Date: June 14th, 2016
About Lynn Hill
This is an interview with Lynn Hill, who’s arguably the most famous climber of all time. She was the first person to free The Nose on El Cap (5.14-), the first woman to climb 5.14a, the first woman to onsight 5.13b, and she was a fierce competitor. She had over 30+ international titles and claimed 5 victories at the Arco Rock Master. More than once, she was the only person – man or woman – to do a route at a comp.
These days, she’s a mother and an entrepreneur, and has settled down a bit. We talked about how she used to train for projects, what it was like back in the day, and the inequalities between women and men in the sport.
More About Our Talk
- How she trained for the Nose and other climbs
- The significance of FFA’s
- Whether men and women should compete on the same routes at comps
- Her weight lifting records
- How to overcome fear and be bold like Lynn
- Motherhood and how it changed her climbing
Lynn Hill Links
- Lynn’s website: www.lynnhillclimbing.com
- Lynn’s Instagram: @_linacolina_
- Lynn on David Letterman (Video)
- Lynn on the Nose (Video)
Training Programs for You
- Check out our Route Climbing Training Program for route climbers of all abilities.
- Our other training programs: Training Programs Page.
Rab Discount UPDATE
Rab is no longer offering you 20% off of their products as it states in the interview. Sorry for any confusion. Please stay tuned for future collaborations with Rab.
FrictionLabs Discount
FrictionLabs (my favorite chalk company by far) is offering you a discount on their awesome chalk – woot! Just visit www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta to get the discounts.
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Transcript
Neely Quinn: Welcome to the Training Beta podcast, where I talk with climbers and trainers about how we can get a little better at our favorite sport. I’m your host, Neely Quinn, and today we’re on episode 55, where I talked with the one and only Lynn Hill.
Lynn is my climbing hero, for sure. As a woman and as a short woman I look up to her and respect her. I often find myself asking on climbs, “What would Lynn do?”
Lynn was the first person, man or woman, to free The Nose. She was the first woman to redpoint .14a. She was the first woman to onsight .13b. She has over 30 international titles in competitions, she had five victories at the Arco Rock Master, so not only is she a really, really good trad climber and sport climber, she was an all-around amazing athlete and competitor.
I was really honored to sit down with her, and I actually have known Lynn for a long time. She’s always been my idol so when I first moved to Boulder I remember just waiting to catch a glimpse of her. I was super starstruck and for some happenstance reason, I got a job with her, babysitting for Owen when he was just a baby. We would go around the country and she would lead these groups for a week at a time, and I would be her babysitter. I had the privilege of getting to know her a bit and continued to respect her as my idol.
Hopefully you guys will get a little bit out of this interview. She’s full of wisdom and it was really great talking to her.
A little update on me: I went to the Vail World Cup this weekend and I loved it. I love comps. I don’t know about you, but I watch the live feeds when I’m not actually at them. I love going to them. I love the crowd mentality of just getting psyched to watch people crush boulders, so it was cool to watch Shauna Coxsey win the overall World Cup for bouldering and it was really cool to see Megan Mascarenas dominate for the United States.
Then I went to Rifle and sort of tweaked my wrist a little bit. After the overtraining episode last week I was kind of like, “Well, maybe this is my sign that I’m doing too much,” so I’m going to take it easy this week and resume next week what I was doing.
Before I get into the interview I want to let you know that my favorite chalk company, Friction Labs, is giving you guys some really great discounts on their stuff. I personally love their Unicorn Dust blend of their chalk. You can get that at a discounted price at www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta.
Also, my favorite outdoor clothing company, Rab, is giving you guys an unprecedented 20% off their stuff. You can get that discount code at www.trainingbeta.com/rab and I really love their Neutrino down jacket. I wear it all the time.
Without further adieu, here is Lynn Hill. Enjoy the interview!
Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show, Lynn. Thank you very much for talking to me today.
Lynn Hill: You’re welcome, Neely. It’s a pleasure.
Neely Quinn: For anybody who doesn’t know you are, which I have no idea what climber wouldn’t know who you are, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself?
Lynn Hill: I started climbing at the age of 14 and I’m 55 now, so I’ve been climbing for over 40 years. Most people know of me because of the first free ascent of El Capitan, and I was the first person to do that, not just the first woman. A lot of people think/they assume that it’s just the first woman, but I think that that’s one of the coolest things about it, that it was a test piece in front of everyone’s nose, literally, and it took my experience from traditional routes and growing up in California and actually moving to New York – that was another level of my education – and then going over to Europe and seeing what was possible. All of those experiences gave me a unique vision that enabled me to at least believe that I could do it, and then I think that’s a lot of what anything requires, sport or any goals that you have – just believing that you can do it. I knew I could do it and I was motivated to do it because of what that would say to other women.
That’s what I’m most famous for but my background is that I started out climbing in southern California. I climbed with the group The Stonemasters back in the day and people like John Long, John Bachar, Ron Kauk, and then lived in the Gunks so I had a different taste of the climbing culture there and, like I said, in Europe, too. I’ve had quite a good time climbing all over the world and being a part of this community.
Neely Quinn: And then, now what? Now you live in Boulder…
Lynn Hill: Yes, I live in Boulder. I have a 13-year old son. He’s not really into climbing like most people would assume. I think that he likes it when he does it, but he says, “It’s not my thing, Mom,” and part of that is probably because of my fame in climbing. It’s hard to follow in the footsteps of not just your dad, but your mom, right? I think that being a woman and being famous, for her son, is probably even more intimidating on a subconscious level. He doesn’t talk about it like that, but sometimes he calls me ‘Lynn Hill, climbing girl’ just to kind of tease me.
Neely Quinn: Really?
