Aidan Roberts on Establishing the U.K.’s First Proposed V17

When Aidan Roberts did the first ascent of Spots of Time last winter, he didn’t immediately publicize it. And when he did eventually share his story—first to Patreon supporters of the Careless Talk Climbing Podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow British crusher Sam Prior, then to his Instagram followers—he hesitated to give it grade. Only after returning from a trip to Europe, where he made the first ascent of the Midnight Project, now called Arrival of the Birds, did he propose V17 for both.

It was June by the time I caught up with Roberts about Spots of Time, which is located just a few miles from his family’s home in the U.K.’s Lake District, and by then the news was no longer really news. So I held our interview, waiting for the climb to recirculate in the form of a film. This week, Wedge Climbing—run by Sam Lawson, one of the best climbing filmmakers currently working—published an excellent 20-minute piece about Roberts’s process on Spots of Time, which I’ve embedded below. In our interview, Roberts spoke grades, projecting close to home, and what Wordsworth’s concept of “spots of time” means to him. It has been edited for length and clarity.

THE INTERVIEW

Climbing: Travel and climbing have always gone hand in hand, particularly for folks like you who can climb out an area relatively quickly and then have to go look for more things to do. What was it like to find a super-hard project like Spots of Time so close to your family home?

Roberts: Yeah, I’m still in a little disbelief. I feel incredibly fortunate. It’s just super rare and super special.

Climbing: You’ve mentioned on your podcast that you’ve traditionally trained in a very seasonal way: You train hard indoors for several months, then go on a trip, then train hard again. But with Spots of Time so close to your training base, you got to test a blended training structure where you supplement board training with performance sessions outside. Is that something you’ll replicate?

Roberts: Yeah, I was able to put so much more into my training having a project close by during my training cycle. In the past, when I picked up ambitious projects abroad, I’d go on the trips, totally exhaust myself, come back completely knackered but with a lot of training motivation, and then dive into a training season for like three months—but towards the end of that training phase, I’d be burning out on training and excited for the trip. So I’d very much be oscillating between the two extremes, always looking for the next thing. Having Spots of Time so close to home was a bit of a stopper to that process. It made the time at home really motivating from an outdoor projecting sense. It meant I could be practicing the psychology of having an ambitious project on a weekly basis. And that made my winter in the Lakes feel super steady. I’m at a point now, I guess, where I’m probably looking to base myself elsewhere, though I’m not quite sure where, and now that I know how special it is to have a project that’s so local, it will really dictate where I’d like to set up camp going forward.

Climbing: I imagine there’s less pressure to send because it’s local, right?

Roberts: Yeah, that was nice. It’s not like anyone’s telling me I have to try those things abroad, but there’s a certain cost to traveling to these places, and I feel a certain pressure to make the most of my opportunities there. When I’ve traveled a long way to Finland or Switzerland, and I only have a short window of the season, a certain part of me feels obliged to try the things that I trained for. But with Spots of Time, I almost preferred having the project there than I did the idea of having done it. So I felt no pressure to try it except when I really wanted to be there.

Climbing: That obligation you feel to try certain hard projects when you’re on trips—do you eventually start to resent the pressure?

Roberts: Yeah, I have definitely struggled with that. When I commit myself to something, I’ve traditionally been relatively tolerant of the austerity that might come along with trying to achieve it—and I don’t think that’s necessarily a virtue. It has a lot of limitations if you’re not very precise or conscious with your goal-setting. If you feel an obligation to try something for reasons that are not entirely intrinsic, I think your staying power can be really limited, particularly if you’re not finding the process making you happy.

Nowadays I’m in a much better place with that. Instead of just being somewhere to try a boulder, I regularly ask myself now what I want to do the following day. It’s nuanced of course, but there are simple exercises I do. In the past I might have finished a session and immediately thought, When can I next try it? Now I’m like, What do I want to do tomorrow? Maybe I want to rest and try again the following day. Maybe that’s what I’m motivated for. But maybe I want to go and climb on other stuff. And allowing myself to do that has been nice. I’m being kinder to myself, putting a bit less pressure on myself.

Climbing: Has something changed that makes that possible for you?

Roberts: I feel like I’ve got a bit more confidence. I climb more on my own terms than I’ve done in the past. And I definitely feel less influenced by what I’d have seen as expectations from others. So it’s been quite nice. It definitely makes climbing a bit more fun.

