Giving slack to a falling leader

Brandon.Phillips wrote: As I get older I find my catches to be increasingly flaccid. 

I just try to stay limp while belaying, don't belay hard is how I was taught.

That's not a post that someone put work into, exclusively for this thread. It's a fuckin link to someone else's work. 

Russell Bangert wrote:and I have seen 5 people get their ankles wrecked because they allowed someone who doesn't know what they're doing to belay them while climbing at their limit.

Hmmmmm. And it was soley the belayers fault and no one elses that the climber fell... ..and got hurt.

https://rockandice.com/videos/weekend-whippers/another-fallen-angel-5-10a-and-another-hard-catch/

yes he started to invert before the rope came taut, but he hit the wall with significantly more force than if he had been caught softly.

https://rockandice.com/videos/weekend-whippers/weekend-whipper-short-roped-slammer/

here a climber really lucked out of a worse injury, because someone didn't know how and when to provide a soft catch.

https://rockandice.com/videos/weekend-whippers/weekend-whipper-taking-a-long-rip-on-spliff-5-13c/

here a belayer injured his climber, and immediately noticed it was his fault. 

https://rockandice.com/videos/weekend-whippers/weekend-whipper-please-catch-me-trad-fall/

Here a belayer saved his climber from what could have been a violent fall, by knowing what he was doing.

Want to discredit these videos?

And for that image, it hasn't been discredited, you however have inserted a petty attempt to poke a hole in it that disregards it's point.

https://www.amazon.com/Andy-Kirkpatrick/e/B0035NHEF8

There's a list of books written by the guy who's image you're "discrediting".  That link explains the forces you can generate in a fall, and is described thoroughly with both math and images, particularly in section 5. However, it's not written to try to convince someone who's incredibly ignorant and resistant to their responsibility as a belayer. Most people don't need someone to tailor math to to this specific scenario to understand it, they can deduct it from from this statement.

From high school physics we know that if the climber falls a distance h then their potential energy mgh will have all been converted into kinetic energy ½mv2 at the base of the fall. This is true whether the drop is a straight line or a swing. This means that a 2m (6ft) swing into a corner (with the protection at the same height as the climber) is the same as a 2m fall onto a ledge.

You wanted math, and I provided it all to you, it's just over your head.

Here it's laid out in more simple terms that you might be able to understand.

https://rockandice.com/climb-safe/climb-safe-belay-school-why-dynamic-matters/

It also confirms that my statement about a soft catch being able to reduce the forces applied on the top piece by 50% was incorrect, it's actually more.

In plain terms, the dynamic belay reduced the load on the top piece of gear by up to 60 percent. 

Here's a graph, if you can understand those.

http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12195037900/Theory-of-Belaying

This has been something that has been understood by climbers for well over 70 years now. 

Buck Rio wrote:

...You hold the rope, make sure to lock it up if I take a fall, but I am the owner of any fall. I'm not some victim of a bad belayer if I get hurt falling....

...
Risk management is part of the game, to abdicate your safety to someone else for not holding the rope right is irresponsible.

^^This^^

Russell Bangert wrote:

Want to discredit these videos?

the video of the woman at J-tree is ridiculous. The climb isn't overhanging and, no matter what, she was going to hit the wall. Having a shorter catch actually helped her there. The one in the Red doesn't look like it mattered either way. He fell pretty much straight down. The other two links didn't work. 

Russell Bangert

Hey i remember climbing with you a couple years ago.

Never again, you gave me that really hard uncomfortable catch while belaying me 

Stagg54 Taggart wrote: ^^This^^

Nope, the safety of the team is the responsibility of both parties. Sure the climber bears responsibility for putting themselves in a position to fall. But in sport and gym climbing, especially, falling is part of the game. The belayer bears the responsibility to help make those falls as safe as possible. You’re just choosing to ignore techniques that can help make falls safer for your leader. 

Count of hands...how many of you discounting soft catches have taken and or caught more than a couple hundred falls? And I’m not talking over a 20 year span, more like in the last year? How many of you are of more than average weight?

csproul wrote:

Nope, the safety of the team is the responsibility of both parties. Sure the climber bears responsibility for putting themselves in a position to fall. But in sport and gym climbing especially, falling is part of the game. The belayer bears the responsibility to help make those falls as safe as possible. You’re just choosing to ignore techniques that can help make falls safer for your leader. 

Count of hands...how many of you discounting soft catches have taken and or caught more than a couple hundred falls? And I’m not talking over a 20 year span, more like in the last year or two? How many of you are of more than average weight?

Chris I know we've discussed this before in another thread and I've thought about it since then as well. It's true that I haven't caught hundreds of falls in the last year or two but I have caught hundreds over the course of my climbing career. And I sport climb a lot more than I used to so a fair number in the last year or two as well. In that entire time I've never had a partner I was belaying get injured from getting slammed into the wall. It's true that may be because I'm fairly light and I've overwhelmingly used an ATC to belay. I'm not discounting the use of a soft catch for some people in some scenarios but neither my experience nor my professional judgement as a physicist says that it makes much sense for me in the vast majority of climbing situations.

Now as for that professional judgement. I posted earlier with some data from Black Diamond about how the elasticity of a rope declines after repeated falls as would happen when working a sport route. Couple that with a belay device that doesn't slip and a belayer who is heavy compared to the climber and I can see how you could get some hard falls. Rather than jumping to give a soft catch though I think using a lower impact force rope and/or a belay device that slips at a lower force makes more sense.

I've been as contentious as anyone on this and even I'm not "discounting soft catches." I think it's a great, moderately advanced belaying technique to have in your bag of tricks. But compared to the basic skill of just catching someone, it's a couple orders of magnitude less important. And in many situations, it's flat out impossible because of weight differences. 