Lynn Hill: Yeah. It’s weird.
Neely Quinn: That’s interesting. So, I’m just going to jump right into these questions. A lot of people, I know, want to know how you’ve balanced climbing with being a mother.
Lynn Hill: Well, I don’t know that I have a formula to share. I wish that I did, but you just have to be organized, which is something that I wasn’t very good at, and I’m still probably not great at that. That means organization months in advance, thinking about my schedule, my goals, trips, and things like that. I’ve actually decided to be more based at home these days and say no to a lot more travels, because it’s very disruptive and I’ve done that for years.
I’ve been traveling pretty much all those years that most people were committed at their jobs and having families, I was traveling around with no real ties. I did have a house in France for a while. That was kind of fun. That’s how I learned to speak French. I renovated this stone house.
I feel like I’ve had a lot of freedom in my life and what a kid needs is stability, so the way that I balance it now is I’ve just basically kind of retreated from the climbing industry, somewhat. I still work with Petzl. It’s the only company that I’m really paid anything from, because they’re/they don’t really ask me to do stuff all the time, and if they do, they pay me. Usually, the things they ask me to do are fun climbing parties, like the RocTrips, so that’s something that I look at as a vacation. My work is my vacation in that sense.
It’s a dream job if you’re able to make a living and climb all around the world but that is something that I did do already and now, as a mother, it’s not really appropriate to do that. I do think it’s easier for a man to do it, because if they’re married and have a wife that doesn’t mind supporting that and making the living – and the way I make a living is through Airbnb at the moment…
Neely Quinn: Oh, really?
Lynn Hill: Yeah. During the time that I’ve lived here, so Owen’s entire life, I’ve been fixing up the property, fixing up the yard, took a single-car garage with a leaky roof – actually Didier Raboutou took the roof off and one of the inspectors in the town of Boulder saw that, and you have to have a permit for that – so I ended up finding out that I could make a two-story unit. That is where I now have a guest house and it’s really sweet.
It’s very Euro, because it’s a small space but really quality materials. I even did the stone mosaic backsplash for the kitchen. It’s actually pretty challenging, because I took a picture from a book called Pavimenti a Venezia, ‘The Floors of Venice,’ and I loved the mosaic and stone. I kind of have this, I’m starting to realize, an artistic flair in me that I never recognized. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been more drawn to things that are artistic, so it was kind of a challenge to try to figure out how to do it. I rented a wet saw from Home Depot, and this was during the winter so it was a little bit cold to be cutting stone and porcelain, but it turned out great.
The house is very efficient. I’ve got everything set-up and during the summer it’s booked everyday. I don’t mind managing at all because I can do that at the house and I can be here for Owen, so that’s how I’ve figured it out, but it was a slow process of, you know, less and less travel to the point where I was like, “You know what? Owen’s a teenager now. I can’t keep living like that.” It’s crazy-making for me to be gone and everytime you leave to go on a trip, you have to pack and plan and, you know, it takes some time. Then you’re gone and you come back and you have to download and catch-up on all the emails and everything else that stacks-up.
I’m also working on a climbing technique video which I still am struggling to find enough time to focus on, because it’s just such a big project. I had no idea how big this project was going to be, but I knew it was going to be hard, like everything I choose to do. It’s like, “Okay, I want to do that!” and the reality of how you get there requires so much more work and time and money, so that’s what I’m focusing on right now, besides the Airbnb and my own climbing, because I like to climb still. After all these years! Isn’t that amazing? It’s part of what makes me feel normal and good, and if I don’t climb, I don’t know.
I’ve never really not climbed for huge periods of time, unless having a kid, of course, and I’ve had an operation – one operation. I had a hysterectomy, because my uterus was too big. I had a bunch of fibroids so I thought: my mother had the operation, and my sister, and my grandmother, so I figured ‘Well, no need to have precancerous cells growing rapidly in my body.’ Those are really the only times that I really didn’t climb. And, by the way, I don’t train like a fiend.
I know you’re going to ask me more about training, but I think that consistency is the biggest thing and loving what you’re doing and picking goals that are exciting. There’s, of course, climbing in the gym, which I actually do enjoy climbing in the gym, more for the social aspect than, obviously, the aesthetics of the environment and the chalk dust-filled rooms. But, it’s also fun. I like the movement and it’s a different aspect of climbing, so I like doing that. I really don’t spend more than a couple of hours in the gym because I just get tired of it after a while. I mean, not just physically tired, but my patience of being there kind of wears thin.
Neely Quinn: So, have you found any projects locally then? It sounds like you’re more domesticated. You’re staying around home a lot more. Are you finding time to climb outside?
Lynn Hill: Well, I did on Sunday with this person that I’d actually only met briefly, at the climbing gym with another friend. That same friend, Steve Anacan, he showed me this climbed called Hasta la Hueco, which is awesome. It’s one of the most beautiful climbs in this whole area, I think. Certainly in the Flatirons. You have to walk for at least an hour, probably more like an hour and 15 minutes if you’re really walking fast, but I don’t mind hiking. That’s part of the outing. It’s more about time.
Hasta la Hueco has a last pitch that Steve and his buddy, Bret Ruckman, added recently and they each redpointed those pitches. They said, “You guys” – meaning this guy, Phil Grubber – “you can go ahead and do the link-up if you want.” Because The Maiden is very well-protected as far as you can’t just put bolts in wherever you want, you have to go through the whole permit process, and they had limited the number of routes on that formation, so in order to do the link-up it would actually be nice to have one more bolt but Phil put some time into it and he put a sling way down. Like, a 15-foot long sling so that when you got to this one spot where it kind of breaks right, you could clip that and then just kind of make one long pitch, which required an 80-meter rope. So, it’s pretty much all of 40 meters. That’s what we did on Sunday.
