Moving On And Getting Over
Reflecting back on the surprising ways this website impacted me in real life, the winter of 2011 was a pivotal one. At the beginning of January I found myself at my first Outdoor R...
Category
From The Narc
Rhythm
Yes, I'm still alive...
Seven
This site is over 7 years old...
No Getting Out
Once you enter this family, there's no getting out.
Making Changes
Moving forward all discussions on this site will be handle by a new Discourse-powered discussion forum
Thoughts On My First Outdoor Retailer Trade Show
Last week I made the journey out to Salt Lake City to take in the sights and sounds of my first Outdoor Retailer Trade Show. Some people go there to learn about the new gear, othe...
Weekend Of Yosemite Bouldering
A recap of my 5 day trip to Yosemite last week
Kentucky Champagne
Sandstone and Bourbon...
What Can You Say About The Grade?
Important to some and meaningless to others, climbing grades have long been a great source of debate to pass the time in between sessions. Recent years have seen an explosion of c...
A Painful Learning Curve
A painful lesson of what can happen highball bouldering, updated with video.
It Takes A Lot Of Belief
A lesson in belief from Tommy Caldwell as he runs laps on Midnight Lightning in Yosemite, CA
The Mental Game
Will Gadd had a series of posts recently where he shared a handful of random training thoughts, most of which espouse the benefits of actually doing an activity (i.e. climbing) rat...
Something To Keep In Mind
Last summer while I was wandering around the boulders in RMNP’s Lower Chaos Canyon I stumbled across an odd scene: there was a really strong looking guy getting very close to sendi...
Is Europe Taking America's Lunch on the Rocks? Yes...and No.
To wrap up the discussion from last week about the perceived superiority of European sport climbers compared to American sport climbers is this guest post by Urban Climber Editor J...
Why Chris Sharma Doesn’t Boulder More
Ever wonder why you don't hear much about Chris Sharma bouldering these days?
Limited Edition Team 5.10 Vs. Five Ten V10 Comparison
A visual comparison of the new Limited Edition Team 5.10 shoes and the old V10s
2009 Mammut Bouldering Championships Wrap-Up
The 2009 Mammut Bouldering Championships are in the books and what an interesting event it was. UPDATED with problem 4 footage
The Cost Of Doing Business?
Are airline baggage fees putting a cramp in your climbing travel plans?
Be Careful What You (Sort Of) Wish For
As climbers we spend most of our time concerned about avoiding injuries to our precious upper body extremities, most importantly our hands. Injuries to seemingly non-essential cli...
Ruffling The Red Feather
Jamie Emerson has had a productive couple of weeks at the Northern Colorado area Red Feather Lakes. He has done the FA of 3 V12s recently in The Big Bang , The Mastodon and The Vam...
Donation Update
An update on the donations from ClimbingNarc.com to access causes and thoughts on an access related thread on 8a.nu
Caution: Side Effects May Include…
As anyone that reads this blog knows, injury related downtime is nothing new for me. In fact, injury related boredom is the main reason this blog was created 2 years ago. Given my...
A Wisconsin Trifecta: 3 Areas, 3 Disciplines, 3 Classic Hard Lines
The news of Josh Wharton’s recent trifecta of 3 difficult bouldering, mixed and sport climbing challenges rekindled a hair brained idea I thought up last year. For those that didn’...
Let’s Talk Style
A guest post from Rhoads about the finer points of Climbing Style
Chris Sharma Esperanza (V14) Video On MVM
The Momentum Video Magazine has posted a clip from Best Of The West of Chris Sharma repeating Fred Nicole’s Hueco Tanks testpiece Esperanza (V14). Beyond the climbing being impres...
Theater Of The Absurd
My Dad often asks me why I don’t just use a ladder to get to the top of a boulder when I tell him about our various bouldering excursions. That’s a valid question I suppose, but wh...
A Conspiracy Theory That Has Nothing To Do With The Election
A few weeks back, Skyler Weeks opened a new dyno at Clear Creek Canyon, CO called Zion . You might be asking yourself, who is Skyler Weeks and why would I care about some dyno in C...
Putting Climbers First to Create Climbing We Can Believe In
Today is election day in the United States, an important day no doubt. I have to ask: What has either candidate vowed to do regarding the important problem that plagues many of u...
