age and climbing performance

Notable sport climbing performances at various ages

As someone who quit work in my late 40's to climb full-time, the topic of climbing potential when conventionally "old" has long been an interest. I describe here how I was significantly inspired to "work now, climb later" (apologies, DMM) by a London friend who achieved his best lifetime climbing performances well into his 40's. A few years ago I launched a thread on a British climbing web forum facetiously titled "benchmarks for the elderly" to share news of significant ascents at various age thresholds. In general the results were even more encouraging than I expected and suggested strongly that climbing at a high level was possible in your 50's and beyond. 

In 2021, my Sheffield-based friend Simon started a Facebook group "Grey Power" aimed at climbers in their 50's and older. It has proved shockingly successful and now has over 10,000 members. A recent post, describing Lynn Hill's ascent of a 5.13d sport climb aged 62, kicked off a side conversation about performance at age which re-interested me in the "benchmarks for the elderly" data. I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to update the data from the old forum thread. In particular I wanted to add more data for women which had been under-represented there.

The chart above summarises my first pass at this. The "new" data has mostly come from pleas for help sent to two people - the hyper-knowledgeable Swedish expat Jonas Wiklund in Barcelona and perma-road-tripping rockstar Maggie Odette somewhere in North America. They unearthed numerous anecdotes of notable ascents which I attempted where possible to authenticate from other sources. Then I condensed those down to a shorter list to make the chart. Very approximately the data points are the "Oldest Known Ascents" at various grades. (If anyone is interested in the reference sources, see the Google Sheet here.)

The data

An obvious question is what does the chart tell us, beyond recording that someone did a hard thing at a specific age? Specifically, does it have any predictive value? I think it is reasonable to use the data for setting personal aspirations. If, say, you just turned 50, have had some life change that enables you to be more serious about your climbing, the ceiling for what may be possible is quite elevated: people your age, male and female, have climbed well into the upper 8's/ 5.14's. 

A topic that I am less sure about is whether the trend-line signifies anything? Superficially it looks like a  forecast of decrepitude. In other words: the rate of decline in your personal climbing performance that you might expect with age. The decline for both male and female from 50 to 60 on the curve is about a full YDS grade, or a couple of full Euro-sport grades, and then accelerates downhill beyond 70 for males (I was unable to find much data for females north of Lynn Hill). Intuitively that makes sense; we are accustomed to perceiving advancing age as an increasing drag on physical performance across a wide spectrum of activities, and athleticism isn't usually expected in the over-70's. 

Unfortunately, that interpretation would really only be robust if we could analyse multiple samples of performance data for individual climbers over their lifetimes. And even then we might want assurance that they had been trying equally hard at climbing throughout their lives. In the real world, careers, parenting and other pursuits distract people from climbing for years or even decades. In fact I believe some of the older climbers whose hard ascents have been newsworthy over the last decade, like Bill Ramsey and Chuck Odette, achieved their best performances in their 50's, not in their 20's. (Bill's article on projecting the 8c route "Golden" at 54 is the greatest thing ever written about redpointing, regardless of age.)

Another data problem is that we are not examining performances from a homogenous cohort of climbers, who are only distinguished by age but are otherwise identical. For example, no climbers aged ~60 now (my generation) had access to modern climbing gyms or, perhaps, more importantly, informed training advice until they were in their mid-20's or older, past their prime years for building strength and power foundations, tendon resilience and so forth.  Jeff Smoot's book about 1980's climbing in the US,  "Hangdog Days", documents how the influential Oregon climber Alan Watts caused himself permanent soft tissue damage in his prime by never taking rest days; a folly almost inconceivable to any subsequent climbing generation. In my peer group I can think of two people who were exceptional climbers in the mid-1980s and early-1990s respectively but suffered elbow and shoulder over-use injuries from which they have never fully recovered. 

It seems to me probable that the cohort of climbers currently in their 40's - early 50's, who did have access to quality climbing gyms in their formative years, and at least some warning against wrecking their bodies through over-training, may show less decline into their late 50's and 60's than the GenX elders/ late baby boomers occupying that age zone now.

If anyone reading this is aware of ascents-at-age that are significant or would augment the data (as mentioned, hard ascents by women in their 60's and 70's are an obvious absence) please let me know.

Finally a few notes that hopefully pre-empt some questions/ complaints:

• Yes, I have ignored trad climbing. Several reasons of which the main one is that it is unclear to me how to rank trad ascents from different climbing scenes meaningfully. How do you compare a hard but safe Indian Creek crack to a don't-fall British ledge-shuffle or a Czech sandstone trouser-filler between giant but spaced bolts?  (British E-grades do aspire to this but 1. they are not in widespread use outside Britain 2. there is the deep rabbit hole of whether they apply to onsight or worked ascents. In passing, though, to placate the Brits: Rob Matheson has climbed E7 at 72, Nick Dixon E8 around 60 and the ubiquitous Steve McClure E11 around 50.)
• The trend-line is a cubic polynomial curve generated automatically by Google Sheets that fits the male data with an r-squared of 0.99.  Yes, it is heavily influenced by the final data point (6a around 90).
• Some of the ascents cited are of routes that may have been downgraded and/or have split grades. I ran with the grade perceived by the ascentionists rather than, say, the current consensus on 8a.nu/ Mountain Project/ sendage.com. Precise grades don't seem hugely important in this context either in considering the overall trend or for the individuals involved (older climbers don't typically have sponsorships or instagram follower counts contingent on whether their hardest thing was 8b+/8c or 8c).
• Similarly some of the ascents are FA's of new routes which don't yet have established grades.