UKC

Wow, it sounds like ALex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell have just taken the record in around about 2:09!

Wow, where did you see that?

It came up on my timeline on Facebook as they hit the halfway mark

2:10:15 apparently.

Amazing effort, I guess that we can excuse them the extra minute and a quarter

That's an enormous jump from the Gobright Reynolds time! The downside of course is the extra risk required to achieve it.

Conceivably the risk could be the same and the speed improvement down to better planning and/or higher fitness or familiarity levels. The problem, of course, is that nobody will ever really know what the actual risks were. Possibly including the climbers themselves!

I think I remember a discussion involving either Gobright or Reynolds where they said that either of them could improve on their time if they were willing to simply move together instead of short fixing (or something like that...) but that that would increase the risk. So I wondered if that's how Caldwell Honnold achieved such a jump.

Having seen both Alex and Hans talk about the their record I suspect that the risk can't alter much. It's all about finding a few seconds here and there with efficiency, fitness or just honing the moves.

Brad Gobright seems impressed by the amount that Alex and Tommy free climbed but feels that there are areas that they messed up where there is more time to be gained.

Hats off to the guys ten minutes is a huge chunk.

There is a mountain of fixed gear on the Nose so simul climbing has been the way for NIAD teams for a long time. Watch the Huber bros video from way back when to see how they simul climb. 

Well of course they do, everyone knows that. I've been trying to find the actual quote but can't. It came from either Gobright or Reynolds and it was something along the lines of that if either of them teamed up with Honnold they would inevitably go faster as Honnold was willing to take bigger risks and, if my memory serves me, cutting out the short fixing and climbing 100% simul climbing might be the key.

Impressive but personally I can't get excited about it

I cannot believe I've been involved in climbing for so long and never heard of short fixing. Probably because I'm too much of a wuss to do any big walling. Though I would have thought I'd read enough books to pick up on it!!

Me too I am sure lots of people find it tremendously exciting but I do not. To me it is like someone doing Great Wall on Cloggy in 12 minutes then next week someone does it in 11. Anyway that is just me

Purely to me its incredibly impressive tho i admit i like human performance at its limits.  If they took a second off id be as impressed.  this sort of competition is what drives human performance improvements in all sorts of areas.  Its a driving force for change and improvement.

interesting to see if Brad and Jim have another go soon.  Risk of an arms race style scenario is a bit scary tho...

Each to their own, I'd find it hard not to be impressed by it.

The bad news is that come the next Olympics we're all going to encounter a lot of people that think indoor speed top roping is the dogs baubles

https://www.climbing.com/news/alex-honnold-and-tommy-caldwell-break-nose-sp...

Sad to see someone like you lacking the imagination. Brad and Jim flew past us on our camp under the Great Roof on a training day.  All we saw was grace in movement and ropework as they cheerfully cracked jokes (they could have been annoyed as a certain BMC VP had just accidently 'annointed' them): it was no different to all the other great climbers we have been lucky enough to witness on the crags, yet just happening in the most impressive location imaginable. 

On the risk arguments we laud our Himalayan first ascentionists playing Russian Roulette at times and accept the first alpine season losses of young friends with stoic sadness, yet bizarrely nag and wince at this safer game.

Spot on, but I'm not sure that I would really appreciate it withoutdirect experince of bigwall climbing, even at my bumbly level

World class indoor toprope speed climbing is physically extremely impressive, yet it is (quite rightly in my opinion) derided as a complete joke by almost every climber I know. So just because the Nose Record is very impressive, it doesn't follow that anyone has to take it seriously as a form of climbing.

If a fast ascent of the Nose isn't worth taking seriously as a form of climbing that it is worth taking seriously then WTH is

I didn't say it wasn't worth taking seriously; just that physical impressiveness alone does not necessarily make a form of climbing worth taking seriously.

Personally I see this sort of speed ascent as a sort of freak sideshow and take most other forms of cutting edge climbing more seriously. I see it's long term value as developing techniques and attitudes which can be transferred to do true cutting edge stuff in other arenas - maybe one of the best examples of this is Honnold and Caldwell's Fitzroy traverse.

Anyway, each to their own.

Ah but all you're doing here Rob is exposing your preference for the mountains over pure rock climbing. Personally I'm not usually impressed by speed records - for instance stuff like claiming to be the fastest to do the 7 summits etc - as they're so contrived, but this, even if it doesn't sit well with me as it has the potential to end in tears (and indeed has - Quin Brett) is just pure uncontrived impressiveness. Start at the bottom, finish at the top (shortly afterwards).   

Or perhaps, like me, he finds Nalle sitting under the same three moves in a gloomy forest in Finland for 3½ years more impressive.

Now if someone ever brings that sort of bouldering strength and Nose record efficiency to free climb some massive Antarctic big wall between storms........

My first attempt at leading Flying Buttress (the Diff, not the E1) took me over 30 minutes. Now that's a record that no-one's going to beat.

I wonder what routes they did with the rest of their day?

In a thread back in 2006 (don't ask me how I remember such things, my mind retains utterly random stuff), someone said "A couple of mates of mine once did Flying Buttress (the Stanage one) in 10 pitches with proper belays at each stance!".

I bet they took over 30 minutes.

Would have been my post, I'm pretty sure they took longer than that but we didn't time them.

Edit: I also retain loads of useless crap but sometimes forget what I went upstairs for.

I wonder if some of these people ever forget what they went up the Nose for.

vimeo.com/264661267

Blimey...looking at the speeded up G&R climb they pretty much appear to be simul-climbing most of the time.