“Fifty Words...” & Horseshoe Canyon Ranch Sneak Peak
Fifty Words For… …Get A Life?? …A Job?? I'm not really sure what to make of the mini-melodrama that took place at the Red this weekend. Here is a brief synopsis for those intereste...
Climbers Take The Access Initiative In Joe’s Valley
This has been posted elsewhere already, but I thought it was important to pass along as a general reminder for visitors to all climbing areas. Often times the things we take for gr...
A Few Annoyances Observed At The Red River Gorge This Weekend
It’s been awhile since I’ve spent any amount of time at the Red River Gorge in Kentucky and even longer since I’ve stayed at the local hangout Miguel’s. This past weekend I had the...
Girl Talk In Rifle
If you are looking for some evidence that people can get along in this crazy world of partisan presidential politics and large financial institution collapse, look no further than...
Five Hard-ish Boulder Problems You Should Do Before Death (or Full Time Tradding)
I have had a lot of downtime to compile lists of routes and boulder problems I would like to do once I get healthy again. The following is a list of 5 classic problems that are har...
Urban Climber Website Gets Redesigned…Sort Of
I was perusing my messages on The Facebook yesterday when I saw a notification from my “friend” Urban Climber Magazine that their website had been redesigned. I’m into websites an...
Climbing With A Baby: Some Reflections
As a recently married couple, Mrs. Narc and I are asked about when we will have kids more than just about anything. In this guest post, Peter Beal examines some of the issues one...
How Much Would You Give?
Memorial Day weekend. An opportunity seized by almost all climbers to take advantage of an extended break from our day to day lives to go climbing. Unfortunately for me, my recent...
Beta Whoring
I was discussing my FRB interview with someone at the gym a while back. This person mentioned that he took exception to the part in the interview about how my climbing partners vie...
Whipper Night...Unsafely?
With last night being whipper night at team (sorry Tony) the below video that I found at the newly redesigned Splitter Choss Blog seems especially pertinent. The video demonstrates...
Gravity Brawl 2008 Wrap-up
Photo: Tim Kemple At the end of March, the 2008 Mammut Bouldering Championships Pro Tour got underway with Gravity Brawl '08 at the New Jersey Rock Gym. Overall the event sounded l...
Lifestyle, Training, Performance: A Review Of The 2007 8a.nu Yearbook
After quickly devouring my 2006 8a.nu Yearbook and promptly letting it sit under my car seat until Mrs. Narc made me throw it away last month, I was on the fence as to whether or n...
Truth In Advertising?
Two recent La Sportiva Solutions ads have featured some fuzzy math when it comes to the grades attributed to the routes in the ads. One being a Timy Fairfield as showing him climb...
Climb Like A Girl
This is another guest post from Zonk. If you would like to write a guest post on any climbing related subject or share some pictures from a recent roadtrip, please contact me . I w...
Don't Fall Mode
If there is one dream I have, it is to simultaneously hold down a respectable job and travel the world climbing. Mike Doyle is living my dream. He has spent the last couple of year...
Beth Rodden Climbs 5.14 Crack In Yosemite
I know this has been reported elsewhere, but for those that haven't seen it yet Beth Rodden (pictured at right on her FA of The Optimists 5.14b at Smith Rocks, OR) has done the fir...
Devil's Lake Trad Ticklist
With Spring rapidly approaching and me having a cast on for the foreseeable future, I figured what better time than now to go over a ticklist of 50 or so routes that I wanted to le...
Cast of ???
First there was Sock Hands' Boot of Doom ... Then came Mrs. Narc's Boot of Unicorns and Rainbows ... Now there is my Cast of ??? Please offer some suggestions on a menacing name th...
Dab & Die Followup
If one thing is clear from our recent discussion on Dabbing , it is that using your knee on a topout does not count for a dab. Poor style? No doubt. Cheating? I guess not. The numb...
Dab & Die?
I originally ran this post very early last year when very few people were visiting this site. I wanted to revisit this topic to give people a chance to weigh in and take the new po...
Paying to Climb Outdoors Follow-up
Last month I ran a poll asking people how they felt about paying to access climbing areas. After receiving 72 votes and several comments, it is clear that the majority of peo...
Paying to Climb Outdoors
As climbers we often spend a lot of time disagreeing about seemingly unimportant things. Is that route 5.12a or just hard 5.11d? Is using your knee on a topout a dab that nullifies...