I’ll probably end up climbing with him, or Bobbi Bensman is also interested in Choose Life. She’s been recruiting people all around. She got Robyn to go up there and Robyn is in really good shape. She is way more than just consistent. She is at the climbing gym practically every day with her team, or her kids, or something. She’s definitely motivated to climb hard. She’s already gone up there probably a few times and done the route, so she’s in awesome shape right now.
Neely Quinn: So – what’s it called – Hasta la Hueco is like a super long, I think it’s a .12d?
Lynn Hill: Yeah, I think it’s probably .13a if you do the two together. Even though you can stop and rest, it’s just heady. The second part of the pitch is pretty thin and it’s a little intimidating, but it’s not that hard. You just have to have some faith and keep climbing through this thin section.
Neely Quinn: Yeah. Do you feel like you’ve been able to stay as strong as you want to as you’ve gotten older?
Lynn Hill: Well, I was thinking about this because I knew you were going to ask me about training and one thing I can say from the start is I’m not a systematic type of person. I always thought that I was and that’s why I studied biology in college. I thought that I was, like, a science type but I’m really not. I can analyze things, and that’s what this video is about, but I’m way more intuitive as a climber. I follow my intuition but I also can tap into the analytical side when I’m climbing.
So, the question that you asked, I will answer it. I think that I’m a much better climber now because of those factors of having thought about it, and trying to teach something is sometimes the best way to learn yourself. My intention with the video was to try to explain in words and in examples that you see, because I think it’s really difficult to explain climbing. You have to show it and explain it, so that process of trying to analyze it and explain it to others in this form has made me much more aware, both on a conscious level – and I think this is the whole point of the video, that if you understand it on an academic level, that you have that information in the computer-like brain that we have, and you can use it.
I said this to somebody the other day, that intuition is a combination of our instinct and our experience, because we don’t know where this intuition comes from. It just seems magical, but I think our intuition improves if we put time into it, like the mastery of many, many hours doing something. So, you have these patterns that you recognize, and it happens so fast that you can’t consciously recognize it but your brain is putting together that information. So the more you do something, even if you’re not doing it at a high level, or training like I could have and maybe did do at a certain time in my life, like when I was preparing for The Nose, I actually did train.
I’m not somebody who does the campus board. I have a hangboard or two and the one time in my life when I was traveling and there were no climbing gyms back in the day, I brought these little things that I made, that were travel holds that I could put on bars. I hung there a little bit. I just did what I thought was almost an insignificant amount of training, but I noticed that it did help.
Neely Quinn: So you were hangboarding on the road on these little contraptions.
Lynn Hill: Yeah. Just/they were basically climbing holds that I bolted onto a piece of wood, then I made a little clamp that I could put over – just like a U-clamp – and I put them on bars. Actually, I was thinking that it would be another product that I could make, but rock rings are kind of like that. This is, I think, a better version of it and it worked.
I like to train, well, I won’t even call it train. I like to get out and do stuff at least three times a week but, you know, I rarely do more than that because being pulled in lots of different directions. If I was really serious about training, I would probably spend more time/more days, and maybe break it up into a morning and afternoon session? Maybe taking the morning for, like, more stretching? Kind of/maybe yoga? Maybe a little bit of oppositional exercises?
There was a time when I was living in New York – again, there were no climbing gyms back then. I just went to a regular gym that had weights, and the idea was to do kind of opposing muscle groups, like bench press and flys and different things so that my climbing muscles would not be much stronger than the opposite side. Instead of just pulling all the time, doing the pushing exercises. I still think that’s a good idea. Especially every now and then, my forearms do get a little inflamed, like a little bit of elbow tendinitis. I guess they call that ‘golfer’s elbow’ but climbers should call it ‘climber’s elbow.’ It’s the internal medial epicondyle, so anyway, if I feel that I do reverse curls and I have just little free weights that I use. You can do it with the Theraband and different ways. I just find that free weights are a little easier and more straightforward.
Neely Quinn: I’m just going to stop here for a moment and let you guys know a little bit more about Rab, which is a clothing and equipment company out of the UK. So, I have their Neutrino jacket, which is a big puffy jacket. I have found that nothing even comes close to how comfortable and warm this jacket is. I’ve tried. I have bought other jackets and taken them back because they didn’t even come close. That’s the Neutrino jacket, and they have all other kinds of smaller jackets, rainproof jackets, windproof jackets, pants, shirts, shorts – like I said, sleeping bags and tents, so they kind of are our one stop shop for a lot of equipment and clothing for climbers.
They are being super generous with you guys, my faithful podcast listeners, and they’re giving you guys 20% off of everything, which is unprecedented for them. If you want to check out their stuff, go to www.trainingbeta.com/rab.
Also, my favorite chalk company, which is Friction Labs, is giving you guys some really great discounts on their chalk and other products. If you go to www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta you’ll find those discounts there. You can also find their stuff at any REI and in a lot of climbing gyms now. While it’s a little bit more expensive, it stays on your hands for longer, you have to use less of it and, for me, I just honestly feel a lot more secure on climbs because the chalk is that much stickier. I don’t know what it is about the chalk. I don’t really care, honestly, I just know that it works better.
You can check them out at REI or your climbing gym, or at www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta.
And now, I will get back to the interview.
Neely Quinn: You were pretty into weightlifting for a while.
Lynn Hill: Well, my boyfriend at the time, John Long, he was kind of into training and getting really strong. If you looked at his body back in those days, he was ripped. He could do/like, if he flexed his bicep, it had a peak on it like a bodybuilder. He was really cut and really strong, so he knew about lifting weights. I would join him a few times at the gym that he would go to and one of his buddies said, “Hey, you could probably break the world record in the bench press and you should do it.” It was only 150 pounds at that time, and there wasn’t much of a culture behind women’s lifting and the whole steroid thing or growth hormones or whatever people use at this point.
