R Beinn a Bhuird in the Cairngorms.
that maybe non-climbers don't appreciate. They possibly look at us and think we're so single-mindedly obsessed or focused on a single line on a bit of mountain that they might think we're failing to take in everything else. So I really wanted to take people into my sensory world and into that experience that you have on the rock and show the amount that you can take in when you're seemingly obsessed with just one line and just one little problem. “It was a gift to be able to write about that intensity with which we hear things and see things and feel things when we're on the rock, when we're that frightened.”
“This gendered perspective took the colour from my climbing. I had imported a set of cruel binaries and constructed a tight-fitting corset for myself, telling myself that I couldn’t climb as well as my male friends because I was a girl.”
‘Time on Rock’ has a female-centric element that highlights a
previously poorly understood yet pertinent topic that is becoming more widely acknowledged and researched, and a cause for conversation at the crag. Anna shares her own personal experience of gendered perspective in the book, touching specifically upon the physiological variables that come into play with the female climber, the effects of hormonal fluctuations on performance and previous self-imposed ideologies about her own abilities as a woman.
40 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN. Whilst the focus of the book is of course, rock, Anna acknowledges
the important role that indoor climbing plays for progression towards accessibility and diversity and its place and purpose in a climber’s world. Once a means to train for real rock, indoor climbing has developed into an activity all its own, a competitive sport and a safe
“We've got to a point in terms of speaking about gender and thinking about equality more generally where it's becoming much more acceptable to talk about some of the female-specific challenges that we have, some of the things we face that men don't. It felt like a great privilege really, and in a way, kind of a signal of how far society and culture has come on that I am able to write a book about climbing for everyone to read, and I can also write about the Pill and the hormonal cycle and those weeks when you have PMS and to help people understand what that means. “That was very important to me, I wanted to give that stuff space to be written and talked about, which chips away at that taboo a little bit more and can just help everyone feel more comfortable about it. I mean, it's basically about just being kind to yourself and kind to your body and kind to the particularities of who you are as a person and that can be surprisingly hard.”
“On the wall I became a network of muscles, limbs, senses, nerves, cells and neurons; an active, thinking, sensing being. Indoor climbing giving me a new map of my body. Forget body image – this was body physical.”
PHOTO: DANIEL MOORE
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