Visualize Your Climbing Ascents
A new approach to training monitoring: climbing ascents visualization
When it comes to keeping track of my training, I am not a precise person. Climbing for me is not only training and performance, but also adventure, feeling, connection and relationship with the rock, and the mountain.
My training logs are very poor. I get demotivated in writing everything down. But, I need something to somehow keep track of my climbing. For me, it is much more important to keep track of my climbing ascents (mainly outside), instead of workouts or training plans.
I then created a tool able to visualize all my climbing ascents nicely. There is more: this tool is flexible enough to select specific features of your routes, and make effective analysis.
If you are also like me, kind of lazy to monitor your training, but feel the need to track your climbing ascents, read this blog! I will explain to you step-by-step how to create your own climbing visualization tool, and make effective analyse..
The software I used is called Notion. No subscription fees or programming skills needed, just creativity.
Happy visualization!
Why visualization of climbing ascents
I am not a fan of monitoring my training: I cannot directly visualize my progress, I cannot see the training effect on my climbing ascents, and I am not that precise to keep note of training details. I was frustrated, because I know the importance, and the positive effect, of keeping track of my climbing training.
I realized that what mattered most to me was being able to visually see my climbing progress, not analyzing detailed training data or keeping a log of specific workouts. For me, during a specific climbing period, instead of knowing the number of maximal pull-ups, I wanted to see how many onsight routes I climbed. For example, I wanted to see how many 6c onsight single-pitch routes I climbed from June to August 2025.
Which tool to use? Notion suits perfectly
I needed a tool allowing me to make visualization analyzes of my logged climbing ascents. Also, it has to let me select routes satisfying criteria, like onsight or redpoint, climbed january or in may, and clearly visualize the routes matching those specific criteria.
I searched online for an app to perform this. Some do the visualization of climbing routes, but for me they weren’t flexible enough to define my own criteria of visualization. So, I created a new one: I used Notion, also the free version of Notion. It works perfectly!
How to visualize your climbing ascents in Notion
I want to describe here how to implement your climbing ascents visualization. It doesn’t require a lot of time, but it requires a bit of patience to understand how Notion works and to adapt it to your needs.
Step 1: the Climbing Table
To visualize any type of data, you need a table of data from which you take the data and do visualization. In Notion, you can either create a new table or select a predefined table. Notion also has templates of tables to log your climbing progress. The important thing is that you have a table, where you insert the climbing routes you want to visualize.
My table has the following structure. Each row describes one climbing route, and each column describes one of its features. In the pic, for each route (each row), I have in the columns: the month when I climbed it, if it was single or multipitch, its grade, if it was onsight or not, its location, if it was outdoor or indoor, and the year.
You can choose your own features, I mean, the features you prefer. Those will be the features you select for the visualization. The features have to describe what you want to visualize. Example. I want to visualize the routes climbed in 2025 and 2024, so I need a column indicating the year. Or, I want to visualize the routes I climbed in december, so I need a column indicating the month, etc., etc.
Step 2: the Climbing Histograms
On the same page of the table, you create a chart: just click on the + near the table name. In the pic, the + near the table name all climbs. You have to select the type of the chart. For me, for each grade I wanted to visualize how many routes I climbed. So I chose the type called “histogram”: on the x-axis I insert the feature grade, and on the y-axis the number of routes climbed for that grade.
Details of the picture. On its right side, you can choose the chart type. The first option is the histogram. X axis is the horizontal axis. In “what to show” you select the grade (this is, and must be, a column in the climbing routes table you build before). You can select how to sort it. I chose from the lowest (left side) to the higher (right side) grade.
Y axis is the vertical axis. In “what to show” you select Count. This automatically counts the number of climbs (of rows in the table) for each grade.
Step 3: The Colors
For a clear and nice visualization, you have to choose the right colors. On the pic, on the right, where you selected the X and Y axis, a bit more down there is the voice Colors. There you can choose the colors you prefer.
Step 4: The Filters
Here it comes the point why I wanted to create my own tool to visualize my climbing ascents. I wanted to have a tool flexible enough to let me visualize any specific climbing feature I wanted to analyze. For exemple: to choose all the routes climbed in 2025, or all the routes onsight, or all the outdoor routes.
In your chart, you can create a filter. When applied, this filter selects and visualizes only those routes respecting the filter. It is important to say that the filter refers to the column of the climbing table you created before.
You create a filter after creating the histogram with X axis and Y axis definition. As in the picture, to create a filter you go on the very right side of the page and select the 3-lenght-decresing-lines to open the filters window. Then you create a new filter by clicking on the symbol + Filter.
For my needs, I created the filters: year, onsight, single/multi-pitch, outdoor/indoor. I repeat: these filters are the columns you created in the climbing table at Step 1. Depending on what you want to visualize, you create your own climbing feature, for which you define the filter.
Advanced Visualization
If you follow these steps, you end up with an already very nice visualization of your climbing ascents. But also a bit visually chaotic. Indeed, you have your climbing histogram, with a color for each column: if you have 9 columns (one for every grade), you will have 9 different colors.
There is a trick to make a nicer and more structured visualization. You have to “group“ the colors. For example, for me I wanted the same color for the grades 6a and 6a+, and to be different from the color for 6b and 6b+.
To do this, I have to create like 5 groups (5c and 5c+, 6a and 6a+, 6b and 6b+, 6c and 6c+, 7a). I create these groups in the Climbing Table (step 1) by introducing another column, which I called “grade class”. For every climb you insert, you select the grade class according to your group.
Example. I insert a climb with grade 6b. So, for that route, I select the group class as 6b. Then I insert another climb of grade 6b+. I then select the group class 6b for this climb. With this, in the histogram (visualization), the 2 climbs belong to two different columns, but with the same color.
On the very right side, the column “grade class“ indicated the group each climb belongs to.
To actually implement this in the Climbing Chart (step 2), in the chart setting, you go to the section Y axix -> Group by, and you select the name that you choose for your group. As I wrote before, I chose the name “grade class”.
Go to option Group by, and select “grade class“. The climbs belonging to the same grade class will be displays in different columns, but with the same color.
Limits of the method
As you may have noticed, this method is a bit technical and requires some focus and detail organization to have a nice view of your climbing ascents visualization.
First, the subscription to Notion. I used the free basic plan, and I already did a nice visualization, but it limits some options, of course. For example, with the free plan you can only have 1 chart. This limits a bit. Indeed, if you would also track your multipitch ascents, you should have another chart, since the features for a multipitch are different than a single pitch.
Second, the climbing table. If you want to keep track of climbing ascents for many years, or if you want to analyze many climbing ascents, the climbing table becomes very long, and its handle will not be easy. A solution would be to subscribe to some advanced plan in Notion, where you can build multiple climbing tables and multiple charts so that you divide your analysis into big groups.
As you start to build your climbing ascent visualization, you may notice other problems, more related to your situation. But I believe this is a very good approach for a first basic analysis of your climbing ascents.
Conclusions
I am honestly very satisfied, because it’s what I was looking for: a nice visualization of my climbing ascents, and the flexibility to define and select the climbing features more suited to analyzing my climbing progress.
My next step: to do the same for multipitch, since I have some hard projects in mind for next summer ;)
