Climbers on Body Image

I gazed out at the football field next to my high school boyfriend, musing about what I would do for money in college. “Maybe I’ll become a personal trainer.”

He stopped me. “Well, you need to look how someone else would want to look like to do something like that.”

I apparently did not have a desirable physique. Excellent.

This and many other moments like this can pile up over the course of our lives. Though we may mostly get over these instances, some words tend to stick around in our heads longer than they should. Similarly, the images we see everyday try to convince that we do no look the way we “should”. Whether it is the media, or your peers, or the way your friends talk about their own bodies – it can be difficult for you to feel good about being you. Body image issues are insidious. While fully resolving them may be wholly impossible, there is certainly room for improvement, especially within the climbing community.

All this to say that hearing conversations like the one between Kris and Kelsey Sather is nourishment to a weary soul. If you ever feel strange or frustrated about your body, you are not alone. If you need to be encouraged, stop what you are doing right now and give this a listen. Kelsey is a beacon of self-love that you did not know you needed in your life.

With that, let’s get into episode #67 of the Power Company Podcast, an interview with Kelsey about her blog series, The Work Behind the Body.

The Work Behind the Body

A progressing trend in the media is to describe strength as the new beautiful, “strong is the new pretty”. While Kelsey Sather was as pleased as the rest of us to see that this movement was getting traction, she wanted more.

So Kelsey set out to find twelve strong women in the local Bozeman community who are silently crushing at their respective athletic mediums.

“I approached women in the climbing community specifically, craving those stories of the hours spent at the gym where no one sees and what drives them. I crave the stories of women leaning into their potential… where no one knows about level. I wanted to hear how women related to sports in terms of a personal relationship.”

Kelsey set out to find out exactly what work goes into the bodies of the unsung mountain heroes of Bozeman, Montana. So she did. And what she found was remarkable. From professional mountain guides to weekend warrior mothers, Kelsey captured the stories of a wide variety of mountain athletes silently crushing in Bozeman.

Part of Kelsey’s motivation to hear the stories of these women was driven by her own curiosity. Like myself, Kelsey has dealt with body image issues. It turns out that women who are badass climbers learn to be badass at loving themselves too. One of the themes running through Kelsey’s interactions with the twelve women of Bozeman was their intelligence in caring for themselves.

Self-Care

Kelsey notes that one of the unifying lessons of her interviews with the women of Bozeman was their ability to know what their body needed.

Interestingly, many of them did not follow a regimented training plan, they could simply feel when they were ready to try hard, but also knew when to give it a rest. As a climber, these are critical skills. Kelsey admits that self care looks different for everyone and it depends on what you need that day.

Sometimes self care is beer and pizza.

I can definitely relate to Kelsey’s sentiments. On my longer climbing trips, I have begun to teach myself to flip a switch. I do my best to replace anxieties around food with the permission to eat whatever I want – as long as it isn’t too much of what usually gives me a stomach ache. I realized that I might as well give my body what it needs. Typically, if I eat a lot on a climbing trip, I feel a better overall. While eating enough is one way to care for ourselves, Kelsey elaborates on the many other methods.

Self care looks different for everyone. Yeah it’s a day at the gym, but it’s also a day at home on your yoga mat doing what feels good. It’s putting lotion on and spending time with your body.

Self care is a key to success for the high-performing women of Bozeman, Montana. It is also an instrumental tool to employ in the battle to love our bodies and have a positive body image.

Kelsey On Body Image

While my body image story is rooted in dance teams and figure skating clubs, Kelsey’s is different. She was a college basketball player who unfortunately got injured. Subsequently, she began a job working at Coldstone creamery where she received a free pint every shift. Between losing her identity as a basketball player and overexposure to ice cream opportunities, Kelsey notes that her weight fluctuated between 30-40 pounds and she was continually depressed. “I ate a whole Albertson’s cake one night.” She jokingly reminisced about her past eating habits. You can hear Kelsey tell her story by listening to the below:

After this phase, Kelsey found climbing and her motivation to eat healthy changed. Kelsey posits astutely:

There’s such a difference between wanting to be skinny and wanting to be fit.

This sentiment really resonates with me as well.

Eat Better Climb Better

Before I found climbing, I was a fitness junky.

