Training for Climbing, 2nd: The Definitive Guide to Improving Your Performance (How To Climb Series)

home! JOHN GILL COLLECTION
     

    Given the extreme and run-out technical climbs being done on the Elbe River sandstone near Dresden a century ago—the hardest of which are now recognized as being near 5.10 difficulty—it is reasonable to conclude that early German free climbers placed a high value on style and difficulty. It is hard to conceive of such sustained routes being climbed without some specific regime to build forearm and upper-body strength, although working routes on toprope may have been their primary method of training.
    The strongest climbers of the early and mid- 1900s included Oliver Perry-Smith, Albert Ellingwood, Joe and Paul Stettner, Fritz Wiessner, Jack Durrance, Hans Kraus, John Salathe, and Harold Goodro, as well as some of the early Yosemite masters such as Warren Harding, Dave Rearick, Bob Kamps, and Royal Robbins. All were natural athletes or competed in other athletic activity prior to becoming climbers. More important, they all possessed a great sense of adventure and daring—a hallmark trait of all great climbers of this era. Mike Sherrick, Robbins’s companion on the first ascent of the North-west Face of Half Dome, was an excellent gymnast who often backflipped to the ground after finishing a boulder problem, much to the chagrin of his tamer companions. Yet training as a rock climbing discipline built on vision, specificity, and intention was the innovation of a young man from Alabama who began climbing in the early 1950s.
    Now one of the undisputed legends of American climbing, John Gill is the first person known to engage in highly regimented training for climbing. Unlike the others of his day who pushed themselves on vertical crags and long rock routes in the mountains, Gill—although an alpinist and rock climber—spent more of his time on short, overhanging faces on low boulders at the base of mountains or in river valleys. Bagging summits and climbing big walls had less aesthetic appeal for Gill; he instead sought the kinesthetics of dynamic movement up overhanging rock and adroitly built a novel training program to suit.
    For more than fifteen years beginning in the mid- 1950s, Gill trained on a gym rope, the still rings, and with weighted, fingertip pull-ups, one-arm and one-finger pull-ups, and one-arm front levers, in preparation for his powerful bouldering ascents throughout the Midwest, Southeast, and Rocky Mountains. In the early years Gill’s gymnastic moves and the extremely muscular problems they produced—even his use of gymnasts’ chalk—were viewed by most climbers with bemusement, if not bewilderment. Today his legacy as an innovator, visionary, and, in fact, the father of both modern bouldering and training for climbing is the foundation that has allowed route ratings to move into 5.13 and beyond. Gill’s technical ability was years ahead of everyone else, as illustrated by his very bold 1961 free-solo first ascent of The Thimble in South Dakota’s Black Hills, an overhanging 30-foot inspiration now rated V4 (5.12a), and his improbable center problem (incredibly, grade V9 by modern standards!) up the Red Cross Boulder in the Tetons two years before The Thimble. Unrecognized and underappreciated at the time, Gill in establishing these standards was an early prototype of today’s top-end rock gymnasts, characterized like them by precise footwork, intense focus, and awesome power.
    By the mid-1960s a number of other climbers, most with a background in gymnastics, also began training specific to climbing. Pat Ament, a young gymnast from Colorado, was an early training enthusiast and went on to become a leading climber and prolific developer of hard boulder problems. In 1967 Ament and Gill began a long friendship, and these two powerful boulderers undoubtedly inspired countless climbers throughout the Front Range and beyond.

     
    Pat Ament, a trained gymnast and disciple of John Gill, introduced a new level of hard bouldering—as well as chalk—to Yosemite Valley during his numerous visits in the late 1960s.
    PAT AMENT COLLECTION
     

    At about the same time, famed ’Gunks hardman Richard Goldstone met Gill during a summer trip out west and was enormously impressed with Gill’s one-arm pull-ups, front levers, and stiff boulder problems. Goldstone went back to the University of Chicago with an enthusiasm for training and adapted the use of surgical tubing (long utilized by gymnasts to build enough strength to do an Iron Cross) as a training aid for