Ep 4: Grace Crowley - Pro Speed Climbing as a Non-Binary Athlete

So I compete as a woman, though I don't identify as a woman. And I'm faster than like three people, so I won't come last. I have many, many bad habits that I'm trying to unlearn. Welcome to another episode of the That's Not Real Climbing podcast. I'm your host Jinni, and I'm excited to introduce my guest for today, Grace Crowley. Grace is a speed climber who made Australia's national team after only four years of starting climbing and started competing in World Cups at the age of 15.

Grace is open about being a non-binary athlete, so in this episode we talk about their ballsy approach to applying for the national team, their experience being non-binary in competitive sports, and we explore different formats of speed competition. I've got to apologize in advance for the audio quality. I thought I would be able to fix it, but this was the best I could do. Hopefully you can still learn from the actual content, and without further ado, enjoy this conversation with Grace.

But alright, how are you doing today? I'm doing alright, how are you? Alright. Are you doing any training today?

I am. I actually just had COVID, so today's gonna be my first day back. So we'll see how that goes. Okay, are you feeling okay? You sound alright. Yeah, I was sick for like three or four days, like pretty bad fever and stuff, but then like magically on the sixth day, all of a sudden felt completely fine. Weird. Okay. Yeah. Well that's good at least. Yeah, I think when I had COVID it was a full 10-day thing for me, so first time. I've had it before, I've had it once before, but not for a while.

Okay, good that you're already back up and running. I know some people said that the second time they got it, it was way worse, so I was like really scared, but hearing you say that it wasn't too bad is a little less concerning, so that's good to know. Yeah, I definitely felt worse, but it didn't last any longer. It was like three days were worse and then it was pretty much the same. Okay, yeah that's good. Yeah, glad you got better. Yeah, I got lucky.

Yeah, are you excited to get back to training? I am, yeah. I think I'll probably take it pretty slow today, but just test it out. Yeah, are your muscles feeling good? Yeah, they feel much fine. I probably won't go for very long, but should be fine. Hope it turns out well for you. Me too. Where are you calling in from? Are you still in the US? Yeah, I'm in Salt Lake. Do they have a full speed route there?

Yeah, there's two, I felt like they're both at commercial gyms, like the USA training centers here, they don't have speed wall there, but then the front has a speed wall and then momentum, Mill Creek has a speed wall as well. Then the momentum wall is closed off to the public, but world cup climbers get access to

it. So you are on the Australian team, but you grew up in the US, you also sound American. So yeah, how did that work out? Yeah, I grew up in Montana, my parents and I are from there. We moved to Australia in 2017, and that's when I started competing. I came up through the Australian competition scene and I made the Australian team, which is actually how I got my citizenship. I moved back to the US last year because the training for speed climbing is better here.

What's the training like in Australia? Do you not have access to a full wall or is it just busier? When I was there, there was one wall and since I've moved, they built another one. They're both in Melbourne, which is where I live. There was also no timer and there's no coaches. So I kind of moved here so I have access to a timer and a coach and train with people. It's gotten better since I've moved back in Australia, but still not quite as good.

So you're just here for, I guess, an unspecified amount of time? Yeah, definitely, at least through the Paris Olympics is the plan. We'll see where I'm at after that. I'll decide where I'm going to live. So then why did you guys move to Australia in the first place? My mom got a job there. She works at a university so we all moved down there. So are your parents still down there? Yeah, they kind of come back and visit.

My brother lives in Montana still, he didn't move with us, so they come back in the summer sometimes to visit. But my mom can get time off work to work remotely or things. So most of the time they're in Australia and occasionally they'll come up here and see my brother and I. Alright, makes sense. And so yeah, tell us about how you got your start climbing and competing.

Yeah, I started climbing when I was in Montana. I had a family friend take me to a local bouldering gym that had just opened. I started like only a few weeks after they opened and pretty much immediately hooked. I think I went once and then probably haven't gone less than twice a week since I started. I was immediately in and then they started a youth team and so I joined their youth team as soon as it started. I was on that for a year or so and then we moved to Melbourne.

The first thing that we found was a climbing team for me. So I joined a bouldering gym there with a youth team. And that's how I met a coach that started me in competition. So I trained with her. She asked me if I wanted to do some competitions, tried them out, hated the first one. She made me do another and I loved it. And then I did all of them from then on. What made you hate it the first time and love it the second time? Did you win the second time? No. Oh, okay.

The first one I ended up doing was youth nationals. And so it was a big competition. And I think I came second to last and I had no idea what I was doing. Like just kind of threw myself in there and did not enjoy it because I was overwhelmed and didn't know what was happening. And the second one was a state titles event, which are much smaller and usually only a few competitors per category. First was like 30 or 40 at nationals.

