[Sasquatch]

All my best gains have been on my early 40's :p

i turn 40 in 2 years and looking forward to seeing my best gains 

[SA Chris]

From today's efforts at the Works I reckon I am climbing about 6C. 

Just reset after each injury.

[fried]

Every set of data needs its outliers. I have no peer group; I am the buddha of Belleville.

1995ish- 24 - Start, lead 1st D, VD, climb on the seawalls Pompey a fair bit. Stop.

2009 - 37 - Yellow/ orange circuits, immediately fuck shoulder, first 4A
2010 - 38 - Orange circuit/ Blue circuits, fuck ankle lose 2 months, First 5A Grat à Marc at Sablons
2011 - 39 - Blues, fuck finger lose 2 months, did the softest 5 in the forest.
2012 - 40 - Blues, fuck back lose 3 months, did a couple of fives.

2013 - 41 - Move apartment, lose 2 months, first 5C, very soft.
2014 - 42 - Blues/ reds, fuck knee lose a month, first 6A and first quality 5s.

All grades are font font grades. All my first of grade have come long before in other places. Low level grading doesn't make any sense outside of 'bleau.

[kelvin]

I hold out hope with the fact that my dad climbed quit climbing in 1980 and picked it back up in 2005 aged 55, and is now climbing 7c/7A+ aged 62 and still improving.

  Nice one dad.

[Doylo]

I wish my dads progression would extend to belaying .

[gme]

There was no chance of any willy waving when i grew up climbing with Nic Sellers. His progression was something like this.


1990 punter- 7c+
1991 8b
1992 8b+
1993 8c
1994- slacker
1995 8c+

All multiples of the grade and other than progress i dont think any of them took more than 5-6 days, most 2-3.

[nik at work]

95-97 - start "climbing", mostly top-roping, a solitary VS lead
97-98 - E4 GU, E5 O/S, E7 HP, E6 O/S, E8 HP, 7a RP
99 - 00 - E8 Flash, 8A
01-02 - standards start to drop off...
03 - 07 the wilderness years, reset to zero...
08 chump - 7C+
09 - 8A, 7c RP
10 - 7c+ RP, E7 O/S, 8A+,
11 - 8a+ RP, 8A Flash, 7b+ Flash
12 - E8 HP, E6 O/S
13 - 8b RP, 7c+ Flash, E7 O/S F.A.
14 - E8 HP, 8a RP
15 - ...

[abarro81]

It blows my mind that your hardest boulder flash is a bigger number than your hardest route flash!

[nik at work]

I'm really quite shit at sport climbing
I'd say that my boulder flash grade has been consistently above my sport flash grade throughout my climbing life.
However I can think of/make up a couple of reasons to explain this:
1 - I have bouldered a LOT more than I have sport climbed (although currently I'm mainly sport and tradding so hoping that my sport flash grade will become half respectable at some point however...)
2 - when I sport climb I generally get on things that are either too hard for me to flash, or new so need bolting/developing (and hence unflashable) or I try at the end of the day of powering/pumping out on above mentioned too hard to flash routes.

[Duma]

My best os is the same grade, sport or boulder

[Sasquatch]

I was just thinking that my climbing "career" was eerily similar to Nik's, with a little less hp.

And my hardest boulder flash is 7C+, and hardest route flash is 7c.   

I seem to also be shit at sport, although I also hope to rectify that this year. 

[Richie Crouch]

2005: 6B+
2006: 7B
2007: 7B+
2008: 7C+
2009: 8A
2010: 8A+
2015: 8B

Decent plateau. Think 8B+ by 2025 is on the cards!

[roddersm]

It would be interesting to see the correlation with age as well as years climbing.

There seems to be a general pattern, not necessarily from here, of people climbing their best late teens/early twenties and then post 40 - has anyone else noticed this or did I just make this up?

[Luke Owens]

It would be interesting to see the correlation with age as well as years climbing.

There seems to be a general pattern, not necessarily from here, of people climbing their best late teens/early twenties and then post 40 - has anyone else noticed this or did I just make this up?

I started climbing when I was 22 and I'm still a punter now at 26. Maybe I'll have to wait until I'm post 40 to see some progress...?!

[slackline]

It would be interesting to see the correlation with age as well as years climbing.

There seems to be a general pattern, not necessarily from here, of people climbing their best late teens/early twenties and then post 40 - has anyone else noticed this or did I just make this up?

Doesn't directly answer your question but there are the following threads.

Benchmarking Survey

The results are here [PDF] but age wasn't recorded.  I could re-run this and include age and a few other things if people can avoid being unrealistic in their expectations (i.e. the best you can hope for is that people use a consistent finger board, e.g. a Beastmaker, to assess themselves, you're not going to get everyone to go to the same place at the same time so they can use exactly the same finger board in the same temperature/humidity).

Not really maximum grade at different ages, but Benchmarks for the Elderly in which I collated a small amount of data posted and plotted it (post includes code for repeating if anyone wants to add in the data from this thread)...

Assuming linearity between age and grade...



Clearly not linear so lets fit a Loess regression line...



Data

[Rocksteady]

It would be interesting to see the correlation with age as well as years climbing.

There seems to be a general pattern, not necessarily from here, of people climbing their best late teens/early twenties and then post 40 - has anyone else noticed this or did I just make this up?

