The old adage that watching an ice/mixed competition is like watching paint dry couldn’t be more wrong. It is like watching someone paint. You stand there, knees locked, and observe a roster of super strong athletes sweep their brushes across the canvas, some in little strokes, others in broad statements. Mostly, though they hang from their tools, shaking the left arm, then switching and shaking the right, then the left, then the right, then the left, fighting back the pump that builds steadily and as surely as the setting of the sun, which is about how long these comps take if they start early in the morning. Occasionally someone clangs a cowbell to keep everyone on their frostbitten toes, and the people who know a word of French yell, “Allez!”

By the end of it, your knees have calcified and you hobble away straight legged, which becomes your situation until an orthopedic surgeon cracks you behind the knees with a Louisville slugger and gets the joints moving again. It’s expensive, but a fair price for watching the masters paint.

But the Teva Winter Games in Vail on Friday were nothing like that, a fact that even a dolt could grasp when at the outset the commentator flatly announced, “Today, no one hits the ground!”

A proclamation of that sort makes you sit up straight, for it really says, “Hitting the ground is a possibility, but we’ll do what we can today to keep people from getting killed.”

You pay attention after you hear something like that, not that you had to pay attention to understand that this time, this comp was going to be different.

A glance at the wall told you that.

The wall was a 55-foot high, freestanding artificial structure erected by EntrePrises. Until then, all competitions had been on real rock and real ice, just like the early rock-climbing comps were until someone figured out that Mother Nature really sucks at competitive course setting. The EntrePrises wall, actually two walls with mirror-image routes right next to each other, sported regular plastic holds for tool hooking, and bolted-on foam blocks of simulated ice for jobbing picks and frontpoints into.

If the wall was a refreshing splash of ice water on the face, the comp format was six Redbulls right to the brain. Instead of giving climbers one shot at a difficulty route where highpoint wins, a format that necessarily breeds sleepiness, at Vail, the 20 competitors raced like greyhounds side by side up easier routes. When they topped out, they got to rest a few minutes, then switched walls and went again.

A digital clock kept the time and was perhaps the single best addition to mixed climbing, as it gave you a scoring of sorts—until this, onlookers had no firm idea of who was ever winning. Imagine watching a football game without a scoreboard, then with one, and you get the idea.

They started at 10 in the morning, after each competitor got a couple of sussing burns.

Even the warm-ups were exciting, and after the proper lubricating runs, the game was on. The climbers matched up head to head and got down to business. The format was simple, with the fastest 10 competitors advancing, then the fastest 10 advanced, then the top six, then four, then the finals. By the end, the finalists had climbed nearly 600 feet, in ever-speedier times. It was bedlam and thrilling. As the climbers got the route more and more dialed, they cut corners, taking chances with big moves and a hurry up offense. Quite a few paid the price, slamming their picks either so deeply in the foam they struggled to extract them, or pecking them in so lightly they sheared through. Falls were arse-over-teakettle, windmilling affairs but no one was hurt.

Around 4 p.m. a steady snow began to pelt the venue and mini-spindrift avalanches spilled down the wall, adding a surreal element that the organizers would have paid a million dollars for.

When it boiled down to just two more rounds, the competitors got an hour-long break to rest and warm themselves. Inside an adjacent hotel lobby, Sam Elias and Emily Harrington, two of the top seeds, rested and sorted out their strategies.

“Having to watch my nutrition and make sure I have the fuel,” said Elias, who had already nearly worn his hands bloody by grappling up the wall over and over again.

Elias is one of America’s best mixed climbers—perhaps the best—but he’d had a string of bad luck in competitions so far. In 2009, at Ouray, he was one of only two climbers to top the route and was bested when Josh Wharton, who climbed after him, did the route faster. The next year at the same comp, Elias took a spectacular and scary fall when he slipped off a snow ledge just before clipping a bolt, whipping a good 45 feet and nearly to the ground. This year at Ouray, victory seemed certain as he cruised through the route, only to have a hold break in the final stretch.

The pressure was on Elias, for sure, and the intensity in his eyes told you that he was in The Zone and that anything you said to him now would not be remembered.

"I awoke that morning and I honestly said aloud," said Elias, "'I can't wait for this day to be over.' It's a love/hate thing for me. I am really competitive, but I don't like competitions. I feel like I've had some bad luck in the past, and luck isn't something that you can account for."

When Elias and the finalists came out, snow and spotlights and the eyes of perhaps 300 spectators bore down on them.

In a flash the climbers were carving at the wall as if it were a holiday turkey and they hadn’t eaten since July.

By now, the strain of nearly eight hours of nearly continuous competition and nearly 2,500 moves was obvious. Some climbers got to near the top and just faded, unable to even pull up on both tools. But not Elias.

He raged. And raged again, and in the final heat with Stanislav Vrba, which by that point must have felt like Groundhog Day, he posted his fastest time—sub three minutes—sailing to the chains, showing how it was to be done, pointing to the way for, hopefully, future mixed competitions.

MENS

1.     Sam Elias, Boulder, Colorado

2.     Stanislav Vrba, Frisco, Colorado

3.     Bryan Gilmore, Ridgeway, Colorado

4.     Andres Marin, Ouray, Colorado

5.     Marcus Garcia, Durango, Colorado

6.     Will Mayo, Erie

WOMEN'S

1.     Dawn Glanc, Ouray, Colorado

2.     Emily Harrington, Boulder, Colorado

3.     Sarah Shaw, Highland, Colorado

Competitors go head to head in the morning qualifiers.

Sam Elias smokes the finals on his way to a $2,000 cash prize.

The agony of defeat.

Andres Marin battles spindrift on his way to a third place finish.

Elias on left, and Stanislav Vrba race to the top in the final run.