Winner of the 2010
Boardman Tasker Award

Order a signed copy now

“I sat down and changed my shoes, lacing up my rock boots and trying not to think of what I was proposing to do. The scale of it was vast — one hundred Extreme grade routes in a day. I hadn’t made a list, and I hadn’t thought too clearly about where to find the most routes for the least amount of effort. I really just wanted a reason, some kind of target, to keep me out all day, to test my body, to find out what I was capable of doing.

There was no ulterior motive. I wasn’t there for sponsors.
I didn’t care whether what I was doing would be reported in climbing magazines. I just wanted to find that edge I felt I’d lost. For almost twenty years I’d spent every waking moment either climbing or thinking about it. My body was honed by a relentless training regime that I had started to resent: hundreds of press-ups each day and seemingly endless top-rope sessions where I would do laps on routes I had once found hard. I’d given pretty much everything I had to the sport. What did I have left?”

“Breathing hard, I pulled up, got the jam out right, and then pushed against the fingers of my right hand, levering my body upwards. I brought my left hand to a good finger jam where the crack began to flare. It was a big reach, and I was near full stretch. Heart thumping, I worked my hands against the slick rock, fighting to stay in contact.

The buttress disappeared beneath my feet, the road swam below me, faces looking up blurred, as I stabbed my feet against the poorest edges around the crack, moving raggedly up it until I could reach out and left to catch an edge. I was, as always on Strawberries, on the verge of falling off, completely consumed by the climbing. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing again so close to the top.”

“To be honest, I can’t now remember what grade I gave Cave Route Left. While I liked to climb as hard as I could, and push limits, it was even more important to me to climb good routes, to create climbs people would want to repeat because of their quality. Both Cave Routes are three-star classics. The left-hand version is now given E6 6c, or French 7c+ in sport-climbing terms. Ten years before, I‘d done my first new route, Mulatto Wall at Malham Cove, which wasn’t far off the upper limit of what was being done at that time. Things had moved on at an incredible pace. I’m not sure I knew it at the time, but I was starting to come up against the upper limit of what was possible simply by being fit and climbing all the time.

Mostly I felt incredibly proud. When Livesey and I had looked at the Cave Routes in the mid 1970s, the feeling was that they were targets for the next generation. Someone had written into Mountain magazine suggesting that a monkey could be encouraged to free Cave Route by wedging a banana in the crack every six feet. Only a few years later, back on the crags where I’d first started climbing, I’d broken through those barriers. A whole new vista of difficulty was opening up.”

Catch Ron Live!

22nd Feburary, 7.30pm :: Chemistry Theatre, University of Bristol
Ron will give a full illustrated lecture.
Full details at: http://www.wildernesslectures.com/speaker.php?id=144