You know what Jams My Cams? Grades. Welcome to a discussion of grades, V(olume) 1. Before I get to talking a bit later about how grades actually work, I’d like to touch on how they might work. You know, mathematically. Bust out your statistics textbooks kids, Imma take you to school!
If you seriously want to know what the heck the following rambling means, you can start here: Standard Normal Distribution on Wikipedia.
Lets say you climb your sweet new project and dub it “Moby Dick, V5.” Every park needs a climb named Moby Dick. Or Moby’s Dick. Discussion for another time. If we are plotting opinions, it looks like this:
Pretty open and shut case you think. But then your super tall buddy, Craig, with the +6″ ape index climbs it, reaching through those crux crimpers. Craig says its V3 ‘for him’. Now the plot looks like this:
And then your super flexy, tiny fingered, friend finds a heel hook that you’d have to dislocate your hip to use. “V4 for me” she says:
But you get lucky, and it becomes a mega-classic. Hundreds (OK…tens) of people try your sweet line and weigh in:
So, on average, people think its a V4, and 99% of people think its between V3 and V5, pretty standard. If grades truly behaved like a ‘standard normal distribution’, it’d have mean of V4 and a standard deviation of 1/3 of a V point. Lets look at some other shapes:
Standard Deviation: 0
Nickname: The Baseline
What more can you ask for? Your problem has been selected for baseline status. The group has collectively agreed, that this is the V5 that defines V5. All other V5s will be compared to it. It will be used as the gold standard in arguments. If it ever gets downgraded, it will be like every other problem in the forest got a little bit easier in that moment.
Standard Deviation: 1/6 VPoint
Nickname: The Agreeable
Everybody still calls this V5, but its not the rock solid of The Baseline. A lot of people call this V5ish, maybe its V5+, maybe its V5-, maybe they even call it by one of those horrible, inconceivable slash grades. Still, pretty solid consensus, who doesn’t like that.
Bimodal
Nickname: The Morpho
Are you less than 5’8″? Then you’re screwed, it’s totally V6+. Anything taller than that? Instantly subtract two, or three grades. The average is still V5, but ain’t nobody ever actually called it V5 when asked for a grade.
There are so many other shapes…..
….. and who knows what they all mean. Better yet, even after everyone has weighed in on a climb, people can still disagree on what the grade “is”. I’ll touch on that in a later post: ‘Grades, V2’. Do you see a trend here?
-Justin Meserve is a grade aficionado and standard distribution genius. He knows the right grade for you based on your height, weight, and flexibility.