Buddy Check

This episode explores the relationship between mental health and climbing. In trying to navigate the relationship between anxiety and climbing in my own  life, I was looking around at other women in climbing who I perceived to have a handle on it. You’ll hear from two of them in this episode. You’ll also hear from Becca Wallingford about the research she conducted for her Master’s in Social Work. She interviewed nine women to understand if and how climbing could be used as a type of therapy for people navigating mental illness.

Resources:

• Wallingford, Becca, “Reclaiming Control in the Vertical Realm: A Qualitative Study on Female Rock Climbers with Mental Illness” (2020). Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342277704_Reclaiming_Control_in_the_Vertical_Realm_A_Qualitative_Study_on_Female_Rock_Climbers_with_Mental_Illness.

Episode 2 of Buddy Check looks at two ways of thinking differently about navigating our climbing partnerships that overlap with our romantic ones. First, what can we learn from queer partnerships, where traditional gender norms are already subverted to some extent?

And then, a conversation with a couples counselor about better communication strategies to increase equity in heterosexual romantic climbing partnerships in order to acknowledge and address the tendency to limit ourselves within traditional gender roles.

Resources:

• @frontrangequeerclimbers on Instagram
• Dorian Evers, therapist based in Boulder, CO: http://www.cultivategrowththerapy.com/ 

In the first episode of season 1 of Buddy Check, Freddie tells her story of how she first learned to climb. Then, we dive into the preliminary findings from Céline Hequet’s PhD research on the climbing community. Céline is a sociology PhD student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is observing and interviewing rock climbers who identify as men about their experience with mentorship and mentoring others, their romantic relationships within climbing, and about how they perceive and understand their own masculinity. Her research will help to explain a pattern we’re seeing in climbing today, where many more women are participating in the sport and many attribute at least part of their mentorship to a heterosexual, romantic relationship.

Resources:

• Donnelly, Peter Alexander, "The Subculture and Public Image of Climbers” (1980). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8019455. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8019455
• Robinson, Victoria. Everyday Masculinities and Extreme Sport. Berg, 15 Oct. 2008.
• Reych, Zofia, “Climbing Women and Nice Media: Beyond Alternative Femininities” (2013). Dissertation in Anthropology and Sociology 15PANC999, Programme: MA Anthropology of Media from University of London. https://www.academia.edu/5651891/Climbing_Women_and_Niche_Media_Beyond_Alternative_Femininities
• Lauren Delaunay Miller. Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing. Seattle, Wa, Mountaineers Books, 2022. https://www.laurendmiller.com/valleyofgiants