And so it's like much smaller and much more manageable, kind of figured out how to do it and enjoyed it much more. Were they the same like format of competition? Yeah. The youth competitions usually are run in like a boulder gym format where they give you six boulders in like two hours and you just go wild. How old were you when you first started climbing? I think I was 12. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was, I guess just like reading up a little bit.

I think your progression from starting climbing to competing was pretty fast. I guess so after like two years you started competing? Yeah. And then you joined the Australian team like 2019.

Yeah, that's pretty fast. Yeah. So I guess how did that happen? I definitely just kind of ended up getting lucky that Australia doesn't really have a speed team. It was like I started training speed at the end of 2018, I think. I sort of got into that because Oshiona McKenzie, who was the Olympian in Tokyo from Australia, she was training for the qualify and her mom had invited me to try speed climbing and join in on some of her training. And I really enjoyed it mostly because of them.

I think they like made it a lot of fun and it was really fun to train. And then I decided to apply for special consideration to be on the speed team that year 2019. They didn't have a national, so there was like no competition and I was just applied and they accepted my application and my first year of eligibility for World Cup. So I ended up just getting to do a few World Cups that year because there was nobody else that really was doing it.

Nice. So like special eligibility, I guess just because they don't have like an official process? Yeah, I think that year they had held nationals at the end of 2018. And so they had opened up like special consideration for more people to be on the team at the beginning of the year who didn't qualify through the original national selection event. And so I essentially just had to send an email and like make an argument of why I should be on the team. I guess I thought I was good enough.

Nice. Did you have to like send a video like proving your fastest time or something like that? I think I did, but it wasn't very fast. I think I remember part of my argument being was I had pulled the speed results from the last World Championships and I had like told them like this is my PR and this is what the bottom of the field was like and I'm faster than like three people so I won't come last. You should put me on the team. And they did. Well, that's ballsy. That's good. Yeah, it worked.

Yeah, nice. And now you're on there. Yeah. Do you remember what the time was? I don't know. I bet it was somewhere around 14 or 15 seconds. I think my first World Cup I ran like a 14 second time. So it wasn't fast, but I was there. But not last. Yeah. So you had about three to four years of climbing before you got on the team? Yeah. Okay. So did you start out as like a boulderer, a rope climber, leap climber? Definitely a boulder.

I started in the bouldering gym and then I pretty much only bouldered until I started speed climbing. I think I learned to lead climb about the same time I learned to speed climb. So I was like only bouldering for two or three years and then started competing in bouldering in those national and state events and then started doing all three kind of about the same time as I started speed climbing. So I was competing in the combined format for a while. But not at the World Cup level. Right.

Okay. How did the, I guess like boulder competitions, I don't know if you did lead competitions, but how did those compare to doing speed competitions? I don't think I really had much of a preference for speed or boulder for a long time. I really liked competing in both. I think it's a different kind of competition, but I enjoyed them both. I've never liked lead climbing as much. I like competing in lead, but I really don't like training lead climbing. Not much for the endurance athletes.

So it was not my favorite discipline, but I kind of always wanted to do bouldering World Cups as well as speed. And so I was working towards that for a few years. That was like the ultimate goal. And then 2021 I did, well, 2020 I made boulder, see there was no competition. And then I made it again in 21 and I went to World Championships and I did both disciplines there. It was my first one, first international event with both. And I think when I went there, I was really excited to do both.

And after when I was debriefing with my coaches, I realized that I had way more fun competing in the speed event than I did in the bouldering event. I don't really know why. I just, I think it was probably like the combination of the isolation and it's drawn out so long when you're a low rank climber in an international field. You're in isolation for hours and it's just a lot less fun. How does the isolation work there? I'm actually not super familiar with how it works for like qualifications.

Yeah. I'll always say like everybody goes into ISO and you get a running order the night before. And generally if you don't have a ranking or if you're low ranked, you're quite far down in the running order. And so the five minutes on, five minutes off, you end up being in there for three, four hours if you're down low. So you're pretty much just sitting around for three hours waiting in this room.

It's the warm up space, usually a big room in there for walls and no phones of course for isolation. So you're just kind of sitting there bored for a few hours and it's time to start your warm up. And what's the speed, I guess there's not isolation for speed. Yeah, there's no isolation. I really don't know that much about speed.

Speed has no isolation and so it's like generally we have the same warm up areas, the bouldering or the lead climbing, but they'll usually add more jugs and it's not closed off like bouldering and leads. So you can leave and come as you like. You can have your phone, everything, anything you want. Just more relaxed. That sounds nice.

