Climber finds foothold on world cup circuit
Jason Holowach is proving you don’t need to be surrounded by mountains to become an elite rock climber.
The 30-year-old Prairie boy is making his mark in his first full year on the World Cup Bouldering Competition circuit. He currently sits 21st after the first four competitions and will be heading shortly to compete in the world championship bouldering competition being held Aug. 14-15 in Munich, Germany.
“It has been an amazing year,” said Holowach as a gaggle of three- to-sevenyearwas scampering up and down rock climbing walls at his Grip It Climbing facility as part of a summer camp.
“The last couple of years I have been doing some World Cup (events), but never have done the whole circuit until this year.”
Bouldering is a wall climbing competition where competitors, using no ropes, compete in rounds featuring different sets of boulder problems. Each competitor has a fixed amount of time to attempt each problem. At the end of each round, competitors are ranked by the number of completed problems, with ties settled by the total number of attempts taken to solve the problems.
“They tend to be steep and overhanging because they need to fatigue these guys that are trained so well,” Holowach said. “So you have to figure out the path of least resistance or maybe the most efficient.”
In his first event of the year in Toronto, Holowach made the semifinals (top 20) and placed 20th overall out of 73 competitors. In his next competition in Vail, Colorado, in June, he had his best result ever, reaching the finals and placing seventh.
He is only the second Canadian ever (behind Sean McColl) to have made it to the finals at a World Cup bouldering competition.
In June, Holowach competed in two events held in China. He didn’t get the results he was looking for, but the experience was invaluable, he said.
“I did really bad for me,” he said.
“I didn’t have that little bit of power that I needed. ... The climate was such a drastic change. I think the heat was something I needed to get accustomed to,” he said.
Holowach has been climbing for the past 18 years. When he was young his mom and dad would find cliffs up around the family cabin near La Ronge and fix a rope to the top for him to climb.
He competed at international events as a youth before an injury made him scale back those activities.
“I ended up getting injured and took five or six years off of competition,” he said.
Over the past three years, Holowach has got his competitive juices back and began competing in one or two World Cup bouldering competitions each year.
“I felt really good all season and I knew there were just five World Cup (events) this year so it was more cost effective,” he said of why he decided to compete on a fulltime basis.
Holowach is hoping for a solid finish to the year in Munich, though he is still nursing a calf injury from a previous event.
He said you need a combination of core strength, power, flexibility as well as technical and mental skills to succeed at these events.
And owning your own facility is definitely an advantage.
“I am stuck in the gym all of the time,” he laughed.
“I am in the environment that the competitions are in.”