if climbing is so safe, what's with the news stories about deaths?

a few days ago i blogged about a recent german report that concludes that climbing is a relatively safe injury-free sport.

so what's with all the news stories about people finding death on the rocks? maybe it's the hidden fear we all have about falling to our death that makes for a good news story? it definitely adds to the intrigue and mystique of climbing. "geez, if even the experienced climbers fall..."

here's an associated press / san jose mercury news story from today:

rock climbing legend falls to his death in yosemite -san francisco- "a renowned rock climber and author who scaled peaks around the world fell 500 feet to his death in yosemite national park, a spokeswoman said tuesday. todd skinner was rappelling monday after he and a partner worked on pioneering a new route near bridalveil fall, said adrienne freeman, a park spokeswoman. it was not immediately clear why skinner, who claimed on his web site to have set climbing records in 26 countries, fell."

nerd alert: indoor climbing safer than soccer?

yup. according to german researchers.

the study, injuries at the 2005 world championship in climbing, published in wilderness and environmental medicine, looked at injury rates per hour during the 2005 world championships of climbing in munich and compared those numbers to other sporting events. pretty interesting.

so the next time your friends are reluctant to join you at the climbing wall, embrace your inner nerd and whip this neatly folded PDF report out of your back pocket.

the one year climbing lull?

i never thought it could happen to me. when i started climbing a little over a yeat ago i came across long-time climbers who talked about the dreaded one year "lull." they'd say things like, "ah, it's your honeymoon" and "this is the best time." i never quite understood. now i do. what happens is that after climbing intensly for about a year it is common for newbies to realize that hitting the crag and the gym regularly can be all-consuming. work, life, love has a way of sneaking up on you and changing your extracurricular priorities. in addition, i think, slowing improvements can decrease your motivation.

over the last two months i've moved to boulder, started a crazy busy job, and cut back on my climbing. that's hopefully changing. i'm slowly meeting new climbers in the area and starting to hit the gym again. getting displaced can mess up your grove. i'm determined to start over.

with that, here's an interesting little passage that reflects on how the risks of climbing might fit into a broader evolutionary story. so be safe out there - "don't f*k it up":

by bill bryson (book: a short history of nearly everything); talking about how through the evolutionary process "you" arrived today:

"...so at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. the tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result eventually, and all too briefly-in you."