Doesn't directly answer your question but there are the following threads.

Benchmarking Survey

The results are here [PDF] but age wasn't recorded.  I could re-run this and include age and a few other things if people can avoid being unrealistic in their expectations (i.e. the best you can hope for is that people use a consistent finger board, e.g. a Beastmaker, to assess themselves, you're not going to get everyone to go to the same place at the same time so they can use exactly the same finger board in the same temperature/humidity).

Not really maximum grade at different ages, but Benchmarks for the Elderly in which I collated a small amount of data posted and plotted it (post includes code for repeating if anyone wants to add in the data from this thread)...

Assuming linearity between age and grade...



Clearly not linear so lets fit a Loess regression line...



Data

Slackers the only things I think would be good to include extra are age, hours per week training, and days per year climbing outside. Apologies, can't see if these are already included - work blocking access to results of survey.

[Fiend]

It sounds like your satisfaction with your own performance is relative to others which is very strange. 

I hope you can get over it some day. 

Oh hush you scrote, it was a joke.

There should definitely be a 'dick swinging' emoticon on this forum. Nearly every post in this topic would use it.

There should also be a "cringy mangina flashing" emoticon for a couple of people shamelessly confessing to headpointing easy extremes in this day and age.

But anyway I don't think the gist is dick swinging? To me it looks like people are honestly reporting their progress and sometimes, maybe due to the selection of respondents, or the general standards of the forum (and El Mocho, Johnny Brown, Nike Air, james etc haven't posted theirs...) the numbers involved look quite impressive.

Then again I am still waiting to see what shark does with this and what the point of it all is?? Something interesting will crop up, other than my tongue-in-cheek but entirely accurate generalisation.... I think the one thing coming out is people analysing their climbing, with a certain amount of "what if...", e.g.

+1 If i hadn't spent 15 years bumbling around onsighting Easy Trad and grit slabs and tried getting strong in my early 20s instead...

Hmmmmm I'd have definitely spent more time onsighting Easy Trad and grit slabs .

Personally....I wouldn't have done much different in terms of where I progress to, I didn't really want to tick bigger numbers. But I'd have liked to have had more pleasure and positivity climbing earlier on, and been a better climber not just a "harder" climber...it took me 9 years total climbing to be happy with my climbing (in 2006).

I'd have changed:
1. Done falling practise as soon as I started training indoors.
2. Tried harder to sort out my head and non-climbing issues earlier on.
3. Trained harder younger when I was lighter and had less risk of injury.
also...
4. Got an MRI scan in my youth and got on Warfarin earlier, ah 20:20 retrospective vision.

[rodma]

OK, I'm going to bite

started bimbling in around 1989

89   diff-ish
90   vdiff-ish
91  hvdiff
92  E1

indoor climbing is invented in scotland and by that i mean a wall opens round the corner from house

94-96
spurt climbing, manage to redpoint 7a
97-99
still spurt climbing manage to redpoint 7b

bouldering is invented in Scotland (see above)

2001  7A (in actual font) (aged 25)
2002  7C+ (7b+ in actual Font) , also redpoint a shit scottish spurt route at a higher grade than previously, but it's just a blip

start working in proper jobs at this juncture.

2004 7C (in actual font)
2007 8A (in font, still haven't done any 7c+s there) (aged 31)
2012 8A+ (aged 36)

[Sasquatch]

On one of the training threads there was a discussion about understanding who you were getting advice from, and whether it was from someone who was climbing hard vs. knew what they were talking about, vs. .....

I think a few progressions on this thread are quite enlightening in that regard.  It gives a perspective on age/improvement/grade all at the same time.  Not to knock the rapid progression guys(as actually I'm just really jealous), but if you jump up to 8A or 8b in 2 years, there's likely alot of natural talent at play which then makes me question any training related advice. 

[kelvin]

  but if you jump up to 8A or 8b in 2 years, there's likely a lot of natural talent at play which then makes me question any training related advice.

I find this to be true in some cases. The lad I'm going on the trip with - he does no training, has been climbing four years and his goal for Spain is 8b+ and whilst he's great at coaching the local youth team, he's the last person I'd ask for training advice.
On the other hand, someone like Ben Davison who set about training for 8c+ is worth a listen to. IME anyway.

That's a whole different thread tho I guess.

[bendavison]

Funnily enough, I kind of agree with Sas, if only because someone who climbs well, but has less talent, will often have more experience since they might have had to experiment with lots of different training methods. Thanks though, Kelvin! I do try and put thought into any training advice I give, even if its based on less experience. But yes, its a bit off topic!

[MischaHY]

May 2014 - E4 headpoint. Several. Headgame lessened slightly, but still shit on sport. 7a+ redpoint.

Plateuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuae

September 2014 - Fear of death fucks off. 7b+ redpoint, then 7c two weeks later.

I'm not sure a six month period in which your redpoint grade goes up three grades can be considered a Plateuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuae

OK fine. But I still thought I was shit for 6 months, so I'm sticking with it.

[petejh]

More of a truncated spur than a plateau.

Has anyone progressed since this thread started? It's been a few days now.

[haydn jones]

onsighted a 9b petejh can i quit now?

[webbo]

Backwards again so far this week.