Bouldering Videos are Too Long

When I started writing about climbing, bouldering had just become “cool.” It was the thing to do, but it was also the thing to shit-talk, especially among climbing’s wise and experienced elders.

To be clear, everyone sport climbed and everyone went bouldering, to some degree or another, but not without first signaling that bouldering—and to a lesser degree, sport climbing—were unessential and frivolous. Not the “real thing.” The main event in climbing was trad, big-wall, mountains, alpinism. Most climbers held a Hemingway-esque attitude toward climbing: if it couldn’t kill you, how could you respect it?

This pathology—a deep anxiety over what makes you a “real climber”—retains a vestigial presence within the psyches of climbers today. Climbers are always insecure and dismissive about their own passion, believing that …