Yosemite climbing icon Hans Florine to speak in Boulder

World-renowned speed climber Hans Florine is sometimes in a hurry to get to the rock. He's been pulled over three times in Yosemite National Park for speeding.

"I only got one," ticket, he said. "I got out of two of them."

Florine credits his public-speaking abilities for that. You can see them yourself when he presents a slideshow at Neptune Mountaineering at 7 p.m. Thursday.

The 45-year-old Californian has won 29 speed-climbing competitions and holds multiple speed records, but he is perhaps best known for repeatedly defending his speed record for climbing The Nose route on Yosemite's El Capitan -- nearly 3,000 feet -- in 2 hours, 37 minutes and 5 seconds in October 2008.

He started speed climbing in the late 1980s, when it was still "a novelty," he said.

"I tried it with a very open mind, of fun, and let's see how fast we can go," he said. "And I won and was given a brand-new rope for winning. And I think that turned a key in my head -- here's a $175 rope I got for climbing fast."

He continued to win speed climbing competitions, and his first

record-setting climb on The Nose was in 1990, in 8 hours and 6 minutes. Other climbers have been chasing the record for years, but Florine and partner Yuji Hirayama keep setting new ones -- most recently in '08.

For the Neptune show, Florine said he plans to talk about that record-setting climb, plus climbs he's done with Golden-based climber Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit Mt. Everest.

Speed climbing is about looking for ways to be more effective and efficient, Florine said.

"When me and Yuji climbed The Nose, when one person's not doing anything, that's a time you should think about what could that person do to aid upward progress," he said.

It's all in "Speed Climbing," a book he co-authored with local climber Bill Wright.

Wright said he'd always been interested in speed climbing, so he found Florine online and contacted him. They traded e-mails, and Wright ended up staying with him on a trip to Yosemite.

"I told him about my idea -- I wanted to write a book about speed climbing, just for my interest, because I wanted to know how they climb so fast," Wright said.

"He said, 'I've been thinking about doing that for years and years.'"

Wright, a software engineer in Superior, said he's just a regular climber who wanted to learn the mechanics of climbing faster -- especially after his kids were born and he had less time to climb -- and thought a book would be helpful.

"I'm a very prolific trip-report writer, and I was just going to write up something, make five or six copies, print it off at Kinko's for my buddies," Wright said. "It didn't go that way. (Hans) is obviously really famous, so when we pitched it, they were like, 'Yeah, we're in.' It was on Amazon, in stores. It was really cool."

The first book was published in 2002. Florine said the principles in the book aren't just for climbing The Nose in a day -- they're for every climber at every grade who wants to get more climbing in.

"Everything matters is a cliché, but in getting more climbing into your day, everything does matter," Florine said.