27 March 2012

Bernd Zangerl: Progress and Inflation

Bernd Zangerl is one of the bouldering pioneers and he actually put up most of the classical hard boulders in Magic Wood and in Ticino. Many of his hardest boulder have been down graded and here he shares some thoughts on progress and inflation. Better training/Earlier start I think what happened in the last years we just can call progression and we shouldn't make such a polemic thing about it. The kids start crimping early on super indoor walls and they train very hard. The "pioneers" like myself and Nicole didn't have such opportunities at the beginning (and didn't even think about it) and climbed mainly on rock. Micro holds: 10 years ago the small holds, like the really bad crimpers where something "new" in bouldering. When we first checked Memento, there was no boulder problem in the world, with such a small hold where you had to jump from. It was a new level at this time.....and is something normal nowadays. The main thing is that it was something new, I wasn't sure if it "GOES" ....now the climbers know: IT GOES, the problem has been done! This is something very important...and therefore repeating problems is always easier than doing the FA, where you spend most of the time finding the perfect solution. Dynamic style: The younger climbers have such a perfect dynamic style and do moves super dynamic where I tried to do it static. This is also a "indoor evolution" somehow. It`s normal and makes fun to jump around safely. It's a different style, progression in technique. I wanted to have the power to make the moves static. I didn't even think about doing it as a dyno......at this time. FA and Confirmations: Putting up first ascents is something different. It takes lots of time to find the best solution, trying different sequences. And the time was always a indicator for the difficulty, a very intangible indicator. In 2000 I did the super classic test piece La Proue, 8B within a short session. I took this line to compare it with my short test pieces in Magic Wood or other areas. It is about Vision, Cleaning, Creativity and Progression. Grades were not important but of course we gave some suggestions which were confirmed and we moved forward proposing harder grades for harder boulders. We just compared the existing problems with the new ones. There where a few 8B problems.....no there are many. But somehow it makes no sense to downgrade all the old problems, because then I have to downgrade all other problems I did before....which makes this a never ending story. The grades have always been a proposal, based on the stuff I did before. New Base Line has seen maybe 10 repeats in 10 years and still it is 8B+ (with a slightly better hold then in 2002). Ii think our proposed grades have been not so wrong.
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