Parenting, paraclimbing and PTSD
Champion rock climber Rachel Ma¯ia juggles single parenting three children, household finances and training on a budget. She’s also recovering from the amputation of her leg. Words: Andrea Vance. Photos: Iain McGregor.
Rachel Ma¯ ia is tired of strangers asking how she lost her leg. ‘‘I could be asked ‘what happened to your leg?’ 15 times a day . . .
‘‘I don’t want to live every day in the past. I don’t want to spend that much of my life talking about something that was a bit traumatic and has been really painful and really tough. I want to keep looking ahead.
‘‘It’s curiosity. They are not taking the time to get to know me as a person and I’m a lot more than just an extra prosthetic leg.’’
She certainly is. Ma¯ ia is a single mother of three children, New Zealand’s first international paraclimber, world-class athlete, sportswear ambassador, and motivational speaker.
Ma¯ ia, 37, juggles a gruelling training regime with intense pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the day-to-day challenges of caring for a teenager with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism.
All of this makes her something of a superhero. And she does it on a shoestring budget.
‘‘Yeah, it’s a bit crazy. I get asked often where the drive comes from. And it comes from so many different places it can be hard to articulate.
‘‘But certainly, one of them is that I want to walk away at the end of this career and know that I left my best out there.
‘‘I’d love for my best to be a gold medal on a world championship podium. That is the dream and the significance would be, we haven’t had a paraclimber achieve podium on the global scene yet.’’
Ma¯ ia climbs without her left leg, often taking all of her weight on her arms and fingers. Occasionally, she uses a prosthetic specially designed for rock climbing by Evolv Sports.
She ascends on a ‘‘top rope’’ while tracking a route set on walls up to 15 metres high.
It requires skill, strength and endurance as she works her way up an overhanging face.
‘‘I love the problem-solving. It’s between me and the wall, I can turn up and . . . maybe emotionally, mentally everything feels like it’s a bit of a mess in life, but when I arrive at the wall, there’s me, there’s the problem.
‘‘Walking across the ground, around the house is really hard for me, but when I’m tied in with a rope, I feel free and I feel strong and I don’t feel held back as much as I do with really simple everyday tasks.
‘‘So that’s another reason to kind of keep running back to it
. . . and obviously I might have a little bit of a taste for adrenaline.’’
Ma¯ ia has lived with unimaginable pain since the age of 16 when a climbing accident shattered her left ankle.
Multiple operations followed, over two decades, including experimental surgery which put her foot in a traction frame to stretch the ankle joint, so cartilage could regrow.
It worked – she was able to weight-bear on a crutch. And as she recovered, Ma¯ ia learned Climbing NZ was going to include paraclimbing in its national championships for the first time: after 18 years it motivated her back to the wall.
She won bronze and the following year took fourth place at the World Paraclimbing Championships in Austria, making her New Zealand’s first international paraclimber.
But the procedure wasn’t a permanent solution. And in late 2018, Ma¯ ia made the radical decision to have her leg amputated. ‘‘To be fair, I feel like I’ve gained one,’’ she says. ‘‘The leg’s actually sitting in my wardrobe cremated in a tub. There’s some fun stories around it.’’
Within a couple of weeks, she was back in the gym, training for the Nationals. Five months later she travelled to France for the world championships, finishing fourth.
‘‘The fear of falling and getting hurt generally is just louder than all the pain I still have . . . in a way it acts as pain relief. I’m training to drown out that nerve pain.’’
Training involves frequent sessions with coach Eddie Tofa at the Kaierau Rugby Club in Whanganui. She boxes and then completes a gruelling workout focusing on weights, strength and balance. ‘‘She’s one tough cookie,’’ Tofa says.
Each session leaves Ma¯ ia drained. ‘‘I need to elevate the leg and get the swelling down, so I can still wear a prosthetic. So, for every training session I do, there’s at least half an hour lying on my back on the floor with my legs sticking up on the couch.’’
To climb, Ma¯ ia must make a three-hour round trip to the
Vertigo Adventure Centre in Ohakune, which allows her to use its indoor wall for free.
‘‘I’m probably doing that [drive] maybe once or twice a week at the moment, and to be honest, that’s not enough wall time. It’s really hard trying to create a training programme for a sport that I don’t have access to in my town.’’
Each trip costs her about $40 in fuel. ‘‘Sometimes, I worry that if my car dies, my climbing career is finished.’’
She must also fit these sessions around the school run and her children’s afternoon sports. ‘‘Obviously, there’s three kids to get to three different schools first, and then train and then drive home and pick all the kids up by 3pm. Then we’re straight into all the after-school mayhem.’’
Quillan is her youngest, aged 9, and Max, 12, is athletic, with lots of training sessions.
Charlotte is 14. ‘‘I like to call her super-powered. Doctors have a few labels for that like autism, intellectual disability, ADHD, but I like to stick with magical.
‘‘She has taught our family to see the world through colours I reckon most parents don’t even know exist.’’
Ryder, a three-year-old service dog, arrived in their lives to help Charlotte earlier this year. The intense training required for assistance animals meant Ryder cost around $20,000
and Ma¯ ia then had to find a further $15,000.
