Hey Everyone,
This week at Climb Base5 we hosted our first “Open Team Selection Camp” – The purpose of this camp was to bring together B.C.’s top competition climbers and select the top 5 men and top 5 women to represent our gym in this years Local and National competition circuits!
Hannah Block on a Women’s Slab problem – Photo: Kyle Rurak
Andrew Wilson, Matt, Hayden and I got together pretty early on Friday night and started preparing to set for the Open Selection Camp. We needed to set an entire “Qualification” and “Finals” round as if it was a real comp. We set 8 Men’s and 8 Women’s problems that tested a wide variety of movement patterns and skills.
Scott Williams getting funky – Photo: Kyle Rurak
For setting competition it’s really important to make sure that no one style of movement dominates the set of problems. For this camp we tried a different way of thinking about the difficulty of the problems, we ditched the V-Grades and thought in terms of “Intensity”, “Complexity” and “Risk”. We first heard about this concept from Montreal based route setter Tonde Katiyo, and then had it further explained by Adam Pustelnik at the IFSC World Climbing Camp.
To roughly understand the 3 terms…
Intensity: How physically hard something is, how small are the holds? or how big are the moves? are the feet really terrible? Essentially anything that requires raw strength to be successful.
Maria Celkova on an “Intensity Problem” – Photo: Kyle Rurak
Complexity: How difficult something is to do the first time. This could be a very technical boulder, or something very sequence dependent, maybe a series of moves that are almost impossible to conceive from the ground.
Simon Parton on a “Complexity” problem – Photo: Kyle Rurak
Risk: How committing a move is – The classic example would be a jumping move, but even something with a hard to read sequence can be “Risky” if your not sure which way to climb it. We are really testing peoples abilities to make a plan (the right plan…) and then stick to it!
Elina Avrimova on a “Risk” problem – Photo: Kyle Rurak
What’s cool about using this format is that it really makes you think about what your trying to achieve with the problem, instead of setting something that is just “hard”, your trying to build a very specific test, ideally level-ing the playing field so that the most well rounded climber wins the event!
All that said, this was a selection camp… not a sanctioned competition… so we had a lot more freedom to really spice up the problems and give these guys some really weird and abstract movements – the problems had 360 spin moves, a multitude of different jumps and running moves, a wide variety of weird mantels and push moves, volume standing, horrifyingly bad foot holds and even a dynamic inside flag… whatever the hell that is.
Ayesha Khan trying a very technical problem – Photo: Kyle Rurak
Over the course of the weekend the athletes did an entire “Qualification” and “Final” round as well as hours of session-ing on the comp problems to dial in the movements they struggled on during the mock comp. Andrew and Matt also did a bunch of obstacle course work, fitness tests and “General Weirdness” – which was in short… a bunch of crazy german stuff….
It was really cool to be able to host something like this at Climb Base5, a lot of our coaching and setting staff are pretty rooted in the competition scene and are really thankful to be in a place where we can have fun with these programs and work on developing the skills that really get us psyched!
The Crew – Photo: Kyle Rurak
Oh Wait…
Did we also mention that we also filled in the cave and left steep, set 4 routes and are back in to add more routes and problems on tonight??
Busy week at Climb Base5!! Make sure you come in and check out all our latest handy work!
THE LAST TAPE ROUTE IS DOWN!
Thanks For Reading!!
Base5 Setting 