I tried Ice Climbing at the World Championships
ice climbing is something i wanted to try for a while so i immediately said yes when i got invited to join the world championships in Saas-Fee in Switzerland my goal was to become as good as possible in only a couple of days of training and then try some of the actual competition routes the strength you need in ice climbing competitions is not too different from normal climbing but definitely not the same and there is obviously a lot of technique to it Petra Klingler who is not only one of the best ice climbers in the world but also a former bouldering world champion was going to be my coach but first i had to learn the boring basics this is for kids no it's not i mean it's quite a steep wall it's vertical i mean the stuff will climb later we'll be longer yeah but actually probably not quite as steep put it on the camera yeah we'll put the compounds on i don't even know how to put these on this is for the right left i think okay what we'll do is i'll kind of show you how to kind of kick the crampons in and make sure you don't stab yourself when you swing at the ice initiate from the out shoulder then with the elbow and then as you get to kind of almost straight arms the flick of the wrist which is important okay you'll see a lot of beginners kind of almost punching in the ice like and the pit going in that way yeah quick of the wrist one of the things that's important with ice climbing is to use all of your sensors so when you look at the ice if you look at for example this ice here right the ice on the front is quite clear yeah compared to a lot of the blue stuff to the left and to the right right so this is going to be quite brittle it's going to break you see kind of yeah it's going to break quite easily so blue ice well the boy rice is is is better right it's more solid the the clearer ice has a bit more air in it yeah and then when you swing you'll feel when you're at when you get a good stick yeah okay so when you swing you feel the the axe vibrate in your hand okay well that's probably a sense that you have to develop yeah yeah but it comes pretty quickly yeah so try try just kind of standing on the ground and doing some swings and and uh let's see uh see how you go why just tie into the rope and try oh you can do that too well let's quickly let's quickly just talk about crampon technique then as well so if i with my heel like this now i'm pivoting around all over the place and i might get to a point where it actually just pops out the ice if you keep your heels low and kick your feet in stay nice and stable so rather than having your axes next to each other like this yeah can i keep have them one slightly higher than the other so you'll you'll have one here yep one here and then you move your feet up swing your axe up here and then swing your axe up high so have you competed yourself rob uh i have competed in a couple of local dry touring competitions with nothing nothing major right but yeah i think the best idea is to get you tied in and let so the goal for the next days is for me to get as good as possible at ice climbing how good is it possible to become in like three days do you think i think for most people kind of getting to the top of this tower and doing some kind of uh some longer pictures will be a pretty good achievement yeah for you i think kind of once you meet up with petra later and uh she starts kind of drilling you on the on the dry towing style i think you'll pick that up pretty quick because you'll have the uh the shoulder stability and the uh and the fitness to go with it so yeah don't don't be afraid to be brutal with it yeah you feel that one there you feel the vibration where it's stuck yeah it's gonna take a while for me to trust the axis i think because i feel like they're just gonna come up yeah you're right your right hand swing is definitely stronger than your air okay got you excellent natural it's just going to take me a little while to get like trust it you know yeah i mean you seem to trust your feet really well which is good yeah yeah maybe kicking in a little more with your feet would probably help i should also try not to probably lock my arms as much yeah i'm like very yeah bicep should ideally i'm gonna hold you into the wall as opposed to okay oh up it's right so how do you think that went yeah really good footwork was really good yeah i think you definitely uh your right swing was good a little bit of work on your left so those are the eye screws yeah this is what we protect the climb with we have a few different lengths we have a long one generally we use for making anchors yep and then we have a blue and yellow which are 16 and 13 centimeters which we generally use for protecting the pitch as we go yep and then just in case we encounter some really thin ice we've got a little short stubby 10 centimeter okay nice yeah and how long does it take to screw them in you can generally if you get good ice you can generally put one in about 30 seconds gonna give it a couple of turns just to get it started and then give it one push to get it to bite in the ice then you can just spin it all the way in oh nice that looks like you see the core of the eye starts coming out in the middle you'll feel when it goes in that it's solid if it suddenly starts to spin quite freely you'll know you've got into a patch of air sometimes you'll go into a patch of air and then go