And so based off of that, you decided to just go all in on the speed climbing? I continued to do bouldering in 2022. At that World Championships in 2021, I ended up qualifying for the world game, which was happening in 2022 in both disciplines because I was the only person that went to that World Championships from the Oceanic region. And so I got the slot and so I kept doing bouldering in 2022 to prepare for the World Games and compete there.

So I did I think three bouldering World Cups in the World Games and then I stopped bouldering after the World Games. So now it's all speed? Now it's all speed, yes. And I guess in terms of the mindset you go into when you were competing in both bouldering and speed, is there I guess like a mindset switch that you have to make in terms of like making mistakes or something like that? I don't think it was ever like a conscious switch I had to make because the preparation is so different.

Like on the day, my warm up is completely different for both disciplines. And so you just kind of ease yourself into different preparation for different disciplines. Kind of it's not a conscious thing. You just one day you're bouldering and you're doing what you do bouldering and then the next day you're speed climbing and you're doing what you're doing speed climbing. Okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense. After so much practice, your body just kind of understands what's happening.

So what in your mind makes for a good speed climber? I mean, obviously the speed is pretty powerful. A lot of fast switch muscles. I think the most important thing though is the technical aspect to it. Like it's so precise and so repetitive. And because it's repetitive, you have to be so precise. And so when you're training it, you have to be able to make those little changes and then make them stick so that the muscle memory takes over competition.

And so it's like the important thing is learning to do the movement right, even when you aren't thinking about it. So that makes sense. I think so, yeah. Have you ever sort of caught this like bad habit that you had to unlearn and then totally missed it? I have many, many bad habits that I'm trying to unlearn. One of them I've been working on lately is at the start, the tamoa skip, the thing that is skipping cold floor. I looked directly at the wall.

There's multiple photos of me midway through the move, just staring at a pool pool. And that kind of ruins your momentum because you're punching yourself forward and then you're going in and out of the wall. Whereas I should be looking up and that creates like your chest is straight, your back is straight and you get a straight line through the movement. So I'm trying to unlearn that. How do you go about unlearning something that is so ingrained in you?

I think mostly you just have to put a lot of conscious thought into doing the right thing. And you have to think about it over and over and over until you can do it without thinking about it. Makes sense. Any other ones that you've already overcome? I think there's always more that you can do. So like those bad habits that I'm unlearning. Like I used to look at a foot shift at the top, like look down and now I don't.

And so it's like you look down and then you look at the wall and then you look up and it's kind of you're always learning something new. Yeah. Are you supposed to be looking at where your feet are going? Because I'm like, I feel like, okay. Yeah. When I watch people, they're never, it's always just... Yeah. When you look at your foot, it causes like a pause because you're waiting for that foot to hit the hold that you're looking at before you move.

And really you want to be like moving and preparing to move before you even hit the hold so that you're exploding off it, like the instant that you touch it instead of waiting for it to hit and then pushing. So you just kind of have to trust that it's going to be there and move before you know that it's there because it's always there. It's never going to move.

So you do know that it will be there. Yeah. That sounds like something that requires a good bit of practice and training. So what does training look like for you? I can give you an idea of what I imagine it as, as someone who just has no idea what goes into speed training. I kind of just think of it as maybe you do some analysis of what other speed climbers do, see what kind of techniques they have down. And then you do sections in isolation or where you're trying to link the big powerful moves.

And then you just like run it a whole bunch of times. I mean, yeah, you pretty much got it down there. Sounds like you're ready to give theme climbers. I wish. Generally, generally what I do is I find someone that's like doing the band that I want to do and that's a similar height to me. I'll just pull like a recording of them in a final or something and you analyze their movements.

And then when you're like learning something new, you'll do it in the section and you'll kind of perfect it in the section and then you'll do it on the whole wall. And it feels really different on the section versus the whole wall because you've like different energy levels. Sometimes you're in a little bit different position and so you kind of have to learn both the section and then relearn it a little bit on the whole wall, especially at the top.

So you'll like sections and then you'll pull and then maybe you'll go back to section to kind of relearn it a little bit to a mix of them. What percentage of your training is split between I guess like on the wall training and then just like physical training? Kind of depends what time of year it is. Like in the middle of the season, it's mostly on the wall training and then in the off season it ends up being like a 50-50 split almost.

Like a lot of weight training, track, there's sprint stuff and climbing as well. I didn't know that was part of it. I don't know if I can do that actually. I do a lot of sprinting. I do hurdle drills sometimes. It's a lot of fun. You're not actually doing hurdles like they would in a race, but you're doing like the drills that they use. It creates like a lot of hopping, a lot of jumping, plyometric drills. Yeah I guess that makes sense.

