Beta in Rock-Climbing

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Lauren. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Lauren. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

So, I work at a climbing gym, which I know is really weird for Nebraska, which is in the middle of the Midwest.

But so, because, you know, we’re really new and a lot of people don’t know about climbing, we have a lot of lingo that goes through the gym that a lot of people don’t know or don’t understand.

Which is totally okay, but it then also makes us question, like, the roots of them.

But I was talking to someone one day, and I was talking about how to climb a route that we have up.

And I said, you know, if you have any problems, you know, I can give you the beta.

And I realized I didn’t know, like, because they asked me then what beta meant.

And I, you know, said, well, that’s how you climb a route.

And they’re like, well, where does it come from?

Because that’s such a weird word.

And I was like, I actually have no idea.

So what are we talking about?

These fake walls with the handholds or rope climbing?

Beta can apply to both bouldering, which is where you climb on the wall, but you don’t have any ropes with you.

You fall under, like, a giant mat.

And there’s wall top roping, which has the ropes.

Okay.

Beta, B-E-T-A, the Greek letter, right?

Yes.

And it’s the route that you climb.

Is it the optimal route, or is it just one of the possible ways?

It’s one of the possible ways because there’s, like, a term for, like, an intended beta.

So that means like how the route was set, like the intended way to climb it.

And then there’s also like things like breaking beta, which means, you know, you’re climbing in a way that’s not the intended way.

We do think we know the origin of this.

It’s pretty well established in the climbing fields that the guy who made beta mean the route that you can take up a cliff face or mountainside or what have you was probably Jack Molesky who climbed in Texas.

And it comes from the word Betamax.

You may have read this before.

Betamax is an old video format that kind of lost out to VHS, even though it had some optimal things.

But there was a time in the 80s where you could buy a Betamax recorder and a Betamax player, and it worked like any other video camera player combination.

And so if you say that you’re going to go to the beta, it means that you’re going to go to the tape of somebody literally climbing that route.

Somebody else was standing back either after them or below them or on the ground was filming them going up so that then later other people could study their technique or study their route and mimic it or improve upon it.

That’s actually really awesome.

I appreciate that it’s such a niche term for a piece of technology that we don’t use anymore.

One thing that I really like about this is this filming of performance or filming of somebody doing an athletic thing is so widespread and common, and in the rest of, you know, in football and baseball and every other sport, they film and they watch the film in order to improve their own game or improve their own performance.

And it’s always been surprising to me that this beta term hasn’t left climbing and entered the rest of these fields.

Yeah, it’s interesting. When I used to go to rowing camp, we would watch the tape. We would talk about the tape.

Yeah, just the tape.

And football, too. You talk about the tape, but not the beta.

Not the beta, yeah.

We’re kind of a little bit narcissistic. We love watching ourselves climb.

I guess we never see it as how to improve.

I mean, obviously some people do, but it’s just really interesting to me.

I want to recommend a book to you, Lauren, before we go.

Do you know about Matt Samet’s Climbing Dictionary?

His last name is S-A-M-E-T.

No, I haven’t heard of that.

It’s pretty good.

And if you have a little gift shop or something in your climbing gym, it might be something good to stock so your new climbers can bone up on the jargon of the field.

That would actually be awesome.

Yeah, and send them to our website.

Waywordradio.org.

Anyway, thanks, Lauren.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Lauren.

Bye.

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