What is smearing in climbing? The word smear has multiple definitions and we’re certainly not going to get into all of them here. If you aren’t familiar with the smearing rock climbing term, you’d perhaps think it was something to do with ego-driven climbers trying to downplay each other’s achievements. “She says she does all her climbs on-sight but that’s a total lie.” “Sure, it looked like he free soloed it on Insta, but I know he had a rope on for most of the route.”
This is, of course, utter nonsense. Smearing in climbing has nothing to do with smear campaigns. Nor does it have anything to do with coating a section of a climb with a sticky substance, or any of the other definitions of the word.
