In reply to CurlyStevo:
> (In reply to Jon Stewart)
>
> I totally agree with this in theory, but when your feet are on smears and your hand holds are typically on jams or slopers (on the bedding planes) that you can't get your fingers behind the sub set of moves and types of movement you can do can tend to be somewhat limited and tend to be a bit samey. This of course is just my opinion.
I last climbed on grit a couple of days ago, on routes up to E1. I did some crack/wall climbs on sloping crimps, big flat square holds and smears, a climb up a positive flake into a series of rounded breaks, a climb which started through a juggy roof and then up some very rounded breaks, a technical seam using pebbles and sidepulls needing a lot of balance (highball boulder problem, the style grit is best at). And that was just a couple of hours after work.
> I think I really enjoy the types of moves you get on flattish steep walls (ie featured but not a sustained corner or crack) on other rocks, but on grit this tends to be a reachy sloper pump fest of quite similar moves.
Me too in some ways. I love brainless crimping more than anything else, Lower Sharpnose is one of my favourite crags because it's such great straight-on wall climbing on holds. Train indoors and then climb high grades on wonderful spectacular walls where you look around and find holds and make continual progress before the pump gets you, what's not to like? Same with much of Pembroke, great climbing.
Grit offers a very different kind of challenge: weird stopper moves, invisible holds, unjammable cracks, delicate unprotected rockovers, contorted palming down and balancing up, etc. Climbing grit is a distilled, intense challenge, where success often boils down to the ability to work out what the hell to do, and the balls to try it given the consequences. Or the willingness to throw yourself into a humiliating battle with some lowly graded crack, which is going to maul you unless you use well-honed technique and whole load of determination and PMA.
There are of course loads of boring grit routes that don't live up to what I've just said, and I agree grit is dull if you choose the dull routes. It's small and the settings are tame. The adventure and the thrill is in the experience of climbing the challenging routes, and you don't get that for free, you have to either be bold, or be prepared to get beaten up, or if you want to be good at it, both.
This is why it's so annoying, and yet so amazing. But boring and samey it is not.