Soon after, I did reach that goal of lifting/bench pressing 150 pounds. I’m sure that the record just went off. I don’t even know. I didn’t follow it. I didn’t even know how to look that stuff up. It’s not even like, you know, today we have Google – I wouldn’t have even known how. How do you find out who’s doing what in weightlifting? It wasn’t really my culture, and after I did reach my goal weight of 150 pounds I was not into what it was doing to my body, because my triceps were getting really big. It was not the kind of physique that I wanted. I wanted to be like a climber’s build: lean and cut, defined, and no extra mass, so weightlifting was not going in the right direction for me.
I was studying. I was in UNLV at that time, in Las Vegas, and that was pretty exciting, being out there during the time when people didn’t even know there was climbing in Las Vegas. We were kind of on that first generation of people that really pushed the climbing out in Vegas, although since I was in school and working at a part-time job, I didn’t really have that much time to go out on those adventures.
Levitation 29 was definitely one of those great routes that we did do, with George and Joanne Urioste. George Urioste, he bolted this line – a 10-pitch route, Levitation 29 – and his wife, Joanne, turned 29 that day or something. He was like, “Well, I like doing these routes but I don’t have any intention of free climbing it. You guys do that,” so that’s what we did. He basically just handed us this equipped route with bolts. Like, the first sport climb in America, multi-pitch sport climb, pretty much, is what it seemed like looking back. I had never done anything like that. It was one of my favorite routes and still is a mega-classic. I think it gets done quite a bit.
Neely Quinn: Yeah, it’s mega-classic. I want to back up a little bit. I know you were a gymnast as a kid and I’m wondering, like, how you think that affected your climbing and what sets you apart from other climbers that made you so strong?
Lynn Hill: Well, I think that gymnastics was a great sport to do before climbing because of the kind of full body strength, especially abs. You have to have a really good proprioceptor awareness of your body in space, another very important thing for climbing. The strength in your arms is, I don’t think, as relevant as probably in hand stands. It requires the core strength but it requires more pushing out of the shoulders, not pulling, but that was probably good to develop.
As I was saying before about weightlifting, the oppositional muscle groups help me be more balanced as a climber, but I think on a psychological level it gave me a lot as far as being able to go for it in a realm when I wasn’t sure. I remember my coach saying, “Okay, we’re going to try a double backflip today,” and I was like, “Oh wow! I didn’t even know there was such a thing!” I didn’t know anyone else who was doing them so I had to imagine in my mind what that was. He said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll spot you.” I was really little so I trusted him to just be able to pick me up out of the air if there was something going wrong. I said, “How do I know when to open?” and he said, “You’ll see the ground.”
So, it’s like it happens so quick, you really just have to have faith that you’re going to actually figure it out. Just instead of opening up after one rotation, you just keep holding on, and then you see the floor and then you open. It worked just like magic, so it taught me that I could imagine something and break it down into, like, two or three steps.
I’ve read a lot of books since then. One talked about this concept of chunking, where you take bits of information and you basically make each step as doing that. You chunk the information into, “Okay, so I’m going to do my roundoff back handspring and jump as high as I can. Lots of power.” So that would be step one. “Punch at the right time and try to get as much height as possible, and then you grab your legs and you spin around,” and then the landing would be number three.
So from that standpoint, I learned how to visualize and I think climbing has opened up much more complex visualization because when you’re working a route, you have to figure out what your body might look like in space from a third person’s perspective, which I learned in gymnastics as well. Kind of imagining what I might look like, and then chunking it into steps would be like: on the crux move I have a physical, kinesthetic feeling and I might be looking at the shape or size of the hold. There are certain cues that I key into that are important for that move because sometimes on a crux move, you fall because you didn’t quite finish the movement. You didn’t pull-up quite as high because you were a little tired.
You’ve got to remember when you’re on the redpoint to do certain things, so I learned how to practice the route from beginning to end. Go through every single move and remember all the details. I think climbing is much more complex because the climbs last for a lot longer and there’s, you know, infinite different ways of doing things and every climb is different, so it’s definitely helped me develop those skills.
Neely Quinn: Yeah, I was reading about some of your early first ascents, like your onsight – I’m trying to remember the name/I’m trying to find the name of this crack climb that you did. I think it was a .13a and nobody had ever done it before and it was super bold, like, I think it was X-rated and the person who was belaying you commented on how he had tried to do it and got too scared, basically, but you were just up there going for it and you were super confident. Having watched you climb myself, that’s exactly what I’ve experienced. You’re just supremely confident, so how do you think you created that in yourself? Where did that come from? Do you think it was mostly gymnastics or what?
Lynn Hill: Well, I think it started with gymnastics. Just the trial and error and realizing that I could do things and I just figured out what approach worked. Same in climbing, but remember, I started climbing in 1975 so that was during the whole era of boldness and ‘Don’t fall’ was the first rule, because we were sometimes on climbs that didn’t have as much protection as most of the climbs today. We didn’t have cams and after I’d been climbing for a few years, I’d run into people like John Long and Mike Kuklenski, John Bachar, Maury Gendry, that whole crew, and we were kind of – I wouldn’t call it ‘Sandbaggers,’ because I never did this to anyone – we wouldn’t act scared. People would say, “Oh that was a great route,” and inside they were probably thinking, “Yeah, that was super scary,” but they would never admit it, so there was this certain bravado or some kind of attitude about not being wimpy.