Did you have any athletics experience with that kind of stuff before? No, not really. I pretty much have only been a climber, never been much for team sports or anything. So then yeah, you mentioned that during the competition season you're mostly doing on the wall training. I guess you still have a few competitions coming up, so are you doing on the wall training right now or especially since you just had COVID is there anything you need to build back up physically?

I'm not sure about building back up after having COVID. We'll find out later today, see how I feel. But I think right now my next competition is until the end of November and so I'm planning on doing like a big strength training block and essentially treating these next few months as like a mini-off season where I do a bunch of strength training and learning new technique and then I'll refine it maybe towards October and build the speed back to mostly on the

wall. Yeah, good luck with that. So personally I've had a really hard time finding gyms with speed walls. I've always wanted to try it. I mean I know I would be awful at it but I still want to try it. So yeah, exactly. I need to know like how awful I am so that's why I need to try it. But it's really hard to find I think one because like interest is not as high among climbers and it's also hard to find gyms that have a ceiling high enough for that.

I think a lot of gyms are just kind of in like old warehouses and they don't necessarily think they need like how tall is it? Yeah, 15 meters. Yeah, so they don't think they need that high of a ceiling for like a random warehouse. So, has it been hard for you to find gyms to train at and what do you recommend for people to train speed if they don't have access to a speed wall? If that's like even possible? Definitely possible but train without a speed wall it's much harder but doable.

I mean there's a lot of people that train like just to be really strong and really powerful and then they'll do like short trips to a speed wall they don't live near one and like be super strong and super powerful and just learn the technique in like a boot camp style way of you go really hard for like a few days and you learn all the technique and you get really strong and then you do it again whenever you can and you learn all the technique again

and you just kind of get faster by getting stronger. I guess you could study the movement as well. Definitely possible but it gets much harder. Yeah, has that worked for people? Like is there anyone on the World Cup circuit who does that? I'm not entirely sure if there's people that do it like consistently.

I have heard of athletes that will take like a month break off speed climbing so that they can focus on building their strength and so they're not doing any speed climbing and they're just lifting or strength training and then they come back and get faster because they got stronger but I don't know of anyone that does it consistently. I guess have you done that in the past? You mentioned that it was a bit hard to get speed access in Australia but yeah in those moments is that what you did?

I've pretty much always trained like at least once a week on the wall and so there was one wall when I was living there and so I would drive 20 minutes to do it once a week and not focus the rest of my training on bouldering but not really as efficient to do it without a wall. Okay, makes sense. I've also seen some places have not the full wall but they like split it and then rotate it or maybe like have it in different sections. How is that? Is that like pretty good?

I think it's super popular in the US especially to have the 10 meter wall and so that's like split halfway. A lot of places won't just have the first 10 meters and then ideally you would want like the next five meters down low as a section and that it works really well for training. You can train techniques really well like that and then you kind of don't get the same power endurance as you would on a full wall.

You have to focus a little bit more on training that intentionally in a different way but it does work really well to train like that. Yeah, that makes sense actually that yeah I could see the pros in having that.

Cool, and do you ever train as like a team in Australia or like train with other teammates? In Australia the national team is world self-funded. The coaches are all volunteers and so they only go to events that Sport Climbing Australia can fund them for so they don't like coach athletes, the day-to-day training, just events because they all have their own jobs. They usually have people pay them for coaching because they need to make a living.

Sport Climbing Australia doesn't have the funding to pay them so they all volunteer their time. Yeah, we're all pre-sprint out as well. The speed team is pretty small so we're less spread out because there's limited walls but the bouldering and lead teams kind of spread out throughout the whole country. A lot of people are overseas for most of the season as well so everybody trains on their own or with a few people that are in their city.

It's not very cohesive like some of the places like training centers. Do you know if that's something they're working towards or is it just not even in the cards right now? I have heard various rumors of people trying to build things but I think it's a ways out. That's always tough. Just based on what you have access to and what the federation is like, it makes a big

difference. Yeah, and during our pre-interview you had mentioned that you had also ran into a lot of difficulties with visa issues in the past. What happened there? Yeah, especially COVID times. Melbourne had a pretty strict lockdown for almost two years and the country itself was entirely locked off from the world and so our national borders were shut which means that nobody could go in or out.

So the beginning of 2021 when World Cup started happening again, we couldn't go at all because we weren't allowed out of the country. Then about midway through the year they changed the rules to allow people to apply for an exemption until we gave them. So to go to the World Championships in 2021 I had to apply for an exemption from the government to leave the country and I couldn't come back less than three months so I had to be out of the country for three months.

