There's indoor gyms like this one opening all around the country and in 2020 for the first time it will be an official sport at the Olympics made up of three events.

The first is lead climbing that's scaling a tall wall using a rope that you use to anchor yourself along a route.

That changes from competition to competition.

The second is bouldering no rope this time because it's closer to the ground.

But the problems are physically and mentally a lot more demanding like lead climbing the roots change from competition to competition.

And the third is speed climbing which is exactly what it sounds like climb a 15 m wall as fast as you possibly can.

Here's the twist unlike lead climbing and bouldering, the route stays the same every single time the holds like this one are standardized and they're in the exact same position in the exact same place along the route.

Whether you're climbing today, a year from now in the U.

S.

Or abroad.

The fastest time ever recorded on a speed wall is 5.48 seconds.

Look at that time.

Go down today, we're going to look at why climbing a speed wall in five seconds flat is almost impossible to find out what it takes.

I climbed with one of the fastest american speed climbers.

Okay, talked big wall speed climbing with Alex Honnold speed climbing.

Big walls, you don't think about your lactic threshold and just do it over and over and just you know it improves and the physics of flying up the equivalent of a four story building with a bio mechanistic like running or swimming.

The start procedure is very, Very important, climbing fast in and of itself isn't exactly new people have been racing each other up walls since at least the 1940s, but the standardized route that will see for speed climbing in the Olympics has only been around for a few years.

The very fastest climber, Iranian Raisa Lalitpur set the world record at 5.48 seconds in 2017 but not even a decade earlier.

The record was in the mid six second range today.

That's how long it takes.

This 16 year old champion sprint up the wall.

So we're here today at Earth treks gym in Englewood colorado.

We're gonna do some speed climbing and with us today to help us out is two time national champion Jordan Fishman, you have a couple of records in speed climbing right?

Alright, he's very fast at it.

And also with us is Alex Honnold, he is a speed climber of a different sort, he works on bigger walls and you've actually never climbed this either.

Right, I've never climbed the wall, this is gonna be great.

Alright, I haven't either.

I'm super nervous.

Let's try this.

I went first, so exciting, let's just say that I did not set any records, he's off like a rocket.

It took me more than a minute to get up the wall.

Yeah, Okay, one minute 15 seconds.

Ah Alright Alex is turned Then it was Donald's turn.

Not surprisingly, he was much faster.

He made it to the top in just under 30 seconds.

29 seconds.

I feel winded and kinda shaky.

So the progression was 75 seconds, 29 a half seconds.

Let's see you Jourdan.

Even with a couple of missteps, he scrambled up the wall in 8.5 seconds.

Just a walk in the park.

I know it's pretty classic with mistakes and as a warm up it's still 8.5 seconds.

Just for comparison.

Here is a shot of each of us on our first climbs.

As you can see I'm picking my way slowly up the wall, figuring out the holes as I go.

To be totally honest, My main focus here is on not falling, so I'm being very deliberate with my movements and as a result climbing very slowly.

Now take a look at Honnold here in the middle like me, he's climbing this route for the very first time, so he's figuring it out as he goes, but he's still much faster in the time it takes me to reach the top.

Honnold could have climbed this route 2.5 times and a lot of that has to do with his strength and confidence, but also pay attention to his footwork to move fast.

He's using not just the holds on the wall, but the wall itself, climbers call this smearing and on the speed wall, it spares them from looking down to find footholds, saving them valuable time.

And then there's fishermen on the far right, he knows this route by heart, so he's relying on explosive strength and muscle memory to blast himself up the wall like Honnold.

He's also smearing his feet, He's moving so fast that he stumbles a couple of times, but even with those missteps, he still soars up this wall in the time it takes me to climate once fishermen could have climbed it and tagged the buzzer at the top nearly nine times.

I was obviously the slowest took me 75 seconds to complete the run Alex was a lot faster than I was.

He took just under 30 seconds to complete it, Jordan, you talk about, let's see, that's 8.5 seconds to run through that as a warm up run and you missed a couple holes all right, but that that's a huge difference and I feel like a lot of it boils down to the style with which we were climbing it, like I was being a lot more delicate about it, Alex, you were smearing a lot.

So you were just putting your foot directly on the wall.

I was trying to but obviously there was a lot of room for improvement.

So why were you doing that?

Uh Just so that I didn't have to think about the footholds as much, basically.

So I could focus on just making big moves between the handholds all right, and then you just blaze through it 8.5 seconds.

So what what how do you how do you trim off 20 seconds?

Part of it is that he didn't have to think about anything because he knows exactly what to do, so his body is just executing without thinking about it.

Yeah, that's the other thing, this is the first time I've ever done it, this is the first time Alex has ever done it, so there's nothing for us to do would improve, that's the spirit.

How did you get faster for one?

Knowing the route helps and knowing the holds like where you have to grab them and when you have to grab them uh because that just like just thinking, takes time off, so by doing that you can get faster and that also helps with your feet because you know where to place them, so you don't think about that either as you might expect, the start is crucial if you have a bad start, you can kind of ruin your run because as you push off, you have to carry that momentum all the way up through the entire out.

So if you don't get as fast as a start, typically you're running as fast, even if you can catch up speed would fishman and many other elite speed climbers do is bypass an entire hold, you want to go foot and hand at the same time.

So you kind of, you get back, you generate as you pull, you push off of this foot cut and then you catch like this and then you kind of start to barn door, but you want to carry the barn door through and then and then fly upward.

Exactly the move is now called the reason for the Iranian climber who has used it to slash the record up to 15 m wall to 5.48 seconds.

Like it just saves so much time off and it, it almost makes you flow better through the next like three or four moves because you're better set up there already.

But the Reza is not easy.

I struggled.

