UKBouldering.com

the shizzle => bouldering => Topic started by: Dave Flanagan on June 05, 2003, 10:07:36 am

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: Dave Flanagan on June 05, 2003, 10:07:36 am

http://www.theshortspan.com/stuff/johngill/johngill.htm

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: Bubba on June 05, 2003, 10:18:55 am

That's brilliant - well done GlenDale - Gill is the man - I especially like:

TheShortSpan: Zen in the art of bouldering?

It ultimately comes down to concentration, focus. Easy problems can be delightful moving meditations, and the more challenging routes can sharpen your ability to focus. Zen - type exercises can help you prepare for total involvement or total awareness, but if you only do them to allow you to do more exclusive climbs, you miss their greatest blessing: enhancement of the joy of climbing at any level of difficulty. If the only thing you can think of as you boulder is to punch out the other guy and boost your numerical rating, you miss the point of bouldering - which is to simplify the act of climbing, stripping away all extraneous factors.

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: Bubba on June 05, 2003, 10:20:18 am

and:

you find at which rating level you climb; you try to advance to the next level, no longer focusing entirely on the climbing, but on its numerical representation. Such ratings are not intrinsic to the rock - they are a social construct. The tail wags the dog. Besides, rating schemes are always flawed. I can no longer tell where genetics ends and "difficulty" begins. Can you? The truth is each act of climbing by an individual is an individual act, unrelated to someone else's performance on the same rock. When you truly understand this, you free yourself from the strong currents of mainstream practice and philosophy and appreciate the simple, unexploited experience of climbing.

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: Dave Flanagan on June 05, 2003, 10:48:29 am

Its deadly to hear from some one with something intelligent to say about bouldering. Its all too easy to get sucked into a grades/performance thing. He is abstracted from that and can see things as they are.

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: AndyR on June 05, 2003, 01:26:36 pm

Quote from: "Glen Dale"

Its all too easy to get sucked into a grades/performance thing. He is abstracted from that and can see things as they are.

You're only saying that 'cos you're a punter Dave and we always burn you off..... :wink:

Title: John Gill interview
Post by: Dave Flanagan on June 05, 2003, 01:32:07 pm

Quote from: "AndyR"

Quote from: "Glen Dale"

Its all too easy to get sucked into a grades/performance thing. He is abstracted from that and can see things as they are.

You're only saying that 'cos you're a punter Dave and we always burn you off..... :wink:

Who Dave? I Glen the master zen be.