We learned to be confident by just, you know, measuring our progress. We didn’t just cast out on super dangerous things that we didn’t have the skills for. We went slow but sure because we knew that we couldn’t fall in some of these scary situations, you know? You might have just a little RP way down below your feet. It might hold, but – and it should hold – you don’t know for sure and just the idea of falling was not an option, right? It could happen but it was something we were trying to stay away from. I would push myself right up to that edge.
There were times when I wasn’t sure but I wouldn’t go – and this is something that I think is still valuable today – like, I won’t commit to a move unless I can see it in my mind. Kind of that visualization. It happens really quick. I’ll look at the hold, and it’s really important to look at the hold really clearly because, again, it gives your brain the time to calculate the push-pull forces and everything required to get to that hold. If I don’t see the hold in that quick little meta-thought – and I’ll explain more about that later – if I don’t feel like I can do it, I won’t do it. So the options then are downclimb or – I guess in some cases you can’t downclimb or – you’re just too pumped and so you might actually just have to take the fall.
It’s amazing that nobody really got hurt back in the day. We pretty much were good at calculating what we could do.
Neely Quinn: Yeah, it seems like a really rational thought process instead of like, “Oh, maybe I can and maybe I can’t. I don’t know and I’m really scared.” It was like, “I can’t do that and I’m done.”
Lynn Hill: Well, so one of the climbs you might have been talking about was Ophir Broke, and it had a really bouldery, difficult, kind of a reachy move that I eventually found some small holds that I could use and John just reached past it. Then, when you got to the crack, it was really thin. His hands couldn’t fit into the crack very well. He had to do ring locks or something. When I got to the crack, my hands fit in. It was a thin hand jam but I got through it so I ended up doing the first free ascent, but that process was/it took several days.
We’d go up there and we’d get the rope up. One person would get the highpoint then come back down and then the next person up would tie into, essentially, a top rope until you got to that high point and then you were leading, so we were doing yo-yo style. It was kind of a shared commitment and I think the more you climb up and down something, the more familiar you are with the moves and the more confident you become. Then you’ve done it several times. You’ve seen the upcoming crux enough times to see where the hold is that might be key but we weren’t allowed, back in the day, to come in from the top and inspect.
That’s what made it kind of exciting. We weren’t using kind of modern sport climbing techniques. No hangdogging, either. We wouldn’t just hang there on the rope and try the move off the rope. We had to go all the way back down to the ground and try the climb again which, from my experiences in gymnastics, I realized at a certain point that was not helpful if you wanted to push into the higher grades. Why go back to the beginning of your routine and repeat all the moves back up to that point where you had to do a double-twisting back layout or something? You should just practice that move that you’re having trouble with and then you link your routine together and everything’s smooth.
I was part of that generation that kind of made it seem like a really good idea. Yeah, of course, if you want to do something that’s 5.13 or 5.14, hangdogging is a perfectly fine technique. It doesn’t hurt anyone, it doesn’t hurt the rock, and so that was kind of amazingly slow to come about. But on the other hand I will say that having to climb in traditional style and go from the ground up was great training. If you arrive onsite at the base of a huge mountain, you’re not going to go run around the top and practice the crux of that huge, multipitch route. You’re going to start from the ground, so it gives you the skills that you need to be a good onsight climber and to be able to figure things out on the go.
Neely Quinn: And it builds fitness because you’re doing so many pitches in a day, basically.
Lynn Hill: Yeah, and sometimes if you fall you can’t get back on the rock anyway, so there are a few climbs that it feels like it is traditional style, like deep water soloing. You’re not going to be able to do that kind of stuff if you’re starting from the water or the base, going up. There’s no rope involved so it’s kind of like trad climbing.
Neely Quinn: I would love to talk to you a little bit more about the gender differences/the gender inequalities, because I feel like you’ve been – first of all, I want to thank you for kind of breaking through those barriers.
Lynn Hill: Thanks.
Neely Quinn: For me, it made me realize that it was possible to climb hard as a woman. It’s crazy that it takes another woman to show you that it’s possible, but – so yeah. Thank you for that, and on that note, how does it make you feel to know that you’re so many people’s hero and inspiration?
Lynn Hill: Well, it’s obviously an honor to be in that situation. Looking back on my life, when I was just beginning to climb and even younger than that, people called me a tomboy because I liked to climb trees and I climbed to the top of our neighborhood light pole. I didn’t know anything about climbing. I’d never seen a picture of climbing. I was just interested in that sort of thing. I felt like I was discriminated against because I did that. I thought, “Wow, that’s really strange, because this feels really natural and normal to me, and I’m a girl, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being a physically active girl.”
I liked having muscles. I didn’t think they were out of proportion or ugly or it wasn’t exaggerated muscles. I just had what I thought was what our body should look like, so I’ve felt like that for a really long time. In the beginning of our conversation when I mentioned The Nose, that’s why I was so motivated to do it, because I knew it would communicate to women and men alike. It would just make that message very clear, that women are capable of doing amazing things. We were told through society’s norms that that wasn’t very feminine, and I think that’s all changed. I think people realize that being fit is healthy and it helps you in your mind as well. If you do sports as a kid, it develops your mind and your body and you optimize your potential as a human being.
I’ve always believed that being active is a good thing and that women were not really encouraged to do such things, especially in a male-dominated sport like climbing, which clearly involves a lot of upper body strength. Women didn’t think that they had that kind of strength, and they were told that they didn’t. I was told that a woman could never do a 5.14, a woman can’t do this and can’t do that, and I’d just look at these guys and say, “What?” It only happened a few times, and when it did I was shocked that that would be their true belief, that women could not do that. It’s a very close-minded attitude, so I think that way more is possible than what we’re even doing today, but if you look at somebody like Ashima, she’s proving that young women/young girls – she’s still a girl, technically – she’s done harder routes than anyone, even Adam Ondra, at her age. She’s an awesome example of what’s possible and, you know, it’s obvious to me that certain sports that are strength-to-weight kind of sports are probably advantageous for women because we are lighter. We have a lot less mass, so I’ve heard people throw out the idea that maybe the best climbers of the future will be girls or, you know, women because of that.
