jt512
Feb 10, 2011, 5:36 PM
Views: 9001
Registered: Apr 12, 2001
Posts: 21904
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lena_chita wrote: jt512 wrote: lena_chita wrote: curt wrote: jt512 wrote: ...The bottom line is that the more fine-grained the difficulty scale, the more information you have about the difficulty, and thus the more useful is the grading scale. This applies whether you are climbing inside or out, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons... That's absolute nonsense. You have no more real information about the difficulty of the problems, only more disagreement about the ratings. Even in a place where the "V" scale is extremely well entrenched (Hueco Tanks) I could take you to a dozen V2 problems and you would swear some of them are easier than V2 and that some of them are V4 or V5. Curt I agree. I think this is why even outdoor, where conventional V grades are used, there is usually additional "color-coding"-- at least in the newer guidebooks that I have seen-- that compresses the V-scale into, essentially, 4-category scale. Example: Stone Fort guidebook, and I think, the new HP40 guide, shows problems in V0-V3 range labeled green, V4-V7 yellow, V8-V12 red, and unsent projects in black. I've seen the same approach-- though with different color designations, in other guidebooks. No, they just use the colors so you can get a quick sense of the difficulty of the area. There is a huge difference in difficulty between 4 V-grades. Huge. Jay I know that this is the reason why the use color-coding. But it works because as a rough estimate of where I want to go in a new area I start with a window of ~4 grades. And while on average there is, of course, a definite trend of difficulty increase with increased V grade, in practice on a particular problem it is +/- 2 V grades of the grade that was assigned to it. The only reason I am bringing it up is that in practice in a gym it doesn't make that much of a difference whether the routes are graded V0-V15, or easy/medium/hard. At the end of the day, if I need to pick 4 problems for 4x4, I will go by how they feel to me-- e.g. I onsighted them, but barely. It doesn't matter if they are called medium, or if they are called V2, V3, V1 and V4.
That is an admission that the easy/medium/hard scale is inadequate, because you shouldn't have to spend time sampling problems to figure out their difficulty.
And what if you want to do a VIR session where you need 8 V1s, 4 V2s, 2 V3s, and 1 V4? You're totally screwed. Good luck actually having the time and energy left to do the planned workout after the time and energy you have to spend just figuring out which problems to do.
Furthermore, if you go by feel, how do you know that the problem you're working is actually the difficulty level you want to work? Does the problem feel hard because it's really that hard, or because you're just missing a trick. And how do you judge progress over time without a suitable metric? Are you getting better, or are you stuck at the same level? How do you know, if all you're going by is "feel"? How do you goal set? And so on?
Jay
(This post was edited by jt512 on Feb 10, 2011, 5:38 PM)
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