UKH

Hi together,

as a passionate rock climber and a data enthusiast, I have started a blog Climbstat (non-commercial and no ads) focusing on data science for rock climbing and bouldering.

Let me please share my blog which you can find here: http://climbstat.blogspot.com/

I discuss there, for example, the role of height and weight for rock climbing performance ( http://climbstat.blogspot.com/2018/12/being-tall-and-carrying-more-weight-a... ), or how much more difficult an onsight attempt is compared to redpointing (  http://climbstat.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-much-harder-is-onsighting-vs.html... ).

Future topics will include the question of a critical period to start with climbing to become excellent, or a statistical investigation which popular crags are grade inflated or sandbagged.

Please let me know what you think. Remarks or criticism are very welcome

PS: I hope it is Okay that I link the blog here, I have used the contact form to ask one week ago but didn't receive an answer. As required in the guidelines, my blog is not commercial, with no advertisements and without sponsors.

Arne

Are you hoping to monetize this idea?

Not at all, why?

OK cool. It just sounded like it might have been an attempt to make a kind of Strava for climbers.

Looks great. Thanks for sharing. Have you considered using data science to ascertain whether 'grade creep' (the perception that, on average, guidebooks upgrade more routes than downgrade) is a real phenomenon? 

Is it possible to accurately predict if a crag will be condensed (maybe only a real issue at a few UK sports crags)? I've always thought you could scrape the UKC logbook or UKB conditions report page to get training data and use weather forecast data (relative humidity ,differencei temperature between day and night), time of year etc. as independent variables in a model.

Seepage prediction would be another good one. On the face of it this seems obvious. If it's raining a crag will seep. However in my experience it's more nuanced than this. There's often a delay between precipitation and seepage. How long is the delay? The amount of sun and wind also affect things.

Have Scottish winter climbing conditions deteriorated over time? I think someone on this forum might have had a go at this recently. Not sure what the conclusions were.

Perhaps I should think about that idea Jokes apart, I have a very good job (related to data science) and be more than busy with our kid and sports. For me, the blogging is really about combining the topics I really enjoy, rock climbing, statistics and data visualization. Plus, I currently need to distract myself because I cannot do any sports due to a broken finger (not climbing caused... bicycle accident).

Thanks for the ideas. I have thought about looking at the (lasting) impact of weather conditions. We have here in my region, for example, the problem that the sandstone does not dry immediately (and after a longer raining period and a few dry days it is sometimes not obvious from the outside that the crag is still wet, and holds may break if you are not careful). However, if you want to consider more than one crag you need to collect for each local weather data which makes the analyses time-consuming to prepare (plus it would be likely worthwile to get the orientation of the crags). Therefore I stopped short so far.

Another rock climbing blog has looked a little bit into the topic of weather conditions. You can find it here:
https://climbcore.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/boulder-problems-ideal-temperatu...

I think the topic of grade inflation super interesting. As I wrote above, I want to try to statistical see which crags seem to be inflated (the typical climber performs better there than at other locations). Unfortunately, I do not have long-term guidebook data.

I enjoyed reading those articles, very interesting. I think that by using the 8a.nu data you are introducing some bias as this is a database for mainly elite climbers.

i would be interested in analysis of maximum grade climbed: climber age.

Good stuff, I look forward to watching it develop. 

Strava for climbers was mentioned above, it already exists in the ukc databases. I recently overheard this comment

"if it is not on ukc, it didn't happen" 

I thi k I may have heard that somewhere before. 

What I think would be useful is an underpinned grade conversion table, currently these are opinion based, created by "experts" and so biased. 

I have suggested ukc use their database to investigate this but it fell on stoney ground, perhaps because they are said "experts".