The Lay Back

The Tokyo 2020 games are coming up fast, and in this episode I interview Olympic hopeful Lucy Stirling. She is one of Australia’s top competition climbers, and currently Oceanic lead champion. Lucy is from Brisbane, Queensland, and has been climbing since age 13. She quickly found success in competition climbing, taking her to multiple Youth World Lead Championships. In 2014 Lucy became Australia Open Lead Champion and in 2017 Australian Bouldering Champion. On the international scene, Lucy represented Australia at the World Games in Poland in 2017 and has competed at Multiple Open World Cups!

Lucy was down in Victoria to train for speed climbing a month ago, and we sat down to talk about her climbing life, and the path ahead of her to get to Tokyo in 2020.

We cover Lucy’s progress through climbing, and the successive challenges she has faced throughout her competition climbing career. We get into how she trains, travelling for comps, outdoor climbing and those other non-climbing things in life.

I sit down to record episode 3 of the Lay Back Podcast, with Simon Carter, of Onsight Photography - a name many Australian climbers would be familiar with, as it appears on the bookends of many an Australian climbing guidebook. Since the early 90s Simon has been producing climbing photography and is described by the editor of Rock and Ice Magazine as “arguably the greatest climbing photographer of all time”.

Simon took a chance on the climbing photography career path, not knowing where it would lead, and he’s worked immensely hard in pursuing that dream.

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Simon's Websites

http://www.onsight.com.au

http://www.climbingaustralia.com.au/

https://www.sloperclimbing.com/ - the Sloper Climbing App

On episode 2 of the Lay Back Podcast, I interview Neil Monteith in the Fallout shelter under his house in the Blue Mountains.

Neil has been climbing for 27 years and has established more than 1000 new pitches of both sport and trad in Australia alone. We discuss his early beginnings climbing with an electrical cord and tow rope in Queensland in the early 90s, his trips to the US and an expedition to Baffin Island in the 2003. We dig into what motivates him to discover and develop new crags, and he gives us some insights into Australian climbing culture as he sees it, having lived in QLD, VIC and now NSW.

On episode 1 of The Lay Back, I sit down with Kim Carrigan. Kim had a significant impact on climbing in the 70s and 80s, pushing standards and establishing some of the hardest routes of the time in Australia. He travelled extensively to world class crags in the US and Europe, challenging the status quo and climbing the hardest routes of the time. We dive deep in the interview, Kim discusses everything from his youth, to his post-climbing successes as an entrepreneur, his thoughts on the current state of climbing and its future, as well as his own ambitions to return to the rock.

Thumbnail Picture:  Kim Carrigan on the Ring Route, now known as Lord of the Rings. Photo courtesy of Glenn Tempest.