Hey Emil! Good to hear from you. You and I are of similar...stature. I have to work to not give a soft catch. If I want to keep from getting lifted or even shorten a fall, it takes effort on my part. I’d guess you are fairly similar. Being on the receiving end it’s typically  the exact opposite. Belayers have to make an effort for me when I fall. I have switched to using ropes with low impact forces when I sport climb. But IMO it isn’t as much about reducing the force as much as it is about lengthening the of the pendulum so to speak. Your the physicist so you may be able to put it in more technical terms, but if you think of a fall as more of a pendulum than a linear fall, the angular momentum is less with a longer “arm”, which can be achieved by a soft catch. Sit down on the belay and shorten the amount of rope and shorten the arm, the pendulum swings into the wall faster.

If you want to learn good catching technique, listen to belayers who have taken and caught a lot...and I mean a lot of falls. Not the 50 something trad climber who has taken fewer falls in their career than a serious sport climber takes in a year. And this is not a dig at you...I’m pretty much closer to that end of the spectrum myself, I just happen to climb with a lot of people who are more the latter.

And you should definitely take a Yosemite trip this year and come visit!

csproul wrote: Count of hands...how many of you discounting soft catches have taken and or caught more than a couple hundred falls? 

Nobody is discounting soft catches entirely.

Some of us are having fun with the people that think that every catch requires superhero levels of finesse and if you don't agree with me you are totally unsafe and I will never climb with you or anyone in your family.

And that chick on Heart of Darkness didn't know how to fall.

Jump off and grab the rope!

Chris I would love to make it out to Yosemite again! I need to find a physics conference to attend in California during prime climbing season ....

I think the pendulum thing you're referring to is the principle of conservation of angular momentum. It's pretty straightforward to model it with an inelastic rope. An elastic rope though is going to have some of the same effect as a soft catch. You can see that by thinking about the limiting case of an infinitely stretchy rope in which case the climber isn't going to swing into the wall at all (but will crater into the ground of course!). One of the reasons I'm dubious about jumping is because I can't really jump much anymore. A stretchy rope and a belay device that slips doesn't depend on my pathetic vertical leap.

Russell Bangert wrote:
Want to discredit these videos?

Sure, be more than happy to...

Video #1: Here the leader is lunging outward an extended distance up around the lip of the roof from their last piece. And when they can't hold the lunge, the result is their body carries a bit further outward with enough momentum to start inverting. But nothing about a soft catch is going to obviate the swinging fall that results. And note, this is an outward dyno roof move which is nothing like simply coming straight down off an overhanging wall to a hard stop and swinging back into the wall as a result - this swing was entirely unavoidable regardless of the catch and if the belayer wanted to do something different they could have let a bunch of rope ease through the belay device (if they weren't using a grigri and knew what they were doing).

Video #2: Really? The leader got hurt because they pushed off just enough to swing back into the top lip of that hole. This is exactly the kind of scenario that ended my friend's life and could have seriously injured this climber if it was her head that impacting that lip instead of her shin.

Video #3: Here we go from merely "really?" to seriously? As in video #1, the leader makes a full up and way-the-fuck-out-there dyno and unfortunately sticks it just long enough for his feet to continue rocketing outward further still and with a shit ton of momentum this time - i.e. he's flying outward at speed and with significant rope out from their last piece. The only way that resolves is with big ass swinging arc back into the rock and no soft catch is going to change that reality. And note, his belayer already has some slack out and is dynamically dragged several feet towards the rock and at least a foot upwards which, between the two, would constitute as soft a catch as he was going to get no matter what the belayer did. And this is yet another case of swinging into the lip of a [small] roof, They're very lucky to have cleared below the lip without pounding their head into it. The roof/lap that did in my friend was like a mere 15" wide and very, very similar to this one.

Video #4: This yet again has nothing whatsoever to do with hard/soft catches and everything to do with issues involved with climbing really steep overhangs and roofs. The leader has traversed progressively further left and up from their last piece and is going to take a swinging fall regardless of what the world's best soft catch belayer does. Fortunately, they plenty of room to swing and the remedy, had they been a bit higher and with less swing room, would have been to pull some slack for the fall, not a soft/dynamic catch. This is also a classic case of a trad leader needing to be responsible for their own fall management. In this case, the climber elected to jump rather than even be bothered to attempt to downclimb closer to their last piece - not a wise decision and a clear reminder downclimbing is an incredibly valuable skill in trad climbing.

Unless you’ve gained a bit of weight since I saw you last (unfortunately, I have), I doubt you should have to jump at all unless you’re climbing with some pretty small people. I don’t really have to do much more than step into the average fall and I  get lifted most every time.

Russell Bangert wrote:You wanted math, and I provided it all to you, it's just over your head.               

From high school physics we know that if the climber falls a distance h then their potential energy mgh will have all been converted into kinetic energy ½mv2 at the base of the fall. This is true whether the drop is a straight line or a swing. This means that a 2m (6ft) swing into a corner (with the protection at the same height as the climber) is the same as a 2m fall onto a ledge.

This is interesting.  So, is this always the case when a climber hits the wall?  Here are a few different diagrams.  Maybe you can tell me which ones the climber would hit the wall with the same force as "onto a ledge".

No you’re wrong,  no you’re wrong and I am right. No you’re wrong I climb more then you. 

Greg D wrote:

This is interesting.  So, is this always the case when a climber hits the wall?  Here are a few different diagrams.  Maybe you can tell me which ones the climber would hit the wall with the same force as "onto a ledge".

I remember my first drawing 

David Van Parys wrote:

I remember my first drawing 

Can I see your first drawing?  Yes, crude drawings that took 90 seconds to make. 

Can you answer the question and possibly make a contribution?  If not, don’t worry. Physics boy is going to explain it for us.