Aaron's Status
January 26, 2025
6:29 am
A sobering reminder that climbing is dangerous. An enumeration of the projects I’m not doing and hobbies I am not chasing.
Sends
It wasn’t a send train per se but I finally got the yellow V4 that I just couldn’t finish a few times. This was another experience where the last hold felt “all but impossible” and this time felt “doable,” which is either a function of repetition or training or readiness level.
- Yellow V4 with evil crimpy ending
- Black 5.9 TR with a dyno!
Got a chance to have a go at this black 5.9 with a big dyno in the middle. I can statically reach the end so for me it was less of a leap and more of a swing, but I did flash. I would do it again, it was fun.
Leading
I normally don’t climb on Saturdays, but one of my climbing buds had his brother and his brother’s partner up from DC to visit and he invited me to join in, so I met up with them. All really nice folks, and it’s always lovely to meet more nice folks.
Our gym set a couple of lead-only routes on the “lead wall,” which they don’t do too often (typically the routes are TR/lead) and I had wanted to try this blue 5.10 they set. I think if it had been a TR route I definitely would have flashed, but on lead it is at least 2x harder.
The crux of the climb is a spot where there is a gap in the footholds and you are forced to turn from facing right to facing left, while also at a pretty crucial clip location. Now, I think that is somewhat irresponsible here, but I’ll get into that in a second.
I had a go, and I attempted to reach the clip while facing right. It’s not the safest move, clipping above your head while also in a lean-back position, and that’s a big lesson here. Ultimately I got pumped out and came down. My buddy was belaying me and he saw that I was shaking out and rightfully took out the slack so I just had a bit of a swing and it wasn’t a problem.
Later he had a go, and our other friend was on belay. He got to the same place where I pumped out and was attempting the same move. He drew a lot of slack, it’s possible our belaying friend overestimated or couldn’t see or predict what was going on, and he fell.
There was so much slack in the system at that moment that he literally hit the deck. I estimate that he fell from approximately 12 feet, onto the “thin mat” of the roped climbing area, which is surely better than no mat, but substantially thinner than the bouldering area.
He had the wind knocked out of him and bit his tongue badly, but he did stand and walk away, so I guess it could have been a lot worse. Outdoors he would have broken bones or much worse, surely.
The reason I think that the setting is a little bit irresponsible is that the walls in our gym are short to begin with, and the first clip is pretty high up. This route is set as a steep traverse, so you’re basically clipping the “bottom clips” across for three or so, and then you want to go up from there.
Since the bottom clip is already only maybe eight feet off the deck, and the clip above it (that you really want to get for the shape of the route) is maybe four feet higher, you’re forced to be in a situation where you have, at best, only a few feet of margin of error during that clip.
Think about it, your rope comes from your harness and travels a couple feet into the bottom clip, which is maybe eight to ten feet off the deck. At that moment, if you fell with no slack, you would stop at six feet up, at best.
Now you need to make the next clip, so you draw perhaps four or five feet of slack. The most dangerous time in lead is when you are in the midst of clipping, and this is well-known; you have slack in your hand but your protection point has not yet moved.
If you fall at that moment, which is what happened to my buddy, you’ve drawn four or five feet of slack into, at best, six feet of “safe” catch distance. The margins here are razor thin. Even two or three feet could be within a Grigri’s catch distance or a belayer’s own reasonable reflex response time.
I don’t want to say that it’s a gym’s job to make climbs “perfectly safe,” because there is really no such thing. Climbing is inherently dangerous, and lead climbing is much more dangerous than toprope or even bouldering in most cases.
But my take on it is, for a gym, I should think they’d want to minimize the dangers of their own clipping paths, rather than place a crux move at a point where you need to also draw a dangerous amount of slack. I only say this because our gym’s lead wall has fixed clips (one-sided draws bolted to the wall), so just like an outdoor sport climb, you get what you get.
Unlike an outdoor sport climb, where the bolts are placed by climbers setting for the specific route(s), the gym setters set their routes around the existing clip positions. It’s really up to the setters to carefully consider the clip positions and what they’re asking climbers to do.
I don’t think there’s actually a completely safe way to lead that route, though I do think there is a somewhat safer way to approach the move. I think running it out a bit more to get through the body re-positioning part of the crux, and getting into a more stable, slightly higher, and upright position to make that clip would be a better way to do it.
Lead climbing is dangerous! Be careful!
My stalled hobbies
I received the two additional spools of gray PLA that I ordered, so I’m back to printing shelf brackets over and over in search of temperature settings that don’t warp off the build plate. Even the brim that I tried didn’t completely stop it and it’s a super pain to remove so I’d really like to avoid a brim entirely if I possibly can.
What is most confusing to me is that I obviously printed eight of these before without this happening, so something has clearly changed. It’s a different printer with a different build plate, sure, and probably a different brand of PLA (uncertain), but PLA is normally extremely versatile and shouldn’t need this much tweaking.
There’s a print sitting in the printer right now waiting for me to go look at it and get mad again. I’m kind of avoiding it.
I still plan to wire a Shelly home automation switch into the under-cabinet lights at my coffee station and I’ve also been avoiding that, I’m not sure why. I guess I don’t want to have to figure out the maze of wiring again. Maybe I’ll do that today, though.
I had a casual chat with a work buddy on Friday and he made me aware of the existence of this software called Touch Designer, which is essentially a visual, node-based system for creating realtime 3D animations, which is used for a lot of data visualization, realtime music effects, and things like that. I got pretty interested in checking it out, but that’s just another learning curve rabbit hole to fall down that I’m not sure I’m ready for.
And finally, of course, triggered by the Touch Designer thing, I got interested in electronic music production again and started thinking about whether I want to dump a bunch of money into an OP-1. It would be a pretty stupid purchase since that’s an even deeper learning curve rabbit hole and I don’t know shit about music theory, but, something about it keeps calling out to me.
I know it’ll happen eventually but probably not just yet.
Coffee
I should talk about coffee. I purchased a Technivorm Moccamaster (“mochamaster”?) It’s made in the Netherlands so maybe the spelling is a translational thing, most people pronounce it like you’d think, like a “mocha” rather than like “moccasins.” But whatever.
This is an expensive drip brewer, which is said to produce coffee near to pour-over levels of quality. I was curious to find out if I could detect the difference. I think I can, but I’m at the start of the journey, and I still like to make coffee on weekday mornings in more of an automated way rather than babysitting it, which might be hindering my learning.
Anyway, it’s extremely cool, and I like it, and the coffee tastes pretty good, but I’ve been brewing ground coffee from the store. The coffee nerds tell me that pre-ground coffee is usually ground too fine for this purpose, and obviously freshly ground coffee is said to be better in essentially every case. So now I’m thinking about grinding coffee again.
I have a manual grinder and an electric one. The electric one is a nice Capresso conical burr grinder, but it’s pretty worn out and all the settings markings have wiped off, so I’m skeptical that I can use it correctly. The burrs are probably dull as shit by now, too.
The current plan is to brew a small amount of coffee ground in my hand grinder, dosed by weight, and maybe see if I can detect a difference between a couple of grind settings or something. Maybe that is also something I can do today.
If it seems like I’m getting some extra bang out of it, I may need to spend a ton of money on a good grinder, too. Because I am an insane person.