In 2004, legendary builderer Alain "The French Spiderman" Robert climbed Tapei 101, then the tallest building in the world, as part of the official opening of the building. In the ensuing decades, dozens of amateur climbers have lived-and died-in devotion of buildering, a portmanteau of "bouldering" (climbing on boulders) and "building." Long the realm of specialists who climbed with the expectation of being arrested on the top floor, urban climbing has crawled toward the mainstream in recent years. However, the book's title, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, and the author's pseudonym of "Whipplesnaith," show that the naughtiness factor was still front and center.
Ten years later, he followed it up with the equally flowery, classics-quoting general guide Wall and Roof Climbing, still widely available online.īy the 1930s, Cambridge-climbing had developed enough cachet to garner a guide put out by the mainstream London publisher Chatto & Windus. Young's expression of the "true faith" came in the form of The Roof-Climber's Guide To Trinity, a tongue-in-cheek reference work published anonymously in 1895 for his fellow Trinity College students who aspired to ascend the campus' centuries-old spires and chapels. "Since the supply of unconquered Alps is limited and the dangers of Nature's monumental exercise grounds are yearly increased by the polish of frequent feet and the broken bottles of thirsty souls, aspirants with the true faith at heart have been forced of late years to seek new sensations on the artificial erections of man."
Need another reason? The famed early British alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop Young is happy to give it: Why climb a building? Because, it's fun, and/or to be a jerk. Oh, and the race takes place in July, when the surface of the highway in Death Valley is hot enough to melt the soles of running shoes. The original course went all the way to the summit at 14,505 feet many runners still go all the way there. This 135-mile race starts at the lowest point in the contiguous United States, Badwater Basin in Death Valley (-282 ft) and climbs to a point 8,360 high on the flanks of Mount Whitney. Most American states have their own iteration, beginning and ending in the downtown of a resort town.Īnd then there's Badwater. The Ultra Cavalls del Vent in the Spanish Pyrenees features more than 19,000 feet of vertical gain across a jagged 52-mile course. Looking to make a race out of it? You have ample choices. "It's pure mountain and pure running." Unlike the tight, insect-like forms of rock climbers, mountain runners skitter up steep faces like goats and bound down in a cloud of waving arms. "Bruno was the first to see the mountain in that way: to leave town, climb all the way to the summit, and come down as fast as possible," he says. Jornet gives credit to Italian Bruno Brunod for envisioning the simple charm of mountain running back in the 1990s. American trail racer Anton Krupicka, for one example, ran up 8,144-foot Green Mountain from his nearby hometown of Boulder, Colorado, an incredible 296 times in 2010.
Runners like the Catalan Kilian Jornet make headlines for setting speed-ascent records on the Grand Teton and Kilimanjaro, but it is outside of the record books, in these runners' day-to-day training, where the real feats lie. Mountain running-also known as fell running in the U.K., and sky running-has been around informally for years, but has exploded in popularity in the last decade. See that mountain over there? That one-over on the horizon.
0 kommentar(er)
