Last April I competed in the my first SCS Open National Championship at Movement Climbing Gym in Boulder, CO. Bouldering is my first love- I’ve participated in ABS Open Nationals since I was eligible- but I never made the effort to get to SCS Nationals until this year. To my surprise, I qualified for the World Cup being held in Atlanta the weekend of September 29 and 30. Since the competition was being held at Stone Summit, my new home gym, I was pretty happy to have the opportunity to participate. I have to admit, I do not get excited about endurance training and if you’ve ever seen the walls at Stone Summit, you know you need a good amount of endurance no matter the route grade and I knew the routes at this comp weren’t going to be easy. I had all summer to start my endurance training but that turned out be be only a couple of trips to Rumney, which was fun but not much in the way of training. Before I knew it summer was over and I was on my way back to Atlanta to start school again.

I started going to Stone Summit to start my training as soon as I got settled at school but the bouldering area kept calling my name. I went to the gym as often as I possibly could and I did get on some lead climbs, but for the caliber of competition I was facing it was not close to being enough. I resigned myself to just having fun and being fortunate enough to climb with some of the strongest climbers in the world. The competition turned out to be even more fun than I thought it would be. I wasn’t nervous because I knew what I was up against and I had no real expectations.

Qualifiers were flash format so my sister, who was also competing, and I got to watch some real pros climb the routes before I did, which was really fun. It probably should have been intimating, watching all of those ridiculous climbers, but all of them make the climbs look so flawless and beautiful, it just got me excited to get on them. I did my best and surprised myself by making it to semi-finals. Semi-finals were onsite so I got to spend some time in iso with the same big names I was watching the day before. Our climb was long and hard, just as I was expecting, but luckily it was also pretty powerful. That helped me just enough to move up two places and end up in 23rd place. The competition went even better than I could have expected. I am really happy with the results and honored to have been able to just participate in that great opportunity.