So I applied for visas in Australia because the way the Australian passport is generally you can't get a visa outside of the country. So I was going to Russia and I applied for two Russian visas while I was there and it was very complicated, complicated visa and I was not aware that you can only hold one Russian visa at a time so I applied for one and then I applied for the second one and they cancelled the first one but didn't tell me and then I left the country, tried to get into Russia.

They told me my visa was cancelled. I went back into, I think I went to Austria and then I went and tried to go back to Moscow for World Championships on the visa that hadn't been cancelled and was successful but I missed the World Championships because I had messed up that visa. Okay, that was a lot to follow.

Yeah, it was a whole mess and then of course it was like that was in like the period of one month and I still had two months before I could get back into Australia and I stayed in Europe for a while and then I went to Salt Lake because my European visa was running out and I was stuck in Salt Lake for like six weeks because I couldn't afford a flight. That was a whole thing. But okay, but you could go to the US because you still have your citizenship there. Yeah, that's why I went here.

I didn't need a visa. I didn't have to worry about leaving when my visa ran out like Europe. So you made it to the World Champs but not the Youth ones. Did you make it to any other World Cups that year then? No, I was supposed to go to Korea right after World Championships but I ended up cancelling that World Cup and so the only event that I could get out of the country for was the ones in Russia. Gosh. Yeah, that is quite a procedure. Yes, it was a lot of paperwork.

Yeah and that all happened within the span of one month? Yeah, I think it was like maximum six weeks. Well, I'm glad that that's not happening anymore.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. All right, so something else that you mentioned. So you are non-binary and you are an athlete. How does that sort of affect you being like a high level athlete? Yeah, I think it's an interesting experience. There's not a lot of professions that really revolve around gender in the same way as competitive sports. So I compete as a woman, though I don't identify as a woman.

So it's always a bit of an interesting experience internally to navigate that and trying to validate my own identity while still competing in the sports that I love and doing the things that I really want to do. I think it's, ISSC is really great about doing things around inclusivity. They're certainly trying. I contacted them last year, I think, maybe the beginning of the year, asked them if there was like a way I could put my pronouns into their system.

So if I make a final and I end up on a live stream, the commentators would know and they could make an effort to not misgender me. And they were really responsive to that and they changed things for me and put in like a section in our athlete profile so that everybody could put in my pronouns. So it's generally been a pretty positive experience. I think climbing is really great about inclusivity. Trying really hard, so it's alright. Yeah, okay, that's great to hear.

I hear a lot of, we get a lot of like, IFSC bashing on the internet, so it's nice to hear a positive experience there. They occasionally do things, right? Yeah. And this was a question I had as well as a question from Discord. Would you prefer a separate category or like where athletes can choose where they identify the most? And how does climbing compare to other sports in that regard? Or are there any official policies in place? I think right now, like a third category is just not realistic.

Like you just wouldn't get enough competitors to host the World Cups in a third category. Australia runs a third category. They call it inclusive in their state events, most of the states. And so they run a men's and a women's and an inclusive at state level and a lot of the social comps run that. Which is super cool, but you can't really get anywhere past that I think right now because there's just not enough competitors at that level that identify not a man and not a woman.

So third category, not really realistic, I think. But I think there is policies at IFSC about trans athletes and like choosing which category you want to compete in. And I think from what I know, I haven't fully read them. They're relatively relaxed compared to a bunch of other sports, like trans women being able to compete in the women's category and trans men in the men's category. So from what I know, not so bad compared to other sports that outright ban them.

So I'm very thankful that that's not the direction that they're going. Oh okay. Yeah, I didn't know they had a policy in place for that. I think we have it. Okay. Okay, yeah that's good to know. I guess we haven't, have we seen that happen yet or? I don't think so.

Not as far as I'm aware. Yeah, I guess we'll see if that happens anytime soon. So do you feel accepted within the climbing community and within like the elite competition level? Yeah, for sure. I think climbers generally are quite progressive people. Like everyone that I have kind of talked to about it, they've all been super supportive and the people here in Salt Lake and all my friends here and the competitors on the circuit have all made a really good effort to get my pronouns correct.

Like it doesn't happen all the time and there's people that don't at all. So it's like generally not always happening, but people are making a really conscious effort and I noticed it and I really appreciate it. Okay, that's good to hear. Is there anything that you think needs like further change to I guess help you feel more welcome and accepted or is that more of just like a personal battle within yourself? I think it's a lot of like a personal battle.

Just making sure that people know that that's how I identify and that I use they then pronouns and like telling people and correcting people, that's the personal side, but there's also like the societal side of like trans people existence more. It's not always a gender thing, like more societal existence of us, the exposure. I'm glad that you have had a positive experience. I think definitely not the case in like all sports.