‘‘It terrifies me because I don’t have that. But I can see the life that he could give my daughter. If she could have some little things like the independence to walk to a bus and take it into town as an adult, then long term, this is something you cannot put a value on.
‘‘And if it came to it, and I had to choose competing or Ryder, I’d pick Ryder because I think that he’s gonna give her that freedom.’’
Sadly, the pair weren’t the perfect match and Ryder was returned to Assistance Dogs NZ. The family are on the waiting list for another dog.
One relief will be a climbing wall in her garage. Local businesses helped raise around $5000 for the equipment and she paid about $1000 in labour costs. ‘‘It will give me more training time on the wall, more strength and conditioning.’’
She relies on Give-a-Little fundraising campaigns and social media to help pay for travel and other costs of competing. Once the children are in bed, she must put in the hours to raise her social media presence, updating her profiles.
‘‘Everything that I do either comes out of my household budget or has been gifted . . . I’m incredibly blessed to have a really beautiful social media community around me and honestly, I wouldn’t be the athlete that I am, if not for the kindness of complete strangers.
‘‘Community organisations and Whanganui supporters have been really helpful as well. At the same time, I feel quite bummed that I’m always asking for money . . . It can affect your desire to keep pushing for the goal because you feel like you’ve exhausted all the kindness in the world.’’
Climbing will make its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, but is not yet an Olympic sport for para athletes.
That means Ma¯ ia doesn’t qualify for financial support from Paralympics New Zealand. ‘‘I’m too old for a Halberg Scholarship and I’m not famous enough for a big brand to want to throw money at me.
‘‘So it’s just a scramble for every single competition, even the New Zealand ones. You’re just hustling all the time.’’
Before Covid, this year’s competition calendar included the US Nationals in March and World Cups in Austria and France. Ma¯ ia’s goal was a podium finish on a world championship stage next year.
But her funds wouldn’t have stretched to all three. ‘‘So I’m going to miss one of the World Cups. And that’s disappointing because it’s all training for that end game, and that end goal, which is a podium on a World Championship stage next year.’’
Unpredictable nerve pain and disrupted sleep means Ma¯ ia is at present unable to work and is receiving income support.
‘‘I have to rest a lot on and off through the day . . . I don’t sleep at night and my concentration is affected through the day. I carry a notebook around to help with memory.’’
She also has to make frequent trips to Hamilton’s Limb Centre.
The pain is expected to settle over the next year. And Ma¯ ia is trying to generate extra income through public speaking events.
She is an ambassador for outdoor clothing brand Macpac, which provides equipment but it is not a paid partnership. Last year she won one of its Fund for Good grants.
Climbing New Zealand is the national sporting organisation, with around 500 members, and 150 competing at national level. It’s a registered charity, run entirely by volunteers.
David Sanders, its president, says: ‘‘We are not at the stage yet, in the development of the sport in New Zealand, of being able to provide financial support for any of our athletes, including para.
‘‘As the sport grows and we attract more participants, as expected with Olympic exposure, we anticipate a parallel rise in interest from financial partners and sponsors.’’
Paralympics NZ chief executive Fiona Allan says: ‘‘With para climbing not currently being on the Paralympic programme, it doesn’t fall under the current investment model towards supporting athletes on the pathway to the Paralympic Games.’’
Allan encourages athletes to explore options such as grants through community organisations and gaming trusts to cover travel costs.
‘‘There is an opportunity, I believe, for an athlete to look at opportunities to increase their profile, whether it’s website presence [or] through the media.
‘‘With that, there’s an opportunity of increasing their commercial activity value for a potential partner through increased viewership of them as an individual.
‘‘For the likes of Rachel, and a lot of our para athletes, they are inspirational role models. Often they are training, they’ve got families, and it’s very difficult, juggling competition, life and wellbeing.’’
Ma¯ ia must balance her training with physical recovery, pain management and taking care of her mental health. She often struggles with insomnia.
‘‘I have PTSD and I find my climbing helps manage that.
‘‘I find the climbing very meditative, it blacks out a lot of the other stresses in life and lots of other triggers. My sport is my way of pushing through that.’’
She has learned to allow herself to rest. And she is loath to be portrayed as an indefatigable champion. ‘‘It used to really frustrate me and I felt like my body had let me down, and that my mental health let me down.
‘‘Now I’ve flipped it around. I bet you there’s lots of mums that wish they could binge on Netflix for an entire day. And there’s lots of other productive things you can do while you’re sitting.’’
Ma¯ ia says achieving that balance is something every athlete must strive for. ‘‘The hardest part is working out the balance between working at your limit and working over your limit.
‘‘But when I add in three children . . . and then the financial pressure, it can really affect not just your training, but your performance and your selfbelief that you’re ever going to get to your goal. And that can shake you a little bit.
‘‘So every week I’m working at my limit and sometimes probably a little bit over it.
‘‘That’s quite a juggle but I wouldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t
. . . I don’t want to walk away from it and think I could have done more, what if?’’