Monitoring the Progress of our Climbing Training

Progress monitoring and evaluation are essential in achieving a long term goal, especially when following a plan or schedule.  After developing our training schedule for improving our climbing skills, the need to monitor our progress became evident.  Hence I spent last weekend to implement a script-based wordpress plugin to evaluate our progress (see below).

The evaluation of a climbing day is based on a system I’ve started using about 8 years ago.  It’s a "per pitch" evalution that grants a point for a minimum difficulty when climbed top rope.  Each higher difficulty would gain you an additional point.  Lead and belay climbing would increase your score (for that pitch). Additional modifiers are use to reward Flash or Onsight climbs. The same goes if you climb a pitch up and down again (for training purposes). Of course you lose a percentage of points if you don’t redpoint the pitch or if you climb indoors.

SprayCaster for iPhone
SprayCaster for iPhone

Points per Pitch
What started as a simple calculation got more complex with each passing season.  The good news: as with most things – there’s an app for that!  When SprayCaster first came out I was pretty stoked.  Unfortunately it turned out to be lacking in many regards, which is why we stopped using it about 2 years ago.  It was time for our own digital home made solution!  A quick overview of the currently used numbering scheme in our evaluation is found to the right.  Hardest thing is to balance everything, especially between Flash/Onsight and Up&Down pitches. More often than not these depend on the character of the pitch (rather than it’s difficulty rating).

Above mathematics aside, here’s our climbing progress (of all tracked climbing days) since 22.jan.2013:

[KTPPC_W]

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