Day Hiker wrote:Alpinist wrote:Getting back up would have been just as easy. As long as you have a good handhold and it's not eroding dirt on the edge, then that would be simple enough.
I think it's a reasonable statement that very very few 60+ year-old women have the finger and arm strength to do a legitimate pull-up on a chinning bar at the gym, let alone one hanging from fingers on a broken concrete ledge.
I would heartily agree. I can still do at least 23 good pullups, with full extension. But doing pullups from a bar is one thing; doing them against a vertical wall, with a likely rounded edge, is quite another. And once you have pulled yourself up as far as you can, you have to swing one arm into a mantel (mantle!) position and do a one-arm pushup with your full body weight, if you want to top the wall. That's not easy.
Long before the rotator cuff tear, I used to do pullups on a heavy-duty metal door in a room with a 15' ceiling; I'd swing the door open and hang against it. The top of the door was about 7.5', and I'm just 5.5' high (I'm guessing the woman in the video is about this height). Occasionally I would try to get to the top of the door from the pullup position, but the door was so thick that I wasn't guaranteed success, as I couldn't simply hook my hand over the edge.