back into ice on the other side generally if you spin into air straight away you generally want to put it somewhere else take it out and put someone else okay blue ice is good right yeah great kind of hair is good here would be good what you need to do is get it to a point where it will hold itself in the ice because with two hands is obviously very easy but i'm going to try to just use one hand yeah that's it so give it a few more turns with your hands two more that's that's good to go and this can support my weight yeah super solid though yeah i would hang a car off that quite happy you would hang your car off of that wow it's incredible how stable or how solid ice can be yeah that ice crew will snap before it comes out the ice if it doesn't fall out automatically if you get core of ice stuck in the middle you need to give it a good shake okay so you see like we've got now because otherwise if the ice freezes in the middle then the the screw basically becomes useless yeah so you can give it a bash on the snap on the ice like that or yeah what you don't want to do occasionally you can blow on it to blow the ice out but don't touch it to your lips because if it's cold it's going to freeze to your mouth yeah and then you end up with a blood dog has that ever happened to you yeah multiple times really you intend to do it once per season now yeah i mean i expected it to be fun but it was actually more fun than i thought it would be even yeah it's kind of i think it kind of taps into that kind of animalistic kind of yeah side of things yeah definitely more than more than regular climbing this yeah so that was just the very basics but now to some real ice before meeting up with petra at the ice stone but first a quick word from the sponsor of this video so this video is brought to you by raycon i've used this exact pair for a few years now they have up to eight hours of play time and 32 hours of battery life they come in a lot of different cool colors you also get this compact carrying case that makes them really easy to bring with you no matter where you go raycon's everyday earbuds look feel and sound better than ever with optimized gel tips for perfect in-air fit they're also about half the price of any other premium brands raycon's everyday earbuds have over 48 000 five-star reviews and there's no way that they're going to come out of my ear watch this oh that's bad for my neck over the years raikon has showed me and this channel a lot of supports so please go check him out the link is in the description or you can also go to byraycon dot com forward slash magnet and you will get 15 off thank you raycon for sponsoring today's video this is a lot bigger so how tall is this one i think you can climb it in two pictures probably two kind of 40 meter pitches 40 meter yeah so kind of 80 meters total probably yeah we need to we need to move a little quite quickly just so that we can uh get on on and off this crime before the sun comes onto it too much it's already touching the top a little bit but i think as long as we stick to the left in the shade yeah um we will be fine so should i lead or do you lead yeah so i'll i'll leave now yeah and then you can you can follow me up yeah that sounded very hollow there yeah so one thing you'll need to be careful of yeah when you're seconding you're taking them out don't drop them yeah i'll try not to so that was fun yeah it's like you said it's like you feel like it's kind of animalistic you know you're just like i would like to lead but you said that usually you have to wait a little bit before you leave yeah i think it's good to get a little bit mileage under your belt on seconds i think uh petra will have your leading on the mixed stuff yes i think you'll be i think you'll you'll actually find that a lot more comfortable yeah uh kind of because just with your background physically yeah yeah whereas this i think you kind of need to be a lot more solid and kind of confident with your sticks right with your with your axe placement because that's the thing now when i i'm not confident at all i have no idea if it's a solid placement or a bad placement and it's all about kind of learning to read the ice you know what i can look at a piece of ice and kind of ice climbers can look at a piece of ice and go right i know that that's going to be solid and i can swing once and it's going to go in and it's going to be perfect yeah and it's just learning it's just kind of gaining that experience i'm really fascinated by the eye screws too yeah how easy how smooth it was you know yeah how well it works but now we're going to do something very different with petrol yeah it's a completely different style right yeah yeah to become a kind of well-rounded ice climber kind of alpinist a mix of these skills is what you use in the mountains yeah um but obviously petra is going to teach you the the competition style and petra will also compete in the world championships yeah and she she's one of the favorites right i hope so yeah she's uh she won the swiss championships um a couple weekends ago okay and she was came second silver in the medal in the european cup last weekend yeah so uh yeah she should be uh she should be up there nice it should be really cool to see and i will hopefully get to try some of the competition routes as well yeah i'm great to see how you deal with the kind of yeah the style yeah yeah it's a very simple style it's