Imagine hanging upside down, 15 feet above the ground, while your sweaty hands slowly lose their grip and no rope or harness to catch you if you fall.
For Dorothy Potts, junior, such nerve wracking scenarios are not nightmares; they are her childhood dream. After all, Potts competitively rock climbs for a team in Crystal Lake.
“When I was little, I would climb everything. I grew up in this little neighborhood and everybody had basketball hoops everywhere and my neighbors would call my mom and be like ‘oh my gosh! Dorothy’s sitting in the basketball hoop’ and my mom would be like, ‘it’s okay, she knows how to get down’ because I would always just climb on everything,” Potts said.
Potts’ knack for climbing led her to join a team at Lifetime Fitness in Vernon Hills. This is where she first learned to rock climb.
“My first year when I was climbing my coaches brought me to a competition but didn’t really tell me what it was about. I actually got second place, which was crazy,” Potts said. “When we got there, I was baffled because this is like a huge community of people that nobody knows about. It wasn’t what I was expecting but I thought, ‘yeah, this is awesome!’”
After earning second place in her first competition, Potts continued to work hard at rock climbing until she learned everything her first team had to offer her and she had to move on.
“It sounds very self-centered, but [the Lifetime team] actually kicked me out because they had nothing else to teach me. Then I had my own personal coach for awhile, and then I was solo for awhile, and then I found a team at North Wall in Crystal Lake last winter, and I’ve been with them [ever since],” Potts said.
Potts said she usually competes in four or five competitions a year, and last year she made it to Regionals and Divisionals, which are the two competitions before Nationals. Potts participates in a type of rock climbing called Bouldering, which has mats under the wall for cushioning if you fall but no rope or harness. This year, due to lack of time, Potts is only competing in one local competition.
“For a [local] Bouldering competition, each person has a scorecard, and then you have three hours to climb. For each route you do, you have to have two other people watch you climb, and then after you get to the top without falling, they have to write their signature on [the scorecard]. It’s kind of on the honors system,” Miranda Quanstrum, Potts’ coach, said. “If you have any falls, you have to mark on the scorecard that you fell, and that deducts ten points for every time you fall, and then at the end of the competition the scorers take your five highest scores. Whoever has the most points wins. You can try any of the routes between the easiest and the hardest, and each one is a different amount of points. There are usually around 50-60 routes.”
Potts says that contrary to the more laid-back local competitions, the bigger competitions can be stressful.
“For bigger [competitions], like Regionals, it’s super intense. You have to sit in a chair with your back facing the route, looking at the ground. Then there’s this electronic voice and its like, ‘you have five minutes. Turn around now,’ and you have five minutes exactly to look at the route and try to get as far as you can,” Potts said. “When you’re sitting in the chair and the person behind you is climbing the route you’re about to climb and it’s super hard and they’re falling, then you can watch the audiences’ expressions and it psyches you out. It’s very stressful, but it’s also an extremely fun type of competition.”
In these competitions, Potts said, speed does not play as important a role in judging as most people think.
“A lot of people think racing to the top is the competition, but it’s really not. [Rock climbing] is like a collaboration or a series of artificial holes. There are really difficult series and you have to try to move your body and try to use your strength to get from the first hole to the last hole without touching the ground,” Potts said. “Sometimes it’s really difficult because you have to go upside down or in awkward positions; it’s really tough and more difficult than people perceive it as.”
Quanstrum agrees that there is more to climbing than most people know.
“[Rock climbing] is a challenge and it’s very mental. It’s mental in the fact that sometimes it can be a little scary, and then also you’re trying to figure out a puzzle, how to get to the top. Like what move can I do now in order to make the next move. It’s very thought provoking in that way,” Quanstrum said.
Adding to the challenge is the lack of a rope or harness in the Bouldering equipment to protect Potts from falling.
“I fall all the time. If you’re going to be climbing something that’s really hard, you’re going to fall like 10-15 times before you make it. Even if I get to the top and I make it, I’ll down climb two or so steps and then just jump because it’s fun to jump off once you’re not afraid. I used to be afraid of jumping off because I’ve broken my same ankle twice because I fell in a weird position, but now I’m immune to that fear,” Potts said.
In addition to overcoming her fear of falling, Potts also thinks that strength is a positive outcome of rock climbing.
“I think my favorite part [about rock climbing] is just feeling really strong. I really like accomplishing things. If you’re working on a move, which is getting from one rock to another, and you’ve been working on this one move for a week and a half and you finally get it, but you don’t make it to the last rock of the route, you’ve still mastered that one move and that’s the best feeling ever,” Potts said.
In addition to feeling accomplished, Potts also appreciates the kind, helpful attitude the rock climbing community exhibits.
“A cool thing about rock climbers is that even though everybody’s competing individually against every other person, everyone’s really nice to everybody,” Potts said. “Like if you’re working really hard on a route and somebody you’re competing against comes up and tries to work on the route, you help them. If somebody is struggling with something you can be like, ‘hey, do you want to know what I did,’ and then you can share information and strategies, which is cool.”
Due to rock climbers’ friendly nature, Potts says she has made new friends through the sport.
“The people on my team are a group of really close friends and it’s totally people I would not have talked to if it wasn’t for rock climbing, but we have that one thing in common, we all really like rock climbing, so automatically you’re going to talk to them and find out that they’re really cool people,” Potts said. “And I also talk to people who aren’t on my team from competitions. Everyone around here always goes to the same competitions, like even from Minnesota because competitions are so hard to find. I’ll go to a competition and see people I’ve seen for three years from other places that I’ve been talking to. It’s just a really cool community of people.”