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

portions of his workouts. A few years later Goldstone returned east and became a significant presence during the rapid expansion of difficult free climbing at the Shawangunks. Goldstone discovered that Dick Williams (another former gymnast) was already training for climbing and incorporating dynamic movements in his campaign to free climb the many steep aid routes at the ’Gunks. Other Uberfall icons of the era such as Hans Kraus, Bonnie Prudden, Jim McCarthy, and John Stannard also had great interest and long personal histories in physical fitness. Kraus went on to form the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, while Bonnie Prudden became a nationally recognized fitness expert and the first female athlete to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

     
    German climbing icon Wolfgang Güllich demonstrating his one-arm power in Yosemite’s Camp 4, circa 1980. GERD HEIDORN
     

    Meanwhile, out west, it seemed California climbers were more and more toying with one form or another of climbing training. Dave Rearick and Mike Sherrick were specifically oriented toward gymnastics and could do presses into handstands and other gym stunts; Layton Kor was lifting weights regularly for his many outstanding ascents around Colorado and in Yosemite. Remarkably, three of the top Yosemite free climbers of the day—Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Frank Sacherer—did very little training other than the usual regimen of pull-ups and push-ups. Jim Bridwell and Barry Bates followed in the spirit of their master-predecessors, training hard at such things as pull-ups on tree limbs in the Valley. Bates quickly developed the ability to do a one-finger pull-up with his middle finger on a sling hanging from a tree. The main thrust of their training, however, was simply to climb several days per week.
    Bridwell, Bates, and others in the Camp 4 crowd were also likely influenced, directly or otherwise, by visiting climbers such as Goldstone and Ament. Rich Goldstone is believed to have installed the first pull-up bar in Camp 4 while Ament brought the toughest bouldering discipline of the time to the Valley with his first ascents of 1968. Pat Ament also brought the slack chain to Yosemite, challenging climbers to develop refined balance and focus. The revered tradition of chain and rope walking in Yosemite began with the 40 feet of slack links that Ament strung between two Camp 4 trees. (Local legend has it that Chuck Pratt one day stood on the chain and juggled three wine bottles, presumably empty!) Bridwell and others went on to develop and deploy an array of training stations around Camp 4 so impressive that Warren Harding, the Yosemite Generation’s sharpest wit, soon dubbed the area the “Olympic Training Village.” Harding himself preferred to build stamina for his epic multiday big-wall adventures by running to the top of Half Dome and back, a 17-mile round trip with nearly 1 mile of elevation change (and also, by his own admission, by refraining from hard liquor in the weeks before an ascent). In the years that followed, Camp 4 workout rigs introduced countless climbers from around the world to the basic elements of the future science of training for climbing.
    Still, sports scientists in academia and the European mountain heartland had yet to view climbing as a subject worthy of serious and sustained study. Though ascents of the world’s highest mountains were long a source of national pride in Europe, there were no Olympic medals (nor commercial sponsor-ships) to be won around which to build a culture of sport-specific training and achievement aimed at visible rewards. Climbing remained a rarefied pursuit, and research—where it pertained to climbing at all—was narrowly focused on the effects of long exposure to low-oxygen atmosphere. Still, the steadily growing popularity of climbing throughout the 1970s eventually gave birth to the first European studies relating to the physiological stresses and injuries associated with rock climbing.
    In 1977 Pat Ament’s Master of Rock was published. This biography of John Gill, though not focused specifically on training, served to document Gill’s strength-training techniques and introduce them to a wider audience; the book quickly became not just an American classic but a kind of sacred writ for a new generation of climbers interested in pushing the absolute technical limits. Master of Rock opened a new door of consciousness, so to speak, of what it would take to be the