So yeah, it's good to hear that we don't have this issue within the climbing community at

least. But yeah, switching gears to think about the future of World Cups, Olympics, all of that. And I guess also reflecting on the season so far, how have you thought about the season so far in terms of World Cups for this year? I have not had a very good season so far. I think that I've had maybe one competition that I was semi okay with my results from the others, I was like pretty disappointed with.

It's been a pretty full on season, like starting in the first World Cup in Seoul, it's pretty much been like almost back to back for everything through burn. And it's been a lot of high pressure year with people trying to qualify for the Olympics. So I think I've struggled with the pressure to actually perform the way that I can in training, perform that way in competition. So not satisfied this year, but working on it.

Is it just like, I guess like the nerves get to you and then you make like mistakes and you're slipping? Or is it, I don't know what else is it? Yeah, I think it's mostly been like a psychological nerve issue. I don't really feel like jittery and nervous in that traditional way before competition, but then I kind of get on the wall.

It's like I forgot to have a climb and so I make mistakes and I slip and nothing comes together in the way that it should, but not quite been happening the way that I wanted. Does it just like impact your times or have you also, what's it called, when you go before the buzzer goes? The full start. Yes, that. Yeah, I'm not okay. I thankfully never fall started in a competition and I'm going to try and keep it that way. I'm sure it will eventually happen, but hopefully not this year.

What is, so the next competition you're scheduled for is in November. Yeah. Are you feeling better for that one or still like pretty nervous? I think I will feel better. I haven't yet there, but I have a plan, I think, to hopefully help things. Kind of work through all of the physical training, kind of over prepare to be prepared to slip in a competition and then also work through the psychological side. I think I'll see a sports site and work through a mental plan as well. Okay, that's good.

So yeah, just like trying to figure out a way to, I guess, bounce back from having a season where you're a bit disappointed. Yeah, that's the plan. And also the Olympics are coming up soon. How are you preparing for that physically and mentally? Mostly preparing for the qualifications right now. So that competition is in November is the Oceanic Championships, which is my main Olympic selection event. So ideally aiming to qualify for the Olympics there.

And if not, I will hopefully go to the Olympic qualification series, which is next year. The Oceanic region is very small and so I kind of end up getting lucky on a lot of things. So if I don't qualify for the Oceanic Championships this year, I will get a spot at the OQS because they have a continental quota. So I'm the top ranked in the continent on the World Cup series and so I'll get that slot if I don't qualify because I'll get the continental quota.

Okay. So it's a lucky backup plan, but I didn't have the plan. Oh, okay. So then there's like not even anything to be nervous about, is there? I mean, it's significantly harder to qualify at the OQS than it will be at the Oceanic Championships because we're a super small continent. It's just Australia and New Zealand aren't the only one on the team from Australia. And so it's like my competition is a few team climbers.

They're getting pretty fast, but it's significantly easier than the other continents. Well, good luck for that. Hopefully you can make it in.

That'd be really cool. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. How do you think that the Olympics will impact the, I guess, the next World Cup season? I think that it kind of creates a little bit of chaos in the way that they schedule things. So like generally there's the first half of the year's bouldering and the second half of the year's lead and the speed is kind of spread throughout.

The Olympics kind of throws that in a loop because they're in the middle and they can't really run events at the same time as the Olympics because the IFFC needs all their staff at the Olympics. And then in addition to that, having the OQS at the beginning of the year, they also need a bunch of staff there organizing those three events. And so I think it'll mess with the calendar a little bit and create World Cups that are more spread out and weird timing on things.

They haven't released the calendar yet, so we don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that it will create a little bit of chaos in athletes' schedules. Yeah. Do you sort of have an idea of what kind of competitions you'll be signing up for with the Olympics coming up?

I guess depending on if I qualify at the Oceanic Championships this year, I'll probably do the first two or three speed lobe cups at the beginning of the year and then train for a few months for the Olympics and then probably take the second half of the year off, not compete as much. And so it'll be like a few events and a relatively big break to train the Olympics and then another big break.

And if I don't qualify there, I'll have probably a more intense schedule because I'll have to do the three OQS events. So that would be a pretty big walk of events at the beginning of the year. Probably less time for a break before the Olympics to train. And then the Olympics will probably pretty much be packed for the first six months of the year. Yeah, sounds like a packed schedule.

And I guess I would think that as a competitor, you would want maybe a couple of smaller competition events to ramp up for the Olympics just to get you used to that competition mindset again. Is that not the case? You would prefer to just have a bunch of training and then just go straight into it? I think that's what the World Cups at the beginning of the year will kind of be treated as. It's like your preparation event.

