancy a job? The salary is good - £0 - but the satisfaction level is brilliant. Drop me a line if you do!

Judy Whiteside (Mountain Rescue Magazine Editor)”

Great comment. Thanks Judy. I understand my point of view might seem ignorant of the problems. That’s true - I am, because I have an outsiders perspective and it’s not my area. My points are two very general ones - that there is a resource there which could be used to greater advantage, and that there are new opportunities emerging right now because of how media is changing that make it a lot easier to raise funds if the right moves are made.

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Mountain Rescue - how to raise funds?

In the last three days I’ve heard a few things about Mountain Rescue teams and how to raise funds for them. First, I was chatting to a friend about raising funds for a rescue team with a shortfall right now. He was trying to think of ideas to raise funds directly by increasing donations or by generating cash by business activities. Second, I was asked (as I often am) to post on my blog and retweet messages pointing at Mountain Rescue sites, or other charitable organisations.  Third, I was listening to Stephen Fry on Radio 4 today talking about how he is asked continuously to retweet messages of all types (charitable and corporate) and how doing this just doesn’t work for either party in the long run.

Occasionally, it is right to talk about a charitable organisation, when you do some work for them or have a direct personal involvement of some kind. For instance recently when I was at an event for the Linda Norgrove Foundation, a charity I’m hoping to keep a personal involvement with in the future. But Stephen’s point was that the whole idea of a person having a blog or twitter feed is that it’s personal - it’s about you. Distorting that once in a while to promote is OK so long as it has personal meaning for you, but overdo it, and in the long run it’s unsustainable. It just doesn’t work, like spam.

I can see why organisations try to harness the established audience of someone well known in the relevant field in order to get promotional mileage. But if it’s purely a spam exercise it’s destined for an extemely poor success rate. Much better to involve those people directly in some meaningful way if you are going to use them at all. However, in my view, there is a better way, at least in the case of a charity seeking to raise funds. Rather than rely heavily on others to carry the promotional torch down a blind alley, it would be better to utilise the intrinsic value of the organisation itself to generate the necessary reach among the desired audience. So the challenge for the organisation is firstly to figure out what they have that could be of value to their target audience, and then to share it with them in a way that raises funds along the way. Things of value can come in all shapes or sizes. Off the top of my head, if I was running a rescue team, here’s a few things I’d work on:

1. The first thing rescue teams have of value is general knowledge about how to stay safe and move about on mountains, as well as specific local knowledge about the mountains they pull people off day in day out. Mountain guides and centres use this very effectively to fuel their marketing. Rescue teams could do it too, but add a different perspective. Writing online, training events, lectures on mountain safety are all good fundraisers. I’d love to see an article on why you, like so many novice winter climbers are going to get stuck high on Tower Ridge on the Ben and have to call out a team to bail you out. I’d like to see a good annotated topo of the ridge showing where you can move together instead of pitching your way straight into a benightment, how you can escape from the ridge by abseil or ledges and where climbers commonly end up stuck. The URL for that kind of piece will get the retweets without having to ask, as well as maybe even helping to cut the expenditure?!

2. The other obvious aspect of rescue teams’ work that gets people talking is rescue stories. As any new marketer will tell you, marketing revolves around stories, and rescue teams have them in bulk. Whereas many corporate stories are fake and boring, mountain rescue stories are some of the most gripping ever. The ethics and presentation of them are a discussion for another day, but a blog chronicling the activities of a rescue team in the same style (but with more detail) than in the SMC journal would be a very interesting and educational blog. And one which I could envisage getting a lot of incoming links from some highly useful websites (like the BBC!). Some use of Twitter to relate up to date info on hill conditions, especially overnight, would be a very subscribed feed also. And this aspect of a team’s work is exactly the right type of relationship that is needed with potential donors or customers - a regular one with constant reminders. A one off shot, like a piece on the news or a newspaper just pales in comparison in terms of it’s long term value.

3. Marketing fear and responsibility (e.g. “support the rescue team, you might need them someday”) has been shown in so many other fields such as health to have a poor success rate (understatement). Hence, marketing to the majority of the audience who have never used the service and probably don’t even want to think about the day they might need to demands the approach above - a positive one. On the other hand, those who have had to use the rescue services will have a very different attitude. Is there any mechanism in place to keep in contact with these people and make it easy for them to exercise their gratitude for the service, both immediately and down the line (when they are CEOs of big companies etc)?

4. Donations are important, but sell things too. If there was a good book or stories and pictures from dramatic rescues in the mountains I visit, I’d buy it. I bet those who only go to the visitor centre at the bottom would too. Why let some commercial journalist write it and take the revenue? - write and publish it yourself. 

5.Align to bigger business. For certain companies, a badge that says they support, or better still donate a percentage of their profits to mountain rescue is a tool they can use for their own marketing. In other words, it adds value for them, and you. These alliances are there for the taking. Let others sell donations for you. Sponsorship is another way. I saw the ‘Red Devils’ parachute team on the telly tonight, wearing Victorinox logos. 

