Every Body Climbs | Fallon Rowe on Learning Mental Gymnastics So Our Bodies Can Climb
Fallon Rowe has been climbing since 2003 and coaching since 2013. After a decade of youth and collegiate competitions, she found her true passion for outdoor climbing – both sport and trad. She’s spent her adult life pursuing climbing all over the world while offering (mostly) virtual coaching. In her words, she helps “climbers optimize their experience using mindset and mental performance techniques, like working on fear of falling, and analyzing movement and technique with video feedback and visualization.”
Host Emily Chen-Newton and Fallon share a genetic collagen disorder (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). In this conversation they talk how this condition impacts their climbing – and how Fallon coached Emily through some of these issues. Fallon also has a condition called, POTS which you'll hear mentioned in this episode. It's a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. Things that should be “automatic go haywire”, she says. So, her body doesn't properly regulate things like blood pressure, heart rate and temperature. Fallon’s main symptom is lightheadedness or pre-syncope (the feeling you get before you faint).
Fallon is also a rock-climbing guide and teaches courses on trad climbing, anchor building, and more. She is sponsored by The Desert Rat, Cypher Climbing, HILX Eyewear, and Crux Power. Her education as a geologist gives her a deep connection to nature, and she loves playing the fiddle, shooting pool, wandering the desert, writing and photographing climbing. We start this episode with Fallon talking about a recent time when she was digging into some of those "non climbing" hobbies as she was recovering from a tendon tweak. BUT, as she tells us, this injury hit differently than others in the past -- in a good way.
*While Fallon Rowe and host Emily both discuss their medical conditions and how they’ve learned to live with them, this content is not, and does not replace medical advice.
Fallon can be reached on Instagram @fallonclimbs or on her website.
Every Body Climbs (EBC) is a collaborative podcast bringing you interviews with para and adaptive climbers. These profiles can be heard on The Power Company Podcast and Sends and Suffers. Content about festivals, engagement projects and other modes of community building air on Sends and Suffers, while training and nutrition focused interviews can be heard on The Power Company Podcast. Host, Emily Chen-Newton is a freelance adaptive sports reporter working in both print and broadcast. Living with a chronic medical condition herself, her journalism centers athletes, not their disabilities. When she’s not reporting, she’s rock climbing with her husband and their two cats.
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