Neely Quinn: Yeah, you were kind of in a similar place as Ashima, I think, when you were competing. There was one competition in particular where you were the only person, man or woman, to get to the top and the only person to do the hardest move on the route.
Lynn Hill: Well, there was a competition in Lyon that I did the men’s final, and it actually/there were two other guys that did that route. There was Didier Raboutou and Francois Legrand. There was a route, also, in Paris. I think that’s the one you’re talking about. They said they changed something in the beginning of the route, so we can’t say it was the exact same route, but the topout was the exact same and I was the only one to make it to the top of that route, so I knew back in the day that climbing was young and people’s vision was very naive and very way-behind where it is now.
I wanted to compete on the men’s routes just to show that I could, and that was something that was unprecedented in sport and now I think that it has developed to the point where they make the routes different in nature to kind of make it challenging for the men’s, in terms of their taller body size, generally, and maybe more powerful jump moves? I don’t really know because I haven’t really studied the routes in competition too much, but I would say that there are some women that can do those kinds of moves also.
Like, look at Shawn Raboutou. He’s a small man. He’s not even/I think he’s 5’5” and he’s competing in bouldering competitions and those competitions are even more, I guess, favoring of taller people because on a boulder problem, you know, there’s usually not many options. There’s a few holds and they’re usually far apart, and you usually just have to do some acrobatics to get past it. I’m pretty impressed with some of the techniques that he’s done, like this double clutch kind of thing, where you can go from one handhold to another as you’re flying past it. Or use your feet in the same way. You kind of run up it like – remember Johnny Dawes back in the day? There was this film called ‘Stone Monkeys’ and he shows that technique and he basically runs on the wall. He makes like four or five steps and then leaps, so just his use of momentum is pretty impressive.
I think that even in those examples of reachy kinds of difficult moves on boulders or on a route, you can find a way past it if you use your body in the best way possible.
Neely Quinn: So you’ve actually said that you think men and women, maybe a while ago, should compete on the same routes. Do you think – this is actually a kind of common topic of conversation in my household – whether or not, if men and women, or if boys and girls, rather, were trained together from the beginning of their training, if they would be able to/if women would believe more in themselves? That they could do things and that we should actually have women and men competing together, and that that would be more fair?
Lynn Hill: I think it’s interesting to contemplate how that would change the attitudes. I think it certainly would show boys and girls what they’re capable of and there would be a little bit more crossover in approach, because I think the boys could learn from the girls’ approach and vice versa.
Whether they should actually compete on the same routes in absolute? I’m not sure. I think it should be tried, first, to see how it works out just because of the height thing. I think you can design a route to favor someone a little bit more if you make it a certain style. Like, I know there are certain routes outside on natural rock that yeah, sure, I could probably do the move but it’s such an unpleasant move to get past some reach that I just move on to something different, you know? It’s good to develop the skills to be able to do that but there are certain routes that definitely discriminate based off size. It’s going to be harder if you’re below a certain height, whereas the tall person can just stand there and reach the hold. It’s not a move, but at the level of climbing now, today, I’m not sure that I have a solid opinion about whether they should compete on the same routes or not, just because there are those examples. I don’t know.
Seems like the climbing stars on the artificial walls these days are small people.
Neely Quinn: Yeah, yeah.
Lynn Hill: So that would represent, yes, that probably they could compete on the same routes. The men and women could. I don’t know. It would be an interesting thing to do. I think it would be a great psychological move for young girls to compete on the same routes as the boys.
Neely Quinn: I think so, too.
Lynn Hill: I think that it should be something someone presents as some new event. Maybe that could be how it gets introduced, like “We’re doing a competition here and the men and women are competing on the same routes.”
Neely Quinn: Yeah. That’s a great idea, Lynn.
Lynn Hill: Yeah!
Neely Quinn: I’m going to talk to The Spot.
Lynn Hill: Yeah, they should!
Neely Quinn: So, what do you think about first female ascents? There’s a lot of talk in the community right now about whether or not we should even say it’s an FFA. What do you think about them?
Lynn Hill: Well, I answered this question awhile back and my feeling is that certain routes that have a history, like/say Midnight Lightning, that had never been done by a woman and, to me, it was cool to be the first woman because I’m not particularly a great boulderer and it was right before the boom of bouldering. Well, I mean bouldering was already pretty big but there weren’t that many women pushing bouldering at that level. Now, there’s a lot of women that can do Midnight Lightning, but I do think it was interesting to know that that was the first female ascent. Certain things, I think because of the history, it could be good but I don’t think that it’s something that should be overused and it’s just a reference for other women, just like you said, that you knew that I was an example before you and that was great for you to know that it existed. Maybe that’s also encouraging for other women to know, that another woman has done that route.
It could be useful but I don’t think it should be a big deal. They shouldn’t make a big deal about it.
Neely Quinn: Okay, so you’re kind of here and there about it.
Lynn Hill: Well, there’s a route in Rifle – what’s that thing called – left of Pump-O-Rama…
Neely Quinn: Spray-A-Thon?
