Pushing the limits of the climb
St. Catharines’ Rebecca Lewis is one of only two women who compete in international climbing competition for Canada
Falling doesn’t scare her anymore. She has made peace with the demons of unintended free fall and like all rock climbers, has a good working relationship with gravity.
There is an attitude among climbers that if you don’t fall sometimes, you’re not challenging yourself enough. Not pushing yourself to the edge of your limit. Not advancing as a climber.
Indeed, climber Rebecca Lewis has never been content with resting on a goal accomplished for too long. She is happiest on the tomorrow side of a challenge.
The nicest looking falls, the ones that are textbook and controlled, remind Lewis of an agile cat in mid plunge. Upright, elegant and instinctively ready to land.
A good fall off a rock feels much like the moments after arriving at the precipice of a mountainous roller coaster. That moment when you hesitate at the top for a fleeting second, teetering on the brink of anticipation, in the very front car looking down across the expanse of life under you.
“And then you go,” she says.
“It’s a little scary,” she says. “But you’re screaming and laughing at the same time.”
The experience of ascending a rock face can be pure and in-themoment when there is a complete trust in the safety gear, a confidence in personal ability and an unwavering faith in the person below tasked with stopping you in the event of a fall.
The mind is clear. The climber is only thinking about the next move. The next hold. Nothing else matters.
Lewis, 37, has been to this place many times in her 17-year rapport with vertical surfaces.
And it’s exhilarating.
“It can be just you and the rock and climbing and problem solving and pushing your body through exhaustion until you summit,” she said.
In early 2018 Lewis and her husband, climber Nathan Kutcher, will once again test their limits in several North American and world competitions in a sport called dry tooling. Simply put, it has similar mechanics to rock climbing but instead climbers scale a mix of rocks and ice, in cold weather and using ice tools instead of hands, fingers and rock shoes.
The St. Catharines couple will travel to places such as Colorado and Michigan, China, Korea and Russia to compete. Lewis is one of just two women who compete for Canada internationally.
An electrical engineer by trade, she enjoys the analytical problem-solving of climbing. In her words: “Yoga meets a math problem.
“People think this is an adrenaline sport but it’s very slow,” she says.
“You get to a point on the rock and you think, “How do I do this?
“You do it long enough, it becomes natural.”
There is physical strength in a rock climber’s finger tips that pinch grip the smallest flat edge jutting out of a rock face or grasp a pocket hold, a hole big enough to fit the entire hand or so small there is room for just one finger.
“You’re always trying to challenge yourself,” she says.
“You have to keep going even though you’re tired and exhausted.”
There are times when lactic acid builds up in her forearms, and her hands feel clumsy and can no longer remain closed on a rock. And she lets go. New climbers practice falling so they get it right when it counts. So they don’t panic in free fall.
She enjoys talking to women climbers, especially ones new to the sport. She speaks openly about fear and overcoming self-doubt. “There’s always going to be some fear and uncertainty,” she says.
“It’s OK to be afraid. It’s easier to admit to yourself what you’re afraid of and figure out what to do to stop it, than to hold it back.
“It’s better to admit and embrace it than ignore it.”
And sometimes, she will share the story of the fall – and the fear – that nearly changed everything in her own life.
She was 25 years old on a summer day in July 2006 when she was drawn to the cliffs of Mount Nemo, a section of the Niagara Escarpment in rural Burlington. It’s a place where turkey vultures soar with outstretched wings on thermals and hikers are treated to panoramic views of the countryside.
She was working as a supervisor at General Motors and had recently finished a week of night shifts. Lewis was lead climbing, a style of rock climbing that involves the belayer following her from below, feeding and taking up slack in the rope as she moved. Every so often, she would clip her safety line into an anchor she wedged into a small crack.
In lead climbing, there is no top rope attached to the summit above her. So, in the event of a fall, she would drop twice as far as the length of rope from her position to the last point of anchor.
On this day, she was on a short, easy section of the wall where rocks formed a natural, overhanging staircase and presented a relative low risk to a climber as experienced as Lewis.