One summer I did P90X. Another summer, I did Kayla Itsines’s Bikini Body Program. Why did I do these things? Partially because I liked being active, but mostly because I wanted to look good. These exercise programs were always paired with some sort of diet plan that I would be unable to stick to. Because at the end of the day I would know in the back of my mind, that being any “thinner” or “leaner” was not necessary. I would say, “whatever, I look fine” and give up on eating better. I could always stick to exercising, but avoiding the consumption of excessive junky snacks was always much harder.

It was not until I found climbing that I felt any real compulsion to eat better. The pursuit of climbing harder routes is so much more motivating than simply trying to look good. If you can tell yourself that giving your body proper nourishment will help you to climb harder, it is much easier to stay motivated when making food choices.

Related: Ep. 42 | Common Sense Nutrition with Neely Quinn.  

One’s relationship with food is not the only change that can come from the pursuit of climbing – new body image issues may propagate as well.  Fortunately, there are ways to support one another as we tackle these. Though we may not always know how to help those who are struggling.

Everybody’s Body

We have all said the wrong thing to someone. Because we are people and making mistakes is what we do. It can be especially difficult to deal with when someone unloads on you “I think I need to lose ten pounds to send my project, what do you think?” “I feel so fat in this.” “I have to keep running a lot because if I don’t lose weight I won’t send.” “You’re so skinny, how do you do it?” It can be difficult to say something in these conversations without saying the wrong thing and making it worse.

Conversely, we can all think of a time where someone has said something upsetting to us.

“Lauren, you and Michael are both climbers, why does your boyfriend’s back looks so much leaner than you?” Someone once asked me. Even the typical office conversation “Lauren, just have a cookie, why are you watching what you eat?” can be really frustrating.

The truth is that these day to day conversations around weight, food and climbing can dredge up a lot of emotional slough – for some more than others. Think about what you say around other people. You probably do not fully appreciate what they have been through. Kelsey gives her advice on this:

You’re probably going to say the wrong thing sometimes…. Now, my assumption always when I try to interact with people is assuming that everyone has their own body image story.

Kelsey and Kris both agree that we maybe will not know the right thing to say all the time. However, we can do our best to think about what we say. We can let people know we are here for them while they work through it, even if we do not have all the answers.

What is Beauty?

All of this to say, that when we overcome our body image issues, we arrive at the pinnacle of all of this: feeling awesome about ourselves and giving our bodies what they need to help us climb our best.

It’s a Cliché Because It’s True

The last question of each of the interviews in The Work Behind the Body is “what does beautiful mean to you?” Kelsey notes that a unifying theme emerged.

Beauty comes from the inside. How many times have you heard that in your life and how many times will you need to hear it until you actually wrap your head around it?

This is not to say that we cannot appreciate purely external attributes. We should celebrate these things. If your hair is looking good today, that is great. But beauty is so much more than that. There are lots of beautiful things that do not involve how we look.

It’s not a beauty that you can buy, it’s a beauty that costs time and energy with yourself

However, this is not to say that you should throw out all of your favorite shirts and shave off all your hair. If your yellow Alex Megos t-shirt makes you feel awesome, then wear it loud and proud.

“Of Course I’m Cute. Duh.”

Kris asks Kelsey to describe what beauty means to her. To respond, she told the story of a young woman that she interacted with in a youth mentoring group in Bozeman. She describes the young lady as having these “amazing curves” and that she dressed to show them off. You can hear Kelsey tell the story by listening to the sound bite below.

Kelsey describes the young woman carrying herself in a way that said “I am cute. DUH!” and Kelsey found that to be really beautiful.

“Beauty is that non-apologetic way of holding the self”

With that, here’s a picture that made me cringe when I first saw it. But it is one of my favorite pictures now. This was taken right after I sent Metrosexual, a route I had been dreaming about for months. Someone at the crag handed me a cookie. This photo was snapped as I went in for a victory chomp, covered in dirt.

This is objectively a pretty bad photo, but I think it sums me up pretty well. When Kelsey says that beauty is the unapologetic way of holding the self, I think of moments like this.

Feeling wonderful about ourselves take work. It will not be constant. We will sometimes have to battle with ourselves to truly feel beautiful. However, I urge you to start with this: define what beauty means to you instead of letting the world decide for you.