Lynn Hill: Spray-A-Thon. Yes. That move in the beginning is sort of reachy and dynamic at the same time. I found some variation using some horrible little undercling edge and it made the jump a little bit less distance, which made it more possible for me. I think I was the first woman to do it but I don’t know, and I didn’t really focus on it much but there was a discussion after I’d done it about Emily or somebody else trying to do it and it was only in that conversation that I realized I might have been the first woman to do it, and the reason that that was significant was because of the reach. It’s more of a height thing, actually, and I don’t know how many women have done that move since, but I think there’s a lot more women climbing at a higher level in Rifle now.
Neely Quinn: So you think it’s notable sometimes when there’s a certain move or it’s historical, but otherwise it’s not really notable.
Lynn Hill: Right.
Neely Quinn: Okay. I’m sure we could talk about this a long time, because I wonder if it’s holding us back to have FFAs and be like, “Oh, well she’s/even a girl can do it.” You know? In our minds we’re still kind of segregating ourselves from men in our abilities.
Lynn Hill: Yeah, I think it should be downplayed but if somebody wanted to know the history, just because they’re curious, then that information should be available. I don’t know how you’d do that, other than – I don’t know, actually. Guide books, maybe? With the internet maybe there’s a way to figure that out. I don’t actually focus on it that much. I don’t really think about it and it doesn’t really come up in the magazines that I look at so I don’t think it’s as big a deal as it is just interesting to contemplate the psychological ramifications of. I don’t think it’s a huge factor.
Neely Quinn: Okay, moving on. We don’t have to spend that much time on that. I’m wondering, personally, and there were some questions on Facebook that people wanted me to ask you about being short. So, you’ve obviously come up with some pretty creative ways to get through things, even though you’re short. I think you’ve said that you’re 5’2”. I don’t think that you are, but how tall are you?
Lynn Hill: No, I’m not. I’ve never been 5’2”. I’m 5’1½” or, at one point I think I was 5’1¾” so never quite 5’2”. What I do to get past long reaches is, there’s a few different options, depending on what the actual particular characteristics of the climb are. One classic way is to bring your feet up really high and breathe in a little bit if it’s a kind of static reach, or breathe out if you’re doing a dynamic move. You can work with your breath, you can bring your feet up high.
Another way to bring your feet up high that seems to work really well is to – I call this ‘backstepping in a cross-axis relationship to the target hold.’ Okay, so let me explain that. This comes from my technique video. You’re backstepping, and so if you look at/facing the rock, if you draw a quadrant, left hand represents the upper left hand quadrant, left leg lower left, and so cross-axis is going from the lower left quadrant to the upper right quadrant, right? So you’re going across that axis but you’re using your right foot to backstep, so you’re crossing into a backstep position.
You can reach further if you have an undercling hold, obviously, or even a vertical hold because of the way your wrist has changed. That’s if you’re on a horizontal hold, you’re really limited in how far you can reach. You can do a lockoff, which is like one arm distance, max, but if you want to reach your whole arm distance from undercling of one hand to full extension, that’s almost your whole height. You can’t exactly get your whole height distance unless you have some dynamic movement in there, because just the way you hold on you’re not going to be able to go the whole way from tip-to-tip.
Anyway, so the cross-axis would be backstepping with your right foot to a hold in the upper right quadrant. Can you visualize that?
Neely Quinn: Yes, got it.
Lynn Hill: That would give you a lot more height sometimes because when you’re backstepping, your hip is close to the wall and you know, that kind of maximizes your extension. In combination with a vertical hold or undercling hold, your hand is in a good position to be fully extended. So that’s one way to do it.
I look for undercling holds, I look for high feet, and then of course the last resort is you have to jump or do this sort of Shawn Raboutou run-up-the-wall, like tic tac. Really fast, so you use momentum to your advantage.
Neely Quinn: Did you ever train lockoff strength or anything? Powerful moves or dynos or anything in order to get through moves?
Lynn Hill: Well, back in the day when we did not have artificial walls, we had the Bachar Ladder. I made my own back then. They actually ended up selling them and then people ended up getting too much tendonitis and other problems so they stopped making them, but we made them with PVC pipe. We’d cut sections however wide you wanted the rungs and then drill a hole straight through on the ends, and that’s where you would thread a rope and tie a knot and you’d have to regulate the knots so that it was even on both sides. You’d have two ropes, one on either side of the rungs.
The rope ladder you’d set up in a tree at an angle that wasn’t too steep, because if it’s too overhanging, it’s not very pleasant. Pretty much, a little off-vertical and we’d set it up so that you had to do a lockoff. You could skip rungs or just make them that wide. I liked having the rungs close enough so that when I’m really tired at the end of a session that’s all I could do is to get from one rung to the next, but in the beginning of the session after warming up, you practiced your lock offs. Your upper hand would be pulling up to past your chin, right? And the lower arm would be pressing, kind of almost in a mantle and your hips would kind of rotate from one side to the other in the motion. As you’re pulling and pushing, your hips start to rotate. If you’re locking off with your left arm, your right hip is rotating over to the left and in towards the ladder itself.
Neely Quinn: So it’s kind of like campusing on a campus board.
Lynn Hill: Well, it’s static though. On a rope ladder, you’re just practicing the lockoff. When you get to the top of your lockoff, your arm is bent and your chin is a little bit above your hand, you let go and so you’re hanging there just on your arm in a lock off position, right? And then you reach up to the next rung and start the pull and push with the other arm. It also developed your abs, too, because you’re kind of in an L-seat position a little bit while you’re doing that. Not at first, but at the end, your legs rotate a little bit. So anyway…
Neely Quinn: You felt like that helped with your reach? Locking off?
Lynn Hill: It definitely helped for lock off strength, for sure, but we didn’t have sport climbs that really even demanded too much of that until I got into limestone and some of the more overhanging routes of the Gunks. I didn’t really even need that too much.
Neely Quinn: Yeah.
