Friday, July 30, 2010

Mom of 4 FA’s 14b

Jacinda Hunter: Driving Force from Prana Living on Vimeo.


Today the psyche series spotlights Jacinda Hunter. The mother of four, who also has a full-time career, recently did the first ascent of a 5.14b (if you don’t know climbing this is one of the hardest female first ascents in history). The next time you think you’re too busy to follow your dreams think of her.

Thanks to Mike Call for the vid, Ryan Wedemayer for the pic, Prana for their athlete’s blog, Deadpoint Mag for the article on staying motivated in the winter (highlighted below), and Jacinda for the psyche. I’m off to go train now.





“The “project” is something I had been working for months. Just before all the snow, I actually fell off the very last move on the route. It was heartbreaking to be so close and then have to take a break from it. But I figure it's not going anywhere so I hope to get back there in a few weeks. That route is very different climbing because it is steep. It has small holds for the angle and once you pull on, there is no rest. I have to just power through right till the end. It’s a total power endurance fest climbing out the cave

It's pretty fun because I’ll go to the gym just to do a couple warms ups. When people ask what we’re up to and we tell them were about to head outside and just warming up, they look at us like were crazy! I would so much rather spend my time freezing my ass off on some heinous project outside then climb all day in the gym.”

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Holy smokin' cow!!! Take a look at the rest of her photos here: http://www.prana.com/blog/?tag=jacinda-hunter -- that's one strong cookie!

/michm

Steve Edwards said...

She's ridiculously strong. She also has about the perfect physilogical profile for a climber. The obvious part is a super thin lower body but if you stop frame the video you can see that her forearm and upper arm muscles overlap where they connect giving her long thin frame more leverage than normal (you see this on a lot of top climbers). She is literally built to climb.

This, however, doesn't make it any easier to get up at 5am to beat the heat or trudge through the snow for an hour to attempt to climb on razor thin holds in sub zero temps when all sane climbers are hangin' out in a gym somewhere.

Keith said...

Such inspiration.