And then you'll kind of refine things in that training block before the Olympics and then compete. And so you kind of you do your off season and you train for a long time and you get there and then you compete and you're kind of testing out that training that you did. And then you're like evaluating how you did at those events, what went wrong and how you can improve. And then you take that smaller block of training and you improve all those things hopefully.

And then you compete at the Olympics and do well ideally. Yeah, hopefully. In a perfect world, yeah. Yeah. What are your goals for the future? General goals? General goals, qualifying for the Olympics we've talked about as a goal. I'm not at the point where I could make a final yet, but that is the long term goal is to progress to consistently making finals and then eventually podiums and generally better results. That's the goals that I have right now.

Like progressing to get fast enough to be able to make those finals. Do you have an estimate in mind of how long that would take? I think it's kind of hard to tell a lot of the time because speed climbing is progressing so fast. And so sure, I could be a six second climber next year, but maybe the final, like six, eight could not make the final and you have to be six, five that year.

You're kind of always like chasing this invisible timeline of you never know how fast everyone else is going to be. Yeah, that's the stressful part of competition.

Yeah. Okay. I think that is all the questions I had. I do still have a few Discord questions that we'll go into quickly. So the first one, how do they keep up with the development of the sport outside of that of contingent nations? Do they struggle to find training partners and coaches and how is speed well accessed in Australia? We went over a bit of that, but yeah, anything else you want to cover in terms of it still being a developing federation?

Yeah, I mean, Australia especially, like the Federation is completely unfunded, but it's almost a volunteer run. And so they do their best, but there's only so much you can do and the board all work at nine to five for their own job and do this on the weekend in their own personal time without any payment.

Same with the coaches and everything, so it's hard to grow the sport at the same rate as those federations that have funding from the government and sponsorships and things because we just don't have the money from the people and the time to do it. So they do their best, but there's only so much they can do. And then athletes training, because of that you're kind of on your own because you don't get any funding.

So I work in the off season usually and I'm saved as much as I can and my parents support me and so all the athletes are self-funded. If you can get sponsorship, that's how you fund yourself. Let's work. We're a little bit behind some of those other countries that fund their athletes. It's a little harder. Do you think government funding might be the best way forward? Yeah, I think a lot of the federations use government funding, especially with the Olympics.

The governments generally don't give out money to non-Olympic sports. So the Olympics, climbing the Olympics, really I think helps push the sport forward and get everyone a little bit more funding and a little bit more professionalization.

Okay, yeah, we'll have to hope for that. That would be good for everyone. Another question, does the concept of speed bouldering interest you at all? Yeah, I mean they used to run classic speed climbing comps. So classic speed climbing is like the randomized route. You just climb it as fast as you can. I think it would be super cool to bring that type of speed climbing back. I love the standardized route, but I think a greater audience would also like to see the classic speed climbing come back.

I think it's got a different appeal to people. More like real climbing, as some people might say. Well, some people wouldn't even say like any sort of competition climbing is real climbing. Yeah, how is like the classic speed climbing, how tall are the walls for that? Well, they didn't have like a standardized anything, so they would like essentially chuck a route up and start a climber. You get what you get, it becomes a competition, I guess, a bit like a bouldering wall or a lead wall.

Yeah, that would be interesting to see. I guess I do wonder if it would have good general appeal, because I feel like non-climbers prefer to watch speed climbing. So I don't know if they would be interested in watching speed bouldering, actually. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's some competition, like at Edith's Rockstars, that has that kind of speed bouldering component, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I think it's the final round.

But there's two identical boulders usually, and then there's the button at the top, at the top out. So I think that's kind of like speed bouldering, and there's a competition in Arco every year, I think. I don't remember what it's called, but it's on the big Arco competition wall in Italy, and it's essentially like a timed speed climbing.

So they've like hard routes, and you just see people climbing as fast as they can, trying to clip draw those, generally doing weird things, because they're trying to go so fast on a really hard route. So it's an interesting style to watch. Oh, interesting. I don't think I've seen that one. I saw videos of one that happens over the water. Yeah, that's a popular style for the deep water, so like the race. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's a super fun form of climbing, seems interesting, different.

Yeah, but I guess there's no room for that in your current training. Not right now, maybe someday. Yeah, unfortunate. Maybe, yeah, hopefully one day, maybe after the Olympics are done, you can try that. Yeah, yeah, I'll spend six months doing weird speed bouldering competitions.

Yeah, that was really fun. Another question sort of along the similar lines of that, would you ever try to speed climb a sport climb outdoors, for example, like Dan Osmond, but maybe not free soloing? Oh, I don't really have any experience outdoor climbing. Oh, still? Yeah, I'm not a real climber. Okay. I have like zero outdoor climbing experience, so I think that I would not jump straight into speed climbing outdoors. I think I might start with some real climbing and just do it a little slower.