uh a lot of figure pouring and stuff and also knowing when to match when to place the axe in your mouth and like and also trusting it kind of you'll be able to see the axe on the hold yeah on the with the dry touring style and you can see it's all down to your shoulder stability to keep it still okay so then you can move off it oh okay whereas on the ice yeah the pick disappears and you're not sure whether the ice is good how deep it is all that sort of stuff so yeah it's a little bit different just find your way so this is petra uh you're the world champion in bouldering from 2016 right yeah yeah and now you do ice climbing i think i started at the age of 17. so okay over 10 years 10 years of iceland yeah well uh so i'm going to try the men's qualifiers right exactly and you're going to belay me and like this is the first time i do anything like it so i'm probably not going to be very good at it but i hear that you're a good coach there's some tricks some tricks okay things i can give you and which will help you not to be as pumped as you will be okay this place is so big i don't know if you guys see it on screen but it's like how big is it 20 meters i think over 20 minutes it's over 20 meters yeah it's really long and so in the qualifiers or in any round you're allowed to pre-clip two clips right yeah there are two quick draws already clipped just safety wise and the special thing actually in ice climbing is in qualification if you fall before clipping your first own quick draw yeah you're allowed to start again okay yeah that's nice it kind of helps because also with nerves and usually when you fall on an ice climber like when you fall on the lead route you get pumped and you fall but in ice climbing how is that a similar pump or is it more like an upper arm pump um you have kind of two different pumps there's like really the one from the forearm yeah even harder because in normal sports climbing you always have like slightly different holes so you use different parts of the muscle yeah and you can change a little bit with ice climbing you always have the exact same hold in your hand yeah so the pump gets even worse because the hold is actually good so you can hold on really long yeah but there's also the pump of the biceps just because you have like these moves which is just pull by the hands or with bigger force generally ice climbing is maybe a little bit more physical in the upper body than sports climbing so it can be that actually your lat or biceps are just like done and you fall because of that yeah or you just don't fall but you can't move further right and i've seen some videos you do a lot of you matching and you hold you can hold it here or here and you also you put the other axe in your mouth a lot yeah exactly um so you basically have kind of two positions first position or the the short position the long hold it's like steeper yeah and if you have the short hold it kind of drops down yeah um then of course you have under clings as well okay and also here you have two two underclings two under clings there's a lot of technique to this i guess it's technique it's reading a route knowing your ice axe yeah and then of course a lot of detail with positioning of the tool on a hold what would you say would it be easier to come from bouldering to icelanding or from ice climbing to bouldering definitely from bouldering to iceland well maybe it's also just for me because i started bouldering and climbing and then came to ice climbing yeah all right so i'm just gonna try it now in the next video we're going to try again i'm going to try again and i'm also going to film you compete so interesting yeah let's uh i'm excited for that just to watch you guys you know yeah i think you can learn a lot just by watching yeah i'm sure and if you want we also can make a little observation of the route i can maybe give you some hints on where or how to hold the holes yeah that'd be nice or we can just do running uh running better just yelling from the ground yell out whatever as you would yeah and if there's a click that's normally done thank you to be afraid go lower oh your body yes am i not allowed to grind on top really pull in the right direction foreign oh okay yes well that was nice really good job i had no idea that i would actually do the route so it ended i don't know that was obvious for you guys watching but it ended where the top rope was right yeah it's like two x's on the last hole oh so you have to match the last yeah yeah i think i might have forgotten to do that you did and i also cheated once because you were supposed to grab it as an undercling i grabbed it on top before it's not cheating but it's like riskier because there's no hole in the wood yeah but normally the ice it grabs in the hole and there was one time that you actually grabbed the hold with your hand that was uh for me the best part i can feel you yeah i'm kind of known as the climber using my hands okay also like crimps and stuff yeah i just hold on where others don't work climb that much you can't hold and it's so much efficient more efficient for me then yeah uh so tomorrow you're gonna compete right yeah exactly and i'm gonna get to film you uh we're also gonna make another video uh so stay tuned for that good luck for the come tomorrow thank you make sure to follow petra on instagram make sure to like and subscribe and we will see you next time you
2022-02-22 23:27