Lynn Hill: I guess on the boulders you did, because we actually pushed ourselves on boulders. I think that was the key to our ability to push the grade back in the day, because we didn’t really have limestone routes that were perfect for that. We had more trad climbing territory like Joshua Tree. Can you imagine pushing climbing in Joshua Tree?
Neely Quinn: No.
Lynn Hill: It was a great place to learn because it taught me about technique and using small holds and all that balance and friction and all the basic skills, but I guess moving to the Gunks was a great intermediate step because there were a lot of overhangs. I learned how to get past overhangs and the tricks involved with that, then when I went to Europe, it was a whole other level of that gymnastic ability and strength required. Hanging onto a finger pocket? I’d never hung onto a finger pocket before I ever went to France.
We did develop some good lockoff strength but that wasn’t enough to push into 5.13/5.14.
Neely Quinn: Right. Okay, I have just a couple questions. I know you need to go. Do you have any advice for people about having a good head and maybe overcoming some fear in climbing?
Lynn Hill: Well, a lot of times I tell people they shouldn’t resist their fear because all that does is make it worse. People say, “Oh, I’m getting scared,” and then their reaction to the fear is far worse than the fear itself. Accept your fear. Say, “Oh, I’m scared right now,” but remember you chose to be there. Sometimes people find themselves in situations that are surprising and they didn’t want to be in that situation, but most of the time on a rock climb, you choose to do a climb that you know a little bit about what you’re going to come across. It’s not going to be such a big surprise and you’re probably not going to die if you fall in that particular spot where you’re scared unless, of course, you’re trying to do something that is scary and that’s a whole different other thing.
The Alex Honnold approach of free soloing and onsight free soloing, stuff like that, now he’s got a really solid head. He just does not panic at all, it seems. He’s very even-keel and cool headed about it and he has faith that he’s not going to fall because he trusts his ability, so I think that there’s/it depends on what kind of fear we’re talking about. Let’s just say you’re intimidated by a climb that you’ve really wanted to do for a long time. You know the moves but there’s a scary part and you just have to get past that. When you arrive there your heart’s beating and you’re starting to feel nervous and you just have to accept that you’re going to be scared, and say, “Yes, but I know I can do this. I know even if I did fall, I’m not going to die,” so all those things kind of have to be digested before you arrive there. You have to be ready to remind yourself in a really quick instant, “Oh yeah, I chose to be here. I’m ready to go for it.”
You just have to turn on the ‘go for it’ mode, having gone through those checks in your mind about why you’re there, if it’s reasonable or not, and if those things are in check you just go. You don’t have time to consider anything else, you just focus on what needs to be done in that moment.
Neely Quinn: I think that’s really good. That’s awesome.
Lynn Hill: Thanks
Neely Quinn: Yeah! Okay, last question. Somebody wrote in: “What is one word that you would describe what climbing represents to you? Knowing how much you mean to everybody else and knowing everything that you’ve gone through with your climbing life. What’s one word?”
Lynn Hill: Oh boy. I guess ‘love.’ That’s the most basic word of all, right? That’s what makes the world go ‘round and it’s what makes us go rock climbing and it extends to the love of doing it, the intrinsic joy that it brings to the connection to our community – our friends and everybody. I feel like we’re all connected in the whole world. I try to broaden my vision and include everyone, not that we can process that, but I like to be aware that I am connected to something much bigger than myself.
Neely Quinn: That’s great. That’s lovely.
Lynn Hill: Thank you.
Neely Quinn: Any last thoughts for people listening?
Lynn Hill: Well, I’d say enjoy your climbing. Don’t get stuck on grades or anything. They’re just there for indications, they’re guides, but it’s all about the experience that you have and the lessons that you learn and also the friends that you’re with. It just helps enrich our life and try to make time for it and try to push yourself on things on occasion, not always, but I think it’s really good to have goals because it helps us rise to a higher level.
Neely Quinn: Any words for women and girls in particular?
Lynn Hill: Have faith in your ability, because you can do way more than you thought and that’s another thing I love about climbing. It’s just infinitely interesting and we can always get better, even the smallest little details are important, and I love this idea of optimizing. Women are totally capable of climbing at the highest levels. We are light and strong and smart and we have just as much passion as the men.
Neely Quinn: Yeah. Alright. Thank you very much for your time, again.
Lynn Hill: You’re welcome, Neely.
Neely Quinn: Alright, take care.
Lynn Hill: Alright, bye.
Neely Quinn: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Lynn Hill as much as I did. If you want to find her on social media, she’s on Facebook as ‘Lynn Hill,’ she’s on Instagram as @_linacolina_, and she has a website at www.lynnhillclimbing.com. You can actually find out how to stay at her house if you’re interested in doing that at that site.
Coming up on the podcast, I have my surgeon, Dr. Tom Hackett, who was also voted one of America’s most beautiful doctors, which we did not talk about in the interview. He is going to talk about shoulders and what he sees most commonly in climbers and how to fix them.
If you need more help with your training than this podcast or the blog posts can offer you, we do have training programs. If you’re a route climber we have our route climbing training program which gives you three workouts every week. They’re unique and it goes in six-week cycles, so you train strength and power and finger strength and everything you need to be a better rock climber.
If you’re a boulderer we have a really similar program but it’s designed for boulderers, and those are each $15 a month. They’re ongoing. Even though it’s the summer and it’s kind of sending time for a lot of people, you can always stick one, maybe two workouts in per week to keep your strength up. Definitely check those out at www.trainingbeta.com and under our ‘Training Programs’ tab at the top.
Thank you very much for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate your support. I’ll talk to you soon. Have a great week!
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how about podcast with Alex Megos? or with some japanese/korean competition climber (do they have coaches? how do they train? it would be really interresting to find this out, I think…)