So did Honnold, but even without the Reza start, could we get faster?

We each went again to find out.

Yeah, that's really good.

I shaved 40 seconds off my first time running it in 35 seconds.

Honnold took five seconds off doing a 24.5 2nd run And Fishermen Fishermen crushed it 6.62 seconds.

Your record is 6.38 right?

So that's crazy.

And that's like, you know you were saying on on any given day, I feel like your record could be a lot lower than any random morning.

We're not even that warmed up.

I mean we just showed up and did a little climbing most get average anywhere from like 65268 or nine.

But it all, it all just depends on the run in the day of having.

So would you consider that a good run?

Yeah, that's surprisingly good.

Yeah, for me for like semi warm too.

And how many of those do you have in you on a given day anywhere?

Sometimes I'll do two runs a day, sometimes we'll do eight or nine.

But yeah, but it doesn't take money in your cooked, right?

Yeah.

It's funny to think that doing six seconds of exertion six times and you're done with the day.

Like man, I worked out for 45 seconds today, totally anaerobic.

Right?

And what you doing is much more aerobic.

What I'm doing is completely aerobic.

It's basically what you're doing is basically a marathon and you're doing a sprint.

Many people know Honnold as the subject of Free Solo, the 2018 documentary about his rope ascent of El capitan in Yosemite National Park, but he's also set a number of speed records in the park, including the 3000 ft nose route of El Cap, which he scaled with Tommy caldwell in record time in 2018.

This footage of the record climb comes from an upcoming film from real rock.

It takes most people multiple days to complete that climb.

But Honnold and caldwell did it in just under two hours.

Speed climbing outdoors is more about precision and smoothness than it is about being sloppy and fast, which is part of the reason why like people aren't climbing the nose in minutes.

Right?

Yeah, that's that's the reason why it takes a couple hours to climb, you know, pretty much most big walls outside.

Yeah.

Could you apply indoor speed climbing tactics to big walls?

Not exactly the thing about the speed wall indoors is that there's absolutely no risk.

So you can you can be as free as you want, like you can take risks but outdoors if you take risk you're gonna, you know, you could potentially die on something and the climbing style is completely different.

I went to Diablo rock gym in concord California to talk with hans florine is tough, so I usually will go off to the footholds on the sides, flooring literally wrote the book on speed climbing big walls and has owned the nose record numerous times.

He was a speed climbing star in the nineties but he's still really fast.

This is the first ever World Championship speed climbing cup, fully drinkable.

He's in his fifties and last year broke both his legs and both his angles falling on el Cap, he still beat me up the wall twice.

Then he showed me what it's like to climb on El Cap climbing there to rest the outside of my hand.

We went to the gyms crack wall, which simulates the fissured granite that you find on much of the nose route and requires a completely different style of climbing.

Remember just rotate your hand or your wrist and find where it's most comfortable or least painful.

Only took me, you know, 34 minutes, right?

But then again, that's only 30 ft.

So 3000 ft on El Cap, you do 99 more laps.

And this would be a really long show, but that would be doing the nose in a day at the gym, right?

And then there's the weight of all the safety equipment you have to take.

You've got this extra added weight.

This is probably, you know, 11 12 £13.

And that's about what you'd carry if you were just going to climb the nose of El Cap in a single day.

Still experienced climbers like florian and Honnold think the time for a classic route, like the nose could still be brought down.

And we thought it was kind of like the marathon that it would get close to two hours.

But then it turns out actually wasn't that hard to break two hours.

It's not like the marathon, it'll probably go down to 1 20.

I think that if you apply the climbing pace that's used on an indoor climbing wall to El Cap, I mean yeah, you could do it in half an hour but it's just hard to imagine climbing that quickly while still placing protection and clipping your rope and managing all the other systems.

But the speed wall is pure climbing.

Could it get any faster?

The start is clearly key but there's more elements to the climb than that.

So I called up french researcher Pierre La and I was the first champion speak time in champion in France in 90 89.

And now I'm working biomechanics in climbing has studied speed climbing data and found that the fastest athletes optimize the root the top.

It is like the fable of the hare and the total.

So here goes very fast and spends its time sleeping and walking around the path.

So it will travel a lot of way and would take a lot longer than the total that never stops and moves in a straight line.

And the speed climbing is similar if the path of the body mass center is very, very long.

The time at the end will also be very high.

Take a look at this graph based on research the blue line is the path to the climber center of mass takes from the bottom of the climb to the top.

The red lines are the furthest of the climber center of mass moves left or right.

The straighter the blue line and the narrower the red ones.

The faster an athlete can climb.

That is exactly what resonated when he eliminated that fourth handhold.

When the wood was created, the idea of the would settle was to position the climb To the left in the starting position like source.

And that's the 1st 400 holes of the word.

Our position to the left.

Here's video of Reza in 2013 as you can see he makes this big arc going to the fourth hold here he is again in 2017.

This time pulling off his signature move it straightens the curve and makes him considerably faster to make our website.

It's necessary to arrive on the third hand hold with a very high speed.

But not all people use the reason it requires a lot of strength and coordination.

And there's another variable as well.

That's the texture of the wall itself.

So the holds might not change their position might not change.

But some walls are super rough, which is good and others are super slick, which can make it really hard to get your shoe on it and get yourself that push you need to move up the wall.

A very important point for the fish will therefore to supersize the surface of the walls to allow climbers to invent new strategies that will allow to climb faster and faster.

Fishman coached Honnold and I threw some other tricks of the wall and in the end we both got a lot faster.

I notched a run in just under 30 seconds and handled, pulled one off in 22.3 seconds.

Neither of us ever completed the Reza and I struggled with the dinos big leaps from one hole to another, thinks that one of the ways for climbers to go faster is to eliminate as many dinos as possible from their clients.