About a month ago, my mother told me about a story she saw on the Today Show about people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease benefiting from climbing. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s worth all four minutes.
I shouldn't be surprised by the findings reported in this story. Climbing has the power to heal in many ways, as I have witnessed when rehabbing my own injuries. Climbing can remind us that there is strength even in weakness. Most people who climb regularly know this, I think. But seeing that a 68-year-old woman hampered by a debilitating disease could, from climbing, gain strength enough to stop the tremors in her hands associated with Parkinson’s amazed me. Watching someone who used a cane to walk to the base of the climb become liberated from that limitation as he made his way up the walls astounded me. How many healthy people have taken up climbing at 68 years old, much less at 50 or 60 years old, much less someone with Parkinson’s or anything else we might consider a limitation?
To the outside world though, climbing appears to be a young, healthy person’s sport— this is mostly what we see in the media and in climbing gyms. A lot of people think it’s for those already strong or athletic in some way. When I suggest to a friend that they should come climbing with me, the most common response if they turn me down is, “I’m not strong enough.” In truth, however, climbing is an activity that anyone can participate in and gain strength. Climbing meets you where you are. I started climbing in my early 20s having never been athletic or in shape or strong in my life. For me up until then, the only thing close to an athletic endeavor had been smoking cigarettes. Climbing is the thing that got me strong and healthy.
Spurred on by that Today Show story, I participated in a recent adaptive climbing training at ASCEND with Denny Kowska from ParaCliffHangers (PCH), whose “vision is that all people with disabilities have access to and can find community in climbing.” Part of the reason for this training with PCH is so that the gym community could learn to facilitate the gym space for those who come to adaptive climbing events hosted by ASCEND. PCH cultivates accessible and inclusive communities inviting people with disabilities to climb as well as actively participate and volunteer in their gym.
Denny spent part of the time teaching us some hands-on technical skills, like setting up the Mechanical Advantage System (MA System), meant to assist people with limited use of their limbs ascend the wall with ropes and pulleys and even a special chair harness. We also practiced “calling”, taking turns climbing as if we were visually impaired and having another volunteer call out the beta of the climb, where the next hand and foot holds were. I personally don’t know which was more difficult— climbing with my eyes closed and slowly feeling my way up the climb while trying to process my partner’s directions, or attempting to clearly communicate to someone else. I wasn’t good at it! It would certainly take a lot of practice becoming efficient and using words that are most meaningful. I used clock-face terms— “left hand hold at 11 o’clock”— but in the digital age we live in, not everyone is used to reading, or thinking about where the numbers are on a clock face, visually impaired or not. Our group learned together that it worked better to use the body as the reference point— “left hand hold straight above your head” or “right foot hold near your left knee.”
Turns out climbing is liberating for people with many different physical limitations and disabilities. Denny talked about some of them, including her own. The founding members of ParaCliffHangers are people with disabilities— Denny is one of them— and they believe that by sharing their disabilities and being active participants in their communities, they can change how people with disabilities are perceived. She summarized how some disabilities might manifest and what they might require for assistance when climbing: from stroke to missing a limb to visual impairment to spinal cord injury to paralysis to PTSD to brain injury to multiple sclerosis.
The main lesson Denny offered was in hospitality, etiquette, or “conduct,” she would say. A lot of things from the training session we might not remember, or, would take a lot more practice before they’d be burned into our brains— like setting up the 3 to 1 pulley for the MA System— but the message she wanted to make sure we would take home was to be comfortable not knowing, that there was no standard approach when working with paraclimbers, that every individual who comes to climb would be different, regardless of the limitation they were bringing in with them. We needed to learn to be comfortable with being vulnerable and allowing the paraclimbers to teach us— people with disabilities are experts on their own bodies and their own approach to climbing.
But my favorite thing she said all day was that sometimes paraclimbers take a long time to get to the top because for them it’s a battle. Everyone deserves to be given the time and space they need to struggle on climbs, to project, to reach for new goals. Isn’t the struggle why we all climb? Nobody, not even the strongest climber, climbs because it’s easy, and really, all of us bring our own limitations to the sport. Climbing is about struggling against those limitations, and this is no different for the paraclimber.
