“I climb better when I’m scared.”
I’ve heard this quite a few times. I even thought it was true about myself for a while in my earlier climbing career, but it surely can’t be true?We explore fear in climbing with Neil Gresham and Dr Rebecca Williams.
Flow is a concept that can divide in climbing. Is it real, or is it a load of hippy nonsense? I talked to Hazel Findlay about how she uses it to enhance performance, and Dr Rebecca Williams about what the hell is going on when you experience it.
Many of the stories in Factor Two feature the same scenario – What next? You always imagine ticking the big goal might be enough, but it rarely is. For Ben Bransby and Jvan Tresch...
After hearing from Leo Houlding and Patch Hammond about their legendary Yosemite season in 1998 there was one obvious gap in our story – Ben Bransby. Before attempting Freerider with Patch, Ben had made...
Internet forums wouldn’t be the same without their villains and heroes, would they? Franco Cookson appeared on the UKC forums back in February 2008. He began posting prolifically from the off and rarely stopped...
Episode / Extras / Factor Two
by Wil Treasure · Published February 6, 2020 · Last modified July 5, 2021
Jerry Moffatt is a climbing legend, but there was one thing that eluded him – success in the new wave of climbing competitions. This was the final barrier to staking his claim as the...
Patch Hammond has remained a bit of an enigma in the climbing world. If you flick through the magazines from the late 1990s you’ll see a scruffy youth with an impressive climbing CV –...
Back in 1998 Leo Houlding and Patch Hammond achieved something almost unthinkable – a near onsight ascent of El Capitan. They were just 18, had no big wall experience and headed to Yosemite without...
Prompted by Franco Cookson’s article on headpointing recently I thought I’d dig out this interview I recorded in November 2017 with Tim Lowe. Tim is a climber from Yorkshire with an enviable ticklist of...
In the last two episodes we looked at aspects of flow, whether seeking the euphoria as an escape or chasing it as a performance tool. But there’s an area of climbing where flow won’t...
At Factor Two we like to tell climbing stories a little differently. Every episode is a little piece of cinema for your ears. We tell the big stories, with big characters, but we’re also interested in the minutiae of the climbing world and the people that are a part of it.
We’ve told stories about grief and joy, speed records and rescues, identity and losing yourself, and it’s all led us back to basics with our new series.
In Ideas That Changed Climbing we’re telling the story of how climbing became the sport it is today, one idea at a time.