In reply to a few people:
Time to come clean, there may have been a vague element of wind-uppery in my initial post. I knew Steck was good although I was too lazy to do the research to find out *how* good. I still feel that this obsession with the time is a dead end, however, and hopefully dies an early death but I guess the guy needs to satisfy his sponsors.
My main gripe is with perma-morons like Mike Kann who love to use stuff like this to tell us all how alpine climbing is superior to all other forms of climbing and how bouldering V15 is p!ss in comparison to climbing 1000m with a crux at a whopping grade of Scots IV and how dreadful it would be to fail on such a venture - conveniently forgetting that it makes bugger all difference if one falls off soloing the Eiger Nordwand, Kipling Groove or the crux on P.2 of Valkyrie at Froggatt, the end result is still the same.
It's very easy to belittle climbers who don't face the fear of death in their everyday climbs but often these people have never felt the holds on a hard problem, tried to link the moves of a hard sport route and more importantly, have never had to face up to the self doubt and keep going back time and time again to try on something that they may never do. I'm not saying it's harder, but when you're faced with a ground fall, the choice becomes horribly simple - you get up the thing or you f*ck yourself up and in many ways, that's an easier choice to make. When you're not committed, the option is always there to just walk away and leave it - going back to the route or problem in question takes a huge amount of self belief - some of you people should try it sometime.
I'm not saying that one is inherently better or worse, or harder or easier than the other. Just that it's all climbing and just because one person has pulled off an impressive feat in one discipline it's no reason to denigrate the achievements of other climbers in other disciplines.