Climbing: When you first dropped the news on the podcast, I remember you being a bit unsure about the grade, whether it was going to fall in the V16 or V17 range, and I got the sense that you were actually hesitant to offer one. So I was kind of surprised to see that you eventually decided to offer V17. What went into that decision?

Roberts: Yeah, I didn’t think about the grade much when I was trying it. I was trying to view the climb for what it was. I think there’s definitely value to the grading system, but I don’t think I’ve ever really had that much conviction about specific grades. I’ve always been relatively reliant on other people’s opinions. So I found it hard to know where to begin to grade it without understanding how well it suited me.

Climbing: How well does it suit you?

Roberts: I think parts of it suit me really well and parts of it don’t, so it’s hard to know objectively which one is more influential. There are some really small holds on it, and you crimp pretty much every hold, so in that sense, I’d say it suits me really well. But the texture of the rock is pretty glassy, which generally suits my skin less well. And while many of the body positions require a lot of connection between all your limbs, a style that suits me, the difficult part for me revolved around a very close and vague drop knee—and I’m generally better when my hips are more externally rotated. And there was an element of snatchiness to the boulder that suits me less well, too.

So, yeah, there’s bits that suit me really well and bits that don’t, and it’s hard to know where other people will find points of failure. The grade ultimately felt like a shot in the dark. I was trying to compare it to my experiences trying other things where there has been consensus around a grade—things like Alphane. But it was also helpful to have Will [Bosi] try it and get his opinion on it.

[A note about style: Bosi has logged several days on Spots of Time, and while he seems to do quite well with the drop-knee crux, after four days of effort has yet to stick the move to the lip of the boulder—a move Roberts considered easier.]

Climbing: Was there a version where you just held off grading it altogether? 

Roberts: I always hoped to be able to grade it, but the grade wasn’t a big part of my process on the climb, and I knew that when I’d done it, if I publicized it with a grade, the grade would very much take the limelight. So I kind of hoped to communicate my experience of the climb as a reflection of how I actually experienced it—without the grade at first, then with it. I think it’s maybe quite hard to do so on social media these days.

Climbing: What does the name Spots of Time, with its Wordsworthian roots, mean to you?

Roberts: Sometimes I can name something pretty casually, but when a climb has both personal significance and some significance for the U.K. as well, I try to put some thought into it. But at the same time, it’s a piece of rock, and it’s an open project, and I don’t want to express ownership over it by naming it until I’ve actually done it. But in this case the name came quite organically.

Spots of time is an idea coined by William Wordsworth, a poet who lived in Rydal, the small village in the Central Lake District where I grew up. I could see his house from the house where my family still lives. But I actually knew shockingly little about Wordsworth until a good friend of mine, Hamish Potokar, sprained his ankle right at the start of a trip here. Suddenly we were looking for activities he could do on crutches, so we went to the Wordsworth Museum and read a bunch of things. Afterward, we were talking about Wordsworth’s spots of time phenomenon, which is the idea that there are distinct moments in our life into which a lot of greater learnings are condensed. Wordsworth specifically talked about how these moments are often found during interactions with natural spaces. And I thought it could be extrapolated to this climb, which was not necessarily a moment for me so much as it was many movements—and yet the line represents a lot of them at once.

Climbing: I love the idea that a boulder is a representation of a lot more than a boulder. On the one hand, it’s a rock that’s been there before we were born and will be there well after we pass away. Yet we have these interactions with the boulder, and in the end it encapsulates, or comes to represent, a big part of our life while also being its own thing, forever independent of us.

Roberts: Yeah, I think the spots of time idea really references something that climbers experience. I mean, climbing can feel quite arbitrary and a bit silly, but it’s also much more than climbing up a bit of rock. It’s a conduit for so much learning and the connection we have with spaces and people. And I think the name did justice to my experience of that.

Climbing: But the name is also an homage to the Lakes, correct?

Roberts: Yeah, having that project so close to me in the Lake District really changed my relationship with my time at home. I felt really steady in the Lakes and the landscape I grew up in. And since Wordsworth generally wrote about beauty in outdoor spaces and, specifically, the Lakes District, it felt a bit in keeping to give an homage to Wordsworth as well.

The post Aidan Roberts on Establishing the U.K.’s First Proposed V17 appeared first on Climbing.