Inclusive or Exclusive?

We live in a world that celebrates success. A world where beauty is strong, rich, thin, white, heteronormative, and intelligent. Gradually we have made some changes with more acceptance around not so thin, not so rich (?), not so white and not completely heteronormative. It has been a battle to get there. 

In climbing we are actually moving farther and farther from being inclusive when it comes to routesetting. How so, you ask? 

Height is a predictor of performance.
​Age is a predictor of performance.

Now, I am not suggesting that all routesetting should shift away from the dazzle of a dyno or parkour move, BUT when we normalize parkour moves as a part of the everyday climbers existence we are creating a barrier to access if you are short or old. As a woman of 5'3" the early days of my climbing experience meant lots of tall boys trying to tell me how to reach. With parkour style of setting, I cannot necessarily access my technical skills for success because the move involves just jumping. Or reaching if I was 5'7" as I see my taller friends do. 

As the human body ages, flexibility decreases, strength decreases, joint stability decreases, the fluid in joints is reduced and therefore the potential for injury increases. Bones become more fragile and the potential for a break from an impact fall increases. 

Having run a climbing facility for a couple of decades now, I can tell you that what keeps the business healthy isn't the young guns. 💪 Sure there are many young people now making a little money and paying those membership fees and they are going to soon have kids with whom they want to share their love of the sport. But if a child under four feet can't climb past a certain level because of their height, they will pick a less height dependent sport where they can have success. 

We climb because we like the eventual successes. We diligently try, and try again and eventually we figure it out and the success gives us a sense of meaning to all  the effort we put in. If, however, we are not achieving the success, we feel disappointed, frustrated and eventually it may be enough to make us walk away. OR if we can only do the same difficulty and are relegated to only 20% of the routes, we will walk away.

​Flow, or the state of being enraptured in an experience, only occurs when the challenge is of the appropriate difficulty relative to our strength, flexibility and technical ability. 

Now consider... who are your routesetters? How tall are they? How can a tall person ever understand, actually understand what the difficulty is for a shorter person? Consider who has put up and graded outdoor routes. How tall are they? If you are near or over six feet tall and you think you can accurately assess the grade of outdoor routes, you, my friend are discriminatory.

Climbing as a sport is now fairly gender diverse with most gyms seeing a close to 50-50 split between makes and females using their facility. Now toss in youth who make up many climbing teams and bring a climbing facilities mean population height further down the height scale.
I would suggest average height is no longer five foot ten inches as it was when I started out. Are your setters able to accurately set and grading with inclusivity in mind? Are they setting in such a way to allow older bodies to continue to challenge themselves up the grades without a lot of dynos?