She clipped into an anchor and continued up.
Time passed and she came to a point where she would have usually secured another anchor but there was no convenient place to put one. She decided to continue anyway,
“There is always danger but I assessed my capability and decided that I would not fall,” she says.
“The problem was, I didn’t assess for the exhaustion from the night shifts.”
Lewis does not remember her last move.
She fell long, some 30 feet. On the way down, she grazed a tree growing out of the side of the cliff, which pitched her sideways. Then almost at the point where the safety rope would have stopped her, she hit a rock ledge and was knocked unconscious.
Her belayer friend lowered her to the ground and called 911. Emergency crews pulled Lewis up to the top of the escarpment in a rescue basket and she was airlifted to a trauma hospital in Hamilton. Her injuries included two collapsed lungs, a broken pelvis and femur, and a head injury. She was wearing a helmet.
And yet, it wasn’t the physical injuries that took the longest to heal. Instead, she was held back by the load of something she’d never before had carry on a climb.
The weight of fear.
“Once you get hurt, you don’t want to get hurt again,” she says.
She grappled with understanding how such a terrible accident could have happened on such an easy climb. And the place her mind landed every time with a self-doubting thud hurt more than the fall itself. She blamed herself.
“I slipped and fell in a place I shouldn’t have fallen,” she says.
She had lost a climber’s best friend: trust in herself.
Not only that, she also worried about the possibility that it could happen again, even the sensation of falling.
Her fall pushed theoretical risk into the realm of a raw, exposed vulnerability.
“Yes, you realize that climbing is a gravity sport. And that you can mitigate the danger, but there’s always danger.
“It was the difference between logically knowing that and really knowing that.”
Eventually, she realized there was no certain explanation for her fall, but it was likely a result of fatigue from a week of night work. “A momentary lapse of brain,” she concluded.
She devoured books about the fear of climbing and started to climb again on a setup in her basement with the reassurance of mattresses on the floor. She agreed to climb outdoors with a friend and practised falling on purpose, a greater distance each time.
She trusted the rope. Trusted the equipment. Trusted the belayer. And yet, whenever she climbed she stopped short of pushing herself. When her muscles tired, she’d sit on the rope to give herself a break, instead of testing her limits.
“I was climbing below my maximum ability.” And that was not acceptable.
So she listened to some of her own advice and embraced the fear. She learned to understand the lifeblood that kept it alive.
“I had to sit back and think logically, is it a valid fear? And if not, how do I work through the fear?
“People always ask me, why did you keep climbing?”
Her answer is simple: “What else would I do? Why would I stop climbing?
“I made a decision of what I wanted to do and I worked through a lot of the demons.”
A year before her accident she had tried ice climbing, a sport that offered her a new challenge. Not to be defeated, she returned to that too and in the process discovered her passion for dry tooling.
It has similar safety mechanisms to rock climbing but is different enough to satisfy her appetite for new adventures.
She wears special, rigid-soled boots fitted with large crampons and one big toe spike. When she kicks into a rock face, she can steady her foothold on a ledge otherwise too small and precarious for a rock climber. She carries two ice tools – a device shaped somewhat like a farmer’s scythe but much smaller and with a curved shaft, an ergonomic hand grip on one end and a blade on the other. The tip of the pick can also hang off a smaller hold than a rock climber’s fingers could manage.
In competition, she climbs towering columns of plywood and navigates around man-made obstacles and outcroppings.
The fear she carries these days is different, rooted not in her accident but in a pressure she puts on herself to climb bigger, more challenging routes.
“For me, maybe my biggest fear is failure,” she muses.
“Failure is the trip is over and I have to go home and I haven’t finished climbing X,Y and Z.”
And that’s not a bad fear to have, one that motivates and propels her forward to the brink of her own limits.
“It’s not about winning. It’s about pushing yourself as hard as you’re able to,” she says.
“I don’t do it for other people, I do it for myself.” Cclock@postmedia.ca