Complex Motion and Rock Climbing

In a recent bouldering adventure with a friend, I got an opportunity to examine an interesting case of human locomotion. My friend had just finished his first climb at Boat Rock, and we had moved on to the second climb of the day, called "Easy Crack." Of course, Easy Crack is considered easy for most experienced climbers, but that doesn't mean that it's not absolutely terrifying if (A), this is your second time ever climbing outdoors, where falling is not a pleasure, and (B), you've never climbed something by jamming your appendages into cracks before. With those considerations, it was impressive that my friend managed the send on his second or third try.



Equally interesting was the trip down. After I climbed the crack, I made my way down using hands, feet, and back on a slopey section of the rock (slabby, if you're a climber), and jumped across a small gap to a nearby boulder. For me, it was pretty natural, but for my friend, the jump was mildly terrifying. The difficulty was this: you have to jump from a sloped surface that you can't stand up on, and you have to land on a rock something in the range of 3 to 4 feet away from your starting point. This wouldn't be difficult on flat ground, and it wouldn't be scary without a decent drop onto hard rocks between you and safety. So you have two challenges: you have to plan your motion out, and you have to get it right the first time.



The trick was that you had to simultaneously stand up and lean forwards to start the jump, and you had to launch forwards once you were at a good angle. Once you start that sequence, there is no going back: you have something that you can push off of to move forward, but nothing to push off of to stop yourself. There's a terrifying asymmetry in that plan, and that made the movement interesting.



The motion required to jump that gap is an example of a larger class of locomotion: there are certain sequences of motion that cannot be broken down into individual moves and done in isolation. These motions are more than just the sum of the individual moves, they are a result of the interactions between the moves. This is complex locomotion, and it requires a different type of thinking. Not only do you have to know how to move your body to make the jump, you have to plan how you lead into the jump, how you set yourself up for the next move, etc. This requires more spatiotemporal intelligence than the average type of locomotion that a person sees every day.



As a rock climber, you are faced with a lot of asymmetries like that. If you want to test that statement, climb up a very hard route, and then try climbing down. You'll usually find that when you go up, you execute moves in a sequence that is impossible to reproduce going down. That's why getting down after you finish a climb is very possibly more difficult than getting up. Because of this challenge, many of the rock climbers I know, including myself, have developed an increased ability to plan out complex motions, and to move with fluidity in complex terrain. Just an interesting thing I thought that I would throw out there to influence you to get out and try climbing.