As the auto-belay lowered me 15 meters to the ground after I won the Big Final heat, it started to sink in that I had just won the speed climbing National Championship. I truly realized my accomplishment when I touched the ground and was hugged, fist-bumped, high-fived, and cheered by my coaches, teammates, competitors, friends, and family. I was now a National Champion.
While I’ve had a number of successes in my speed climbing career, my five years of dedication and training paid off enormously this year at the 2021 USA Climbing Youth Nationals in Reno, Nevada. This is what everyone in my sport focuses on every year.
It has been an amazing seven weeks since I finished my sophomore year at Westlake High School in Austin and dedicated myself to training for Nationals. Between March 2020 and the end of May 2021, I had only trained on a 15m speed wall a few times due to the constraints of COVID, a busy academic schedule, and the fact that the closest 15m wall is two hours away in Katy, Texas.
The day after school got out, I was on the 15m wall at Summit’s Plano gym and training with my Team Texas teammates. I started my pre-Nationals training with a lot of power because I worked tirelessly to gain strength in my garage gym during COVID. I was stronger than I had ever been, but I needed to refine my speed beta and regain my finger strength and climbing endurance.
The first two weeks of training were rough. My endurance was less than ideal, I needed to perfect my beta, and I was implementing a new and faster start. Progress seemed to come slowly. My coach told me to “Trust the Process”. Despite not hitting any new personal records (PR), I soldiered on while keeping a positive attitude. I was grateful to have access to a speed wall on which to train.
During the third week, things started to click. My PR of 7.70 set in December fell to 7.64. Then 7.61. Next 7.59. Then 7.54. And the PRs started to come in almost every training session. Sometimes two or three PRs in a single session! I finally felt the “process” working.
By the time I had spent four weeks in Plano, my PR was 7.26!
I then traveled to Salt Lake City to join my teammates at the Team Texas pre-Nationals training camp. It was a tremendous camp with the fast climbers from the Team attending. One of the most valuable aspects of the camp was going to the USA Climbing Team Training Center. The Training Center has the 15-meter wall broken into three 5-meter sections. One morning, I trained on just the top third section of the speed route for a couple of hours. That training significantly improved the top portion of my beta.
Right after the practice at the Training Center, I went to Momentum Millcreek to do practice runs on the full 15 meters. My improved top section beta delivered a new PR of 6.86, which was the first time I’ve ever broken seven seconds! At this point in my training, I truly started to believe that I could have a strong performance at Nationals.
By the time I flew from Salt Lake to Nationals in Reno, I had achieved 13 new PRs in the span of just six weeks with a final PR of 6.78.
During the downtime and rest days of my speed training, I worked on a computer science internship with a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. It was a great learning experience and allowed me to have a deep focus for a number of hours every day when I was not climbing.
Just like Salt Lake, Reno has an elevation of 4,000 feet and is hot and dry in the summer. The elevation and climate are quite different from Texas, so I was happy to have acclimated in Salt Lake for two weeks prior to the Nationals. I spent a couple of days in Reno resting and seeing some of the sights with my dad.
Speed qualifying day was not my best day of climbing. In both qualifying runs, I slightly missed the foothold on the jump portion of my start. On my first run, I got 8.20 seconds which was good enough to move on to Semi-Finals. Despite the so-so runs in Qualifying, I knew that I would be competitive for making the podium if I could climb “my run”.
The next morning, I found the flow in my Semi-Final runs. I was able to climb “my run”. I clocked a 7.78 and 7.15 on my two runs. The 7.15 put me into an advantageous second place entering finals.
Speed finals are head-to-head knockout rounds and exciting in which to compete. Being seeded second in the knockout brackets theoretically gave me the second easiest path to being National Champion. In my first race, I had a clean run and won with a 7.13 time.
The next race was not as smooth. My competitor got out to a quick start, and I had an inadvertent pause right before the big dyno. Even though my competitor got nearly 4 meters ahead of me, I did not give up. I restarted and accelerated as hard as I could. My ability to run the top portion of the route fast was required to catch up, and then my opponent slipped. I got past him and won by 0.05 seconds. It was an exhilarating race, and the announcer said that he almost had a “heart attack” watching it.
The final race for the Championship was also eventful. This time I got out to the early lead as my competitor stalled on his Tamoa start, but towards the top of the route, the slippery wall in Reno finally caught up to me. I slipped but recovered and was able to win the race by over two seconds. That was it. I was National Champion! It was such a fulfilling way to finish seven weeks of the best climbing of my life.
Even as I write this a couple of days after the win, I’m still coming to grips with the achievement. I was not the favorite to win. I don’t have a 15-meter wall within two hours of my house. My Team is based four hours away in Dallas. My family was very cautious about COVID, so the majority of my training for the past one and a half years was in my unairconditioned garage gym and the hang board in my bedroom. I was in 12th place going into Semi-Finals. But even with all of those obstacles, I had tremendous confidence at Nationals because of the training that I’ve done over the last five years and how a number of pieces came together in the lead-up to the competition.
Next up is the Youth Worlds competition in Voronezh, Russia at the end of August.