Various Ailments Update
With the way things were progressing in the Fall, what with me doing more outdoor climbing than I had ever done, you would think that I would be well on my way to recovery for a gr...
Anatomy of a V13 Flash
Consider with me for a moment what it takes (beyond being freakishly strong) to flash a V13 boulder problem. Patience is no doubt important as one must wait weeks or even years bef...
My Climbing Shoe Collection
Lately I have been accused by many of owning too many pairs of climbing shoes. One might even think that I am sponsored by Five Ten based on my endless promotion of their shoes, bu...
The Learning Curve
I spend a great deal of my time with young climbers. Most have boundless energy and seemingly unlimited potential as climbers. Despite all their physical strengths, I cannot spend...
Thanks
It's been about 7 months since I brought my unhealthy obsession with climbing to the internet. I don't think I ever thought that I would still be injured after all this time,...
Giving Back to the Kids
One of the harder aspects of my being injured this past 6 months has been how to channel my obsession for climbing into something more productive than just aimlessly surfing 8a.nu...
Prediction Review
At the end of May, I made a few predictions about some events at the pinnacle of difficulty bouldering I thought might happen this summer: Ode to the Modern Man (V15) at Mt. Evans...
Small Victories
Days spent climbing each month the last 11 months: 9/06 - 16 10/06 - 12 11/06 - 12 - Elbow pain begins/worsens 12/06 - 6 1/07 - 8 2/07 - 4 - Valentine's Day Massacre '07, elbow/sho...
Coming Together
Things are starting to come together... finally. Numerous aches and pains are starting to subside and I'm really starting to really feel it again. I feel like I am de-aging a year...
Dog Days of Summer
It's been a slower than normal week as far as things to spray about are concerned. A few tidbits here and there that I could expound upon later this week like Dave Graham's m...
Youth Nationals
I am back from the SCS Youth National Championships in Ann Arbor, MI. The event was an enjoyable experience. You can check out the results here . In no particular order here are so...
Sock Hands
I spend a lot of time on here spewing about how many hard boulder problems guys like Daniel Woods and Paul Robinson have done lately, but their overall totals pale in comparison to...
I’m Waiting To Get On My Project…
Back in my younger days the this was basically my mantra. I was constantly lounging around at the crag resting up to get on whatever route project I was working on. Unfortunately,...
Chalk Debate
I haven't heard of such an area in the U.S. but apparently over in Europe chalk is banned from being used on certain types of rock at certain climbing areas. Adam Ondra , who...
Busy busy busy
About to head down the Kentucky for the weekend. Hopefully my arm won't hurt any worse than it does now when I get back. I will be out of town something like the next 6 or 7 consec...
Giving back to the kids…
It has been somewhat of a slow news week for a bit here. As a ravenous consumer of high end climbing information there hasn't been too much that has blown my mind lately. Hopefully...
Frozen in Time
It has been 3 months since I have really been able to climb at all My shoulder feels better, but it still nags me My elbow feels somewhat better, but it still nags me It has been a...
Disturbing Trend of Failure
A trend became painfully apparent during my last trip to the RRG: I don’t usually get very much accomplished when I climb there. For the number of days I have climbed there (roughl...
8a Yearbook
I started writing this post about a month ago but got sidetracked. As a degenerate for climbing information I was obviously very excited to receive my 8a yearbooks about a month ag...
Got Chalk?
So I went to an SCS comp this weekend at a gym I had never seen before. I don't really have anything bad to say about the comp itself although the fact that the results of these "q...
Pressure
T omorrow we leave for 5 days of southern bouldering and sport climbing. Normally my anticipation level would be through the roof, but this is the first climbing trip I can ever re...
Dab and Die?
I would like to take a moment to discuss an uncomfortable subject for me. Not injuries, not impulsive behavior, not even climbing obsession. No, I am talking about the dreaded dab...
Climbing Addiction
I was going to take the time and put something together on this route Whiskey A Go-Go (5.13a) today to showcase one of the most classic hard lines anywhere that also happens to res...
To 8a Or Not To 8a?
I have one . So do plenty of other people. I get good natured shit from my friends for having one. I'm of course talking about the infamous 8a.nu scorecard. I truly don't think I h...