That makes sense. If you actually haven't done anything outside? I've been bouldering like twice, but I didn't really find anything, I didn't really know what I was doing. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. Where did you boulder outside twice? I've been to the Grand Pians. I went to the Grand Pians bouldering festival in 2018, and I had no idea what I was doing. I showed up and I climbed a rock, so I didn't really know what rock it was. Okay. Yeah. Where is that? The Grand Pians.

It's about four hours outside of Melbourne, the national park in Australia. Is there just not much outside in Australia, or you're just too focused on competition? I think I've mostly just been too focused on competition. That's what I live in felt like right now, and there's top quality boulders, 20 minutes up the canyon, but world class, and I just haven't gone. No, I totally get that. I haven't gone either, and I live in Vegas.

Yeah. Sometimes you just want to go to your nice air-conditioned gym.

For real, yes. Okay. Last one, any opinions on the future development of speed climbing as a sport? Any different formats that you're interested in? I read recently that they're actually doing new formats for the next world game. The only events happening are speed events, and they have a leeway event, and they have the classic pairing, and I think they have a four-lane race.

Whoa. Yeah. So there's new events happening, but I don't know that they will be as common to come by as the classic two-lane race that happens in World Cup. Yeah. Any one of those that you are really interested in trying out?

I feel like the reways are really interesting styles because the timing system is a little bit different in the way that only the first person has the sound, and then they go and hit the timer at the top and the light down the bottom changer, and that tells the person that they can then go instead of having more excessive sounds happening. Yeah, that would be... Yeah, it would be interesting to try. Yeah. It's probably not something that's going to become an Olympic sport, but...

Probably not, but it's a cool, fun format. Yeah, that would be interesting to see. I think I've also heard of people saying that they would change the speed route one day to just something totally different. Is that actually something that's in the talks or just something people like? Yeah, I have heard that they're discussing it. I don't think they're at the point of discussing what they'll change it to. They're at the point of discussing, like, should we change it?

We will change it, and what do we change it to? I think the Athlete's Commission is the one that is in discussions about that. The IFSC level, I'll probably talk about it for a few years, I reckon. But I'll decide what to do. Yeah. Is the goal to just change it every few years so it doesn't get, I don't know, stale? Yeah, I think the one I've heard is they would change it and they'd kind of leave it for a while and everyone would train it. At some point they would change it again.

So it's just mixing it up so that you don't end up hitting the fastest possible time, like humanly possible time. I mean, nothing wrong with that. They haven't changed the kind of track that people run on. Yeah. I don't know. How would you think about it? Is that something you would be excited for or do you want to just keep working on this same one? I don't know. I really like the current route and I feel like I have a long way to go before I hit that perfection.

So I think I'd be a little sad to see it go before I really have a chance to reach my potential, I think. But also having a new route, I think, would really clean slate for everyone and you'd end up seeing different people at the top because of the way that the movement changes, I think. But on the other side, I think that if creating a new route puts the smaller countries at a bit of a disadvantage, it took us, Australia, so long to get us people to start with.

And then to change it, if they changed the angle or the length of it, it would go everyone else who can't afford to just build a new wall. Yeah, that's true. So it's a tricky decision for them. Yeah, that makes sense. It might also kind of make, I guess, a difference with how old you are when they change the route, maybe. So that would also be interesting to see how that plays into it.

Yeah, imagine if they change the route, a lot of the athletes that are pretty far into their career would end up retiring instead of starting from scratch. Yeah, that would be interesting. Do you have an idea of maybe an age where you feel like you'd be done? I don't know. I think that it's... Like there's a small one that's, I think, 36 and just came back from a torn bicep injury at the top of the field. So like, really, you can be 15 or you can be 36. You never know.

Depends on the person, I guess. Yeah, that is a crazy story. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, awesome. I think that is all the questions I had. Thank you so much for joining me today. Of course. Yeah, is there anything that you want to shout out or let people know where they can find you? You can find me on Instagram. My Instagram is at Grace Crowley. I'm sure you'll tag it. Yeah, it'll be tag. That's the easiest place to find me. I guess the only thing is also, like, the letters are kind of switched.

So that really confused me at first. So yeah, it's my last name, but the last two letters are switched. Yeah, okay. Awesome. Yeah, I'll leave that in the links everywhere. But yeah, thank you again. It was amazing to talk to you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for making it to the end of the podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, I would love to hear your discussion and thoughts in the comments below. And don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed.

If you're listening through a podcasting platform, I'd appreciate if you rate it five stars and you can continue the discussion through my competition climbing Discord linked in all the descriptions through all the platforms. Thanks again for listening.