A Practical Guide to Applying the V-System [excerpt]

?V5:???? A problem, if you were to live in Boulder, Colorado that you might actually flash.
?V6:???? A problem, if you were to live in Boulder, Colorado, that you would expect your girlfriend to flash.
?V7:???? A problem you fell on repeatedly, but really, you could have flashed it.
?V8:???? A problem you religiously avoid, because you're "saving it for the flash."?
?V14:?? A problem only Fred Nicole could do, after you gave him the beta.?

-John Sherman

I've seen 5.11 divided into 11 different grades of increasing difficulty, as follows:
5.11a, 5.10d, 5.11-, 5.11b, 5.11, 5.11c, 5.9 squeeze, 5.11+, 5.10 OW [offwidth], 5.12a, 5.11d.
-Brutus of Wyde

When it comes to grades, climbers are hypocrites. We constantly bicker about grades. We depend on grades to plan our climbing trips and choose our projects. We cast aspersions on climbers and even whole climbing areas for sandbagging or grade inflation. We worship the goal of climbing better, and use grades to measure that progression. And yet we often claim that "grades don't matter" or "all grades are bullshit."

The reality is, grades are generally pretty consistent. Regional variation is evening out as climbers travel more. Informal consensus seems to produce fairly stable grades. (High-end bouldering grade deflation is an exception that I will avoid in this post like I avoid run-out slabs.) Arguments over grades are worth having because grades are the most objective way we track the progression of the sport as a whole, and our personal climbing journeys.

What I want to do here is add some clarity to the relationship between sport and bouldering grades. My goal is not to criticize the current grading system, but rather to take it as given and ask: What sorts of patterns emerge? What objective conclusions can we draw from these largely-subjective grading scales?

First, some background...

V-Grades and YDS

Boulder problems are typically graded on the V-scale (named for John "The Vermin" Sherman) from V1 to V16. While V-grades are more focused on absolute difficulty of a Small number of moves, they do take into account?the length of the problem.

Routes in America are graded on the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS) from 5.1 to 5.15b. The old philosophy held that a YDS rating graded the hardest single move on a route. Maybe this was true at one time, but we clearly have abandoned this way of rating. For example, the New River Gorge classic?Proper Soul?has a V8 crux and goes at 5.14a. The Red River Gorge pump-fest?Southern Smoke?has nothing over V6, yet it gets 5.14c.

Route grades incorporate the difficulty aspect of V-grades, and add the challenge of climbing while pumped, linking long sequences, and finding ever-more-efficient beta. Danger is generally not accounted for in the grade, but are communicated in the rating: PG-13, R, R/X, X etc.

What is the relationship between these two systems?

Increasingly there are boulderers crossing over into sport-climbing, sport climbers dabbling in bouldering, and trad climbers... well... trad climbers are trad climbers. These cross-over climbers want to know how the disciplines compare. Sport climbers may want to know what kind of bouldering progress they need to make to have a noticeable impact on their sport grade. Boulderers may want to know what level of sport difficulty they should expect to project.

One typical correspondence goes like this:

V4 = 5.12-
V5 = 5.12
V6 = 5.12+
V7 = 5.13-
V8 = 5.13
V9 = 5.13+
V10 = 5.14-
?
What does this mean? Just because you boulder V7 does not mean you can send 5.13a (unless it's the micro-route?Bottom Feeder). Conversely, just because you can send 13a doesn't mean you can boulder V7. Route climbing is about more than just the ability to climb hard problems - you have to be able to link long sequences of moves efficiently, milk the rests, and climb well while pumped. While the ability to boulder V6 may be a requirement for climbing?Southern Smoke, it is by no means sufficient.

Because route difficulty is determined by more than just the crux difficulty, it makes sense to think of the route-boulder correspondence as a range. For example, take two Rumney 5.13a's:?Bottom Feeder?and?Dyno-Soar. The former is a V7 problem, while the latter is a longer route that never goes above V4/5.

The Landscape: difficulty and endurance in route grades

To show this relationship graphically, I looked for routes with known V-grade break-downs from fellow climbers and online publications occasionally supplemented by my own experience. I collected the data on 30+ such routes in a?Google doc. Here is an excerpt:

"Sustainedness" was judged on a relative (ordinal) scale, taking into account that a series of hard boulder problems without rests can feel as or more sustained than a long endurance pitch of moderate difficulty. A rough measure might be number of moves weighted by difficulty on the entire route.

I plotted the routes by sustainedness and crux difficulty:

Then I separated out the individual grades:

A Few Observations

Although grading is subjective, we can draw some hard conclusions. For instance, using the micro-routes (routes that are essentially bolted problems), we can put an upper limit on the crux difficulty for several grades:
?

YDS????? maximum crux grade
5.12a?????? v4
5.13a?????? v7
5.14a?????? v11
5.14b?????? v12
5.14d?????? v14

So if you are a v10 boulderer, you can confidently get on 5.13a routes and know you will not be stumped by pure bouldering ability, but rather by endurance and other route-specific challenges.

The converse of these upper limits is that certain crux V-grades put a clear lower limit on the route grade:

Crux?????minimum YDS grade
v4 ? ? ? ? ? ? 5.12a????
v7 ? ? ? ? ? ? 5.13a????
v11 ? ? ? ? ? 5.14a???
v13/14 ? ?? 5.14d? ? ? ?

These limits only set the lower bounds of the YDS grade, but they can be helpful in certain extreme cases. For example, the route?What About Bob?(original exit) at Shagg begins with a 5.12+ then has a V9 crux after a ledge rest. Looking at the pattern of grades, it becomes clear that a V9 crux automatically takes the route out of the realm of 5.12, no matter how big the ledge is, or how long you rest there. By comparison to Bottom Feeder (v7) the route must be harder than 5.13a (3rd ascensionist Chris Deulen estimates 5.13c).

What is more useful is the question "What routes should I work?" When trying a route for the first time, it's usually not length that can shut you down, but a difficult boulder problem. We can list the rough range of crux grades one could expect to find in a given grade, to give an idea of what routes one could reasonably project.
??
YDS ? ? ???Range of crux grades:
5.11?????????? v3 and lower
5.12?????????? v3-v6
5.13?????????? v5-v10
5.14?????????? v8-v14
5.15?????????? v13 and higher

Note that while the upper end of these ranges is fixed (i.e. you will not find any cruxes above v6 on a 5.12), the lower end is soft. It's nice to think that if I had enough endurance, I could send?Southern Smoke. Here is the converse table, showing what kinds of routes one could expect to project for a given V-grade:


V-grade ? ? ? ? ? Routes you could project? ? ??
v4 ???????????? Any 5.12a, endurance-focused mid-12's, ultra-endurance 5.13-.
v6 ???????????? All 5.12's, endurance-focused 5.13a's, ultra-endurancy mid-13's
v7-8 ???????? All 5.13a's, most mid-13's, endurance-focused 5.13+'s, ultra-endurance 5.14's
...etc

Conclusion

This chart and the range-correspondence it suggests are not meant to be definitive. My intent was to display the current state of climbing grades in a new way, not to prescribe a certain set of grading rules. I hope this will in some Small way add clarity to the ongoing grades discussion.

What does this graphic tell?you?

Posted?29th June 2011?by?Rajiv Ayyangar