My Injury Mini-Memoir: on resilience, vulnerability, and identity.

In March, I dislocated my shoulder.

In July, I fractured several spinal structures.

Now, I’m holistically the best climbing athlete I’ve been.

Here’s how.

I’ve been injured before - compression and stress fractures in vertebrae, a torn labrum in my hip, and a few broken fingers and toes. Significant but unsurprising injuries given the demands I’d imposed on, and risks I’d taken with, my body over a decade long climbing career. 

But never before had I engaged with an injury recovery process the way I engaged with these two. My shoulder dislocation yielded damage to my bony structures and connective tissues, creating a reality in which surgery was on the table as a way forward. In the month post-dislocation that it took to get imaging and surgical consults, I distanced myself from climbing. While I wasn’t yet sold on the concept of taking time off entirely, I climbed only with my non-injured arm, no more than once a week, and I didn’t resent doing so. I didn’t fight it, and I embraced the novelty of connecting to my athleticism in other ways. 

I spent numerous days in the mountains, conditioning myself on steep hiking terrain and joyously working my way through the Flatirons. For the first time after years of feeling stuck and numb in the competition climbing circuit, I reconnected to the part of myself that authentically loved climbing. I had more fun in the Flatirons, coaching, and exploring one-arm slab movements than I’d ever had on any competition route or podium. 

This was also the first time I engaged with an injury recovery process that actually respected myself, by putting the needs of my future self and athleticism over the wants and whims of my current self that was eager to just get back on the wall. 

I waited six weeks to climb in any real capacity, and when I did, I did so in an exploratory and shoulder-protective fashion, bailing off of any movements that elicited pain or felt unstable.  (One of the quirks of a joint dislocation is a lot of instability. It takes time to rebuild stability, and it took even more time to trust it.)

Two months post-dislocation, I had a session that was a vessel to a magical-feeling moment. Following minimal climbing and no formal training, I climbed 5.13 again.

I clipped the anchors, was lowered and accepted a fist bump from my belayer, and then practically ran to my notebook (a core piece of my mental toolkit). In my notebook, I wrote nothing about the grade of the climb and everything about how it felt. 

At the end of my reflections, I wrote:

“Also, 

I fucking love rock climbing and when I return to seeking performance, I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize that. 

Not again.”

Climbing was fun, finally, and I didn’t want to lose that. 

This became my mission statement for the months that followed- a summer spent throughly enjoying climbing moderate boulder problems in some of Colorado’s most beautiful alpine areas. I embraced opportunities across all disciplines of climbing, from solo alpine bouldering days to single-pitch sport climbing to multi-pitch trad. 

A constant throughout my experiences this summer was a practice I engaged with at the end of each outdoor day - getting back to my car, pulling out my notebook, and writing some variation of, “I love rock climbing. What a wonderful day,” no matter what grade I’d climbed.

No longer was I attaching my satisfaction with my climbing to the difficulty of it. 

And no longer was performance a prerequisite for enjoyment. 

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Towards the end of July, my shoulder felt stable, my body felt strong, and my mind was ready for an execution moment. 

I ventured into Lower Chaos in Rocky Mountain National Park, intending to finally get on Tommy’s Arete, an iconic V7 I’d been waiting to try and flash since I first saw it in 2023. 

I warmed up, pulled on, and flashed. 

I stood atop Tommy’s, overlooking emerald-colored Lake Haiyaha and an overwhelming sense of gratitude washed over me.

Not only had I healed a shoulder dislocation without surgery, I was experiencing climbing in a manner that I’d always hoped competition would facilitate but never did: with a joyful presence. My mind was exactly where my body was, free of anxiety about what could be or upset about what had been.

I made my way over to Running Scared, a lakeside double-digit, and engaged with an equally fulfilling and enjoyable process on it, linking it in two sections. I was about to pull on to give a send attempt when weather moved in. 

A boisterous lightning bolt struck not so distantly, and I knew rain was imminent. 

I packed up and started marching straight up hill, intending to shortcut the hike back. Ultimately, I ended up far off-trail. 

In pouring rain and thunder, carrying a triple stack of pads, I moved quickly to try and get myself to lower elevation - too quickly. 

I stepped on wet moss, felt myself slipping and the pads pulling me in a direction, and was unable to change the direction of the momentum. Landing tailbone first on rock, I felt a sharp pain move up my spine just seconds before I saw lightning hit the ground. 

Staying put and present with my pain wasn’t an option. I crafted a narrative, telling myself, “It’s just my tailbone, it’s just my tailbone, it’s just bruised.”

I counted down from three and got up and moving on one. 

I was two miles from the parking lot and made the trek back one step at a time over an almost two-hour duration. Back at my car, my body’s condition became apparent.

I made a call, determined I could drive myself to medical care, and did just that.  Four hours, a CT, and an MRI later, I was sent home in a brace and recommended bed-rest.

I was carried through the acute phase of healing by those closest to me - from the friend I called in the parking lot who helped me determine next steps to those who brought me groceries and activities, and walked around the therapy pool with me at a painfully slow pace. 

In the month prior to the fractures, I had let people into my climbing process and mental space to an extent I hadn’t before, and color me grateful to have done so. I was met where I was at, accepted, and supported through it all, and these moments of being seen at my worst elicited powerful learning.

I’ve come to understand that in order for someone to meet you where you’re at, you have to be okay with them seeing it - and sometimes, you have to show them. 

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This injury was a notable shift in paradigm from the shoulder dislocation as, temporarily, I was an athlete no longer. I was barely a functional human, cruxing out getting into my car or out of bed.

With fractured spinal structures, I wasn’t just taking time away from climbing. For the first month, my movement was restricted to walking only as much as was needed and moving around in a high-salinity therapy pool a few times a week. 

Many times, I sat with the discomfort of feeling like part of my humanity had been taken from me by the circumstance of not getting to move my body. 

As athletes, we have so much identity tied to our body’s function and movements. We connect our humanity to what our bodies do for us in our sports and chosen disciplines, and it can legitimately feel dehumanizing to have that altered.

Ultimately, injuries, illness, and time away from sport provide opportunities for broadening of identity. They provide time and space for reflection and connection with things that feel authentic to oneself outside of their sport. 

When I returned to climbing this fall, I did so with a much greater sense of self and a broader understanding of my motivations and curiosities within climbing. With that, I returned to climbing having the capacity to engage with it in a novel way: connecting to my experience without attaching to any potential outcomes.

I will always be a climber, through and through.

But there is a real power in learning how to shift identity from being a climber to being a person who climbs.

There’s power (and performance)  in having a sense of self that doesn’t start and end with climbing. 

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Almost nine weeks post-fractures, I returned to one of my favorite places - Lincoln Lake, an alpine bouldering area near Mount Blue Sky. I’d been back to Lincoln since the fractures, but in a limited capacity - mostly coaching and supporting friends.

With a crew to spot, carry pads, and support a safe return to harder climbing, I climbed Kyrptonite and Dreamsnatcher - classic Colorado V8 and V9 testpieces -  a few hours apart from one another. 

I was emotional topping out both boulders, because while they were grades away from the hardest boulders I’ve climbed, I knew I had earned every move.

In the eight weeks that preceded those sends, I had been disciplined, patient, and respectful to myself through an uncomfortable recovery process, and those efforts yielded hard climbing.

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Today, I am the strongest, most skilled, and most formidable climbing athlete I’ve been - 

and that’s not in spite of these injuries, but because of who I became through them. 

I also love climbing more than ever, I can’t wait to see what lies ahead, and yet I’m quite content with what is now.