Did you do any bouldering during your last visit to Boulder?
I was in Boulder mall the other day, and there’s a lot of polished boulders that the kids like to climb on. And the kids were really very interested in climbing all these different boulders. Incidentally, they’re very respectful of each other, and they didn’t take risks either. They were very careful about what they did, and were very enthusiastic. I was climbing on there, as well, and they didn’t think it was weird that I was climbing on there. They didn’t ask me what I was doing or anything, they just… it was like a load of birds on some rocks. I was trying stuff in bare feet, cuz I really like that — you can feel the break-away of it and you actually learn what makes grip, particularly on smooth surfaces. If you rotate your body, if your rotating one hand, and you stop that hand, the gyroscopic effect of that will fix into whatever direction you stop moving your hand in, and that can product an effective shallowing in a foothold. So, say a foothold’s five degrees off being usable — you can rotate your hand at 50mph per hour and stop it, and push it parallel even though it’s up the body, you can push it into the foot. 

There’s ways of marshalling your body to make strange types of grip for very small amounts of time. And if your understanding of what your body does is really crisp, you can pull off moves that aren’t possible within a straightforward rock-climbing model. Boulderers know this, because they’ll swing and catch a sloper and then catch another sloper, and they’ve never really hung properly on the middle sloper. They’ve done the moves… 

Do you climb much alone?
I do climb a lot on my tod. I do like to climb at crags I’ve not been to before and do the established climbs, and I like climbing a lot when I go climbing, and at a certain point I think, it’d be nice to climb something hard, and something comes to my attention, and I’ll try that. But I’m not as light as I used to be and I’m not really super-keen to become… I think my lifestyle would have to change a little bit for me to want to really climb hard again. It’d be interesting to see whether that happens. 

As you get older, the relative importance of being strong or fit is different from being content and responsible. You start to know that things are more viable and more useful to do, and this is one of the things I want to do is to share how climbing has helped me become more aware of what a jerk I can be… or that kind of thing. 

Where are you living these days?
Live in London, in a place called Hoxton. I like to rollerblade around and ride my bike in the park. And I’m writing a book as well about my climbing life. 

What about climbing these days?
On the sandstone, in Kent. I really like going down there and probably just walking along the crag. I really like looking at unclimbed lines. And feeling how it would be to climb them. 

I’m too heavy really to try those project outes [Wizard Ridge, etc.] at the moment. I’ve really had to put my mind into other pursuits for a while. And writing is a bit counterproductive for climbing hard. Writing comes and goes when it wants. And also, to make some money with my teaching, I’ve had to move to London, and so getting out on the crag is more difficult. Also, a lot of people that I’ve enjoyed climbing with or felt relaxed climbing with are doing other things. And also, I got heavier. And so the holds on some of the projects I’ve wanted to do – of which I’ve got about 30 of which I’ve worked in the Peak District that I’ve done all the moves on. Which are… I tried them 10 years ago, and they would have been. They’re certainly as difficult as I think can be climbed with what I know. They’re significantly harder as pieces of rock to climb up than what has been climbed, and I don’t think power is enough to do them. 

It’s a bit like putting a 400 HP engine in a Honda Civic. You could use it in specific places…. If you went over a speed bump, as you came off the speed bump, you could blatt the accelerator and it would give you maybe 15 to 20mph acceleration, and the wheel spin would need to warm the tire up, and you need to peel that back, so… you’d use massive acceleration for small amounts of time to hit very, very specific shapes on very specific days. And to learn which day to be on which crag rather than another, all the alchemy of it is all that. 

And also, climbing boots are not good enough. Climbing boots feel like galoshes on these things that I’m trying to do. They’re dimes, the holds. A lot of them are nail holds, that I can try two or three times in a day. And you need to be able to do box splits on them – side splits. 

I used to train on pins on the wall – pins you put in posters with. Small nails, but not the big thumbtacks, the tin tacks. What it is was I didn’t actually put them in to climb, they just happened to be up on the wall for putting pictures up, and then there was a wooden skirting board  —  some of the moves you moved your foot mid-move. At the beginning you could hang on, at the end you could hang on, but the foot was in a different position and you had to move both hands at different times in the movement. But you’re hitting really, really painful holds. So before you move, you have to hurt all limbs the same in order to hit the end position. And because you can’t break it down, because all the movements are together, you have to rehearse something that you’ve never done before. And it’s our ability to rehearse something that you’ve never done before really quickly that will produce new levels of difficulty. 

What is the universal language of climbing?
Strength and power comes from knowing what to do and only doing that. If you shut off all the muscles except the muscle that’s going to do the move, you’re so much stronger. And, instead of taking five years to improve in strength, you can take an hour and a half… if you really learn how to shut those muscles off. 

Your muscles presumably are holding a position, otherwise you’d be like a sack of spuds on the ground, like really drunk. Now, if you can go from that drunken position to a position like Rodin’s The Thinker in half a second because you know what The Thinker looks like in 3D in your mind, you can feel what that tenor is. And if you could go from that move to that, then you’d be a good climber. That’s what I’m saying. There you go.