I know these ideas aren’t new, complete or detailed and have no idea how much they have been tried or would be suitable. My point is that the status quo is far short of ideal. The folk who are involved directly with the problem will need to iron out the details of solutions, as an outsider looking in it seems to me that a different approach could yield some much bigger results. I hope thinking aloud about this is more useful than retweeting a request for donations?

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Within a move

Holding the crux. A good feeling

Right now I’m totally locked on with my highball project in the glen. Progress has been superb and It’s gone from a distant prospect to feeling very possible in a short time, thanks to all that training. It’s really at my limit though, so I have to accept that every good session might be the best before I lose ground. It doesn’t matter - I’m enjoying trying, a lot.

It’s only when really committed in a die hard way to a project that the windows open up to learning new things. It surprises me that the learning doesn’t stop even though I’ve been here before - maximally motivated, maximally stretched and close to both success and failure all at the same time.

It’s good for me to experience this on a hard boulder line for the first time in a few years - the levers of progress are so different from what I’m used to. Over the past two years, I’ve not really been able to train as I’d like due to injury, so most of my climbs have been trad. I missed hard bouldering and hard boulder training intensely, and have relished the last four months of it. The past three sessions on the project have been the culmination of it. Last session, I held the crux sloper. Tonight, I touched the next hold. If I hold that, I’m on terrain where I would only fall If I made an stupid error, which is just as well as it’s getting into soloing territory up there!

On a boulder, so much extreme effort and focus is distilled into millisecond adjustments of movement and timing. There is very little room for finding what’s necessary during the climb itself. This is the land of the intuitive. Recording that you’ve made a movement decision only just keeps up with actually making the movement. Conscious thought is way too slow and clunky. But it’s not intuitive adjustment out of thin air. It’s adjustment of a model of how the move should go, and how the effort should be timed and focused that’s been refined hundreds of times in your mind. At the level where the real enjoyment comes, it’s a heuristic process of visualisation; you don’t always know why something is right, you just feel like it will be.

To illustrate this blog post, I scrolled through the video of the attempt, shot on my compact propped on a stone. Looking through it, frame by frame, it hit me that I have a record of several movement decisions in my mind’s recording of the move, for every frame of video. 30 frames/sec is too slow! How great is it that movement on rock is so subtle, and that the mind is so expertly geared up to analyse and refine it. You can see how it gets addictive eh?

Hopefully I have the program sussed for that final hard move, and weather, and muscles allow me to get back to it in a few days time.

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Bounceback

It’s funny when you are feeling wasted how the little hole you’re in seems much deeper than it actually is. Since Freida arrived last week, my non-climbing life has been fantastic. The best it’s ever been, despite the adjustments and sleep deprivation. But the importance of my climbing life doesn’t just go away. It doesn’t change at all, in fact.

I used to think it was psychologically dangerous to be dependent on my lifelong habits of the outdoors, exercise and training I do through my climbing. As time went on I realised this was silly. I think eventually it becomes a part of of you that is hardwired. And thats fine. It is amazing it takes 30 odd years to realise it’s ok to be yourself!

Naturally, I’ve put a lot of thought, work and planning into how to balance my climbing and non-climbing life. I’m certainly not perfect at it let me tell you. But I have been doing this all my adult life and it’s worked out well so far. Some of this is really practical basic stuff - having a top-notch climbing wall next door to the nursery, living in the heart of the places I want to climb and having a flexible work schedule to take advantage of good conditions. These are the key ingredients for sure, and maybe the hardest to secure - over a decade of hard work for me. The others are more subtle.

Yet despite the planning, I did get the fear last week after having several absolutely crap training sessions in a row. Sure, they were performed in a haze of sleepiness, but was tiredness really all it was? And even if so, is that it for the foreseeable? I could see, for about a nano second, while falling off a ridiculously easy circuit the other night, how someone could give in to tiredness and permanently lower their expectations in order to avoid such disappointment. I thought previous experiences might insulate me from this weakness. But it’s amazing how being knackered lowers your guard.

All very gloomy. Until it wasn’t... All that was needed was a little extra sleep. It’s being grabbed an hour here, an hour there. But add it up to a critical level and lo and behold, the performance returns. This week maybe I’m getting to grips with the new routine of snatched naps. And all of a sudden tonight the power returned to my arms like magic and I clawed my way up a couple of my hardest creations on the wall. I forgot how well the body adapts and bounces back to change. What a lift!

Yes Yes I know how silly this post might read to someone who doesn’t share the same addiction to training. And I know the challenges for me are nothing compared to Claire right now. But everyone has to have something to keep them keen. And for me it’s this. I’d rather go without food for a week than training. Since this is primarily a climber’s blog, I’m just going through the little ups and downs that go on while in the bubble of the climbing session. But once it’s done, I take off my rockshoes and go back to the important stuff - Claire and Freida!

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