At the first qualifying event for the 2020 Olympics, climber Kyra Condie failed to make the cut. In the days after, she was stressed, understandably, given that the Olympics were a lifelong dream and all. (“I remember being in middle school and drawing pictures of podiums, with myself on top of them,” she says.) She needed a reminder that if she worked hard, she still had a chance to make it at the next qualifying event. So she got a tattoo on her thigh, facing her so she could read it. It says, “you suck try harder”. It was a phrase that someone had scribbled, in Sharpie, on the wall of the gym where she started climbing in Minnesota.

“It resonated with all of us who climbed at that gym,” Condie told me on the GQ Sports podcast Smarter Better Faster Stronger  “It can sound really negative, but I'm not actually telling myself, you suck. It's more of a reminder to stay humble. There's always room for improvement, especially in climbing.”

At the next event, Condie qualified for the Olympics, and on August 3rd, the 25-year-old will become one of America’s representatives in the first climbing competition in Olympic history. (She plans to add a tattoo of the Olympic rings after she does.) To medal, she’ll have to conquer an odd format that combines scores from three different disciplines: bouldering (climbers get four minutes and unlimited tries to complete four boulder “problems”); lead (one chance to climb as high as they can in six minutes); and speed (ascend a set route on a 15-meter wall as quickly as possible—the world record is 5.2 seconds).

If that sounds complicated, it is. (And controversial. There’s already a proposal to eliminate the combined format for 2024.) But Condie is prepared for it. At age 12, she had to have surgery to fuse 10 of her vertebrae to combat scoliosis—a complication that makes it hard for her to even put on her seatbelt, and one she’s been climbing with ever since. Plus, to better cope with the challenges of having to complete three very different styles of climb—and, specifically, to navigate the different levels of what she calls the “neurological engagement” each discipline requires—Condie has been working with a sports psychologist to sharpen a collection of tools that includes everything from visualization to opera playlists.

Ahead of her competition, she spoke to GQ about the tools she uses on the wall to improve focus, increase resilience, and solve problems—the kind of things that might help all of us off of it.

GQ: Climbing, more so than almost any other sport, seems to be very humbling, because you have to fail so often.

Kyra Condie: It's so true. I think that's a culture shock for a lot of people when they start climbing. I've seen people quit because they can't really handle it. It keeps your ego in check. Every session that I go into the gym, I'm trying moves that feel totally impossible. Sometimes the win is that I got closer to the hold. Not even close to holding it! Closer to even touching it. You have to find wins in really interesting areas.

Is that something you had to get used to when you first started climbing?

If something comes easy to me, it's just not as fun. I've always enjoyed the kind of grit that it takes to get over something. So if I do something the first time, it's, “Okay, I don't really need to do that again.” But if I try something like 10 times, and finally do it, I'll be like, “Oh man, I should try and do it again. Can I do it two times?”

When did you feel like you might have a future in climbing?

So the short version of my story is that I found climbing, and then got scoliosis fusion back surgery—10 vertebrae—when I was 12. Then I started doing really well in competitions after that surgery. I started thinking that climbing was something I could do as a career probably the first time I won youth nationals. Which was probably pretty optimistic looking back.

But that really showed me that I could work really hard at something and could accomplish it even after a big setback, like back surgery. Winning youth nationals was this huge goal of mine that I had since I was 11 years old. When it came through, I was like, “Oh, I should set bigger goals. Maybe I can do something at youth worlds. Maybe I can podium at the open nationals. Maybe I can make the Olympics.”

What do you remember about the spinal fusion surgery, or about that experience?

I remember my back was in a lot of pain and I didn't know why, because I was 11 and that seemed like an old lady thing. I was doing some Google searches, and I found out that scoliosis was probably a reason. I asked a guy at the gym, who I knew was a physical therapist, if he could check me for scoliosis. He was like, you should probably go to the doctor. I got an x-ray, and immediately it was bad enough to need surgery. I remember the doctor calling and just sobbing because I knew that would maybe take climbing away from me.

The first doctor I went to was really not supportive. He told me that one day I would have a family and that climbing wouldn't be very important to me. So I shouldn't be that sad. That just really didn't sit well with me. So we got a second opinion and he was super supportive, and told me to send him a picture when I was back on top of the podium. So I wanted to go with him.

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He also decided to fuse two less vertebrae than the other doctor was going to fuse. So I actually saved a lot of mobility that I would have lost if I had gotten the 12 vertebrae fused, versus 10. But I still have a slight curve in my back. This doctor left about a 25-degree curve. That saved me that mobility.

Your spine’s at 25% now. What was it before the surgery?

When I first got my first x-ray, it was 53 degrees. Then I actually waited three months so that I could compete at youth nationals before my surgery. I got to 72 degrees. After surgery, I have about a 20- or 25-degree curve, somewhere in there.

I was a pretty bashful twelve-year-old so it’s amazing to me that you sort of had the confidence to tell that doctor, I'm not taking that as an answer. Where do you think that sort of came from?

I've always had a really stubborn personality. If somebody told me I can't do something, I'd be like, fuck you. I can do it. [laughs] Maybe not when I was 12, but same idea. That definitely pushed me to want to prove that doctor wrong. But I also knew that I would be able to get back into climbing. Even when he told me that I couldn't, I knew I could. That’s just a personality trait more than anything, which is why climbing suits me really well.

Didn’t you actually send the doctor who did your surgery a picture of you on the podium after you made it back?

Yeah, I did. I got the surgery in 2010 and I won my first youth nationals in 2012. So it was a pretty quick turnaround. That was really cool. I remember sealing the envelope and sending it, and then I actually emailed him when I made the Olympics. Then he emailed me the other day after he saw an article in a magazine.

Climbing seems painful. How do you handle pain? Are there things you tell yourself when it's really excruciating?

Well, sometimes I take Advil. [laughs] That's my main way of dealing with it. But there's definitely times where I'm about to get on the wall at the end of a session, and I’ve been grinding the whole day. I'll get on the wall and be like, “Ooh, my skin hurts.” Then, I'm like, “No, it doesn't hurt. It's fine. Just get on the wall.” You just push through it. Once you're in it, it doesn't hurt as much. It's usually that initiation.

Did the surgery change your approach to climbing at all?

If you had asked me that six years ago, I would've said no, not at all. If you asked me that this year, my answer would be yes—a lot, actually. Climbing used to be really straightforward on the wall. There were not very many awkward positions. It was more about doing hard pulling moves. For that, I don't think my back matters even a little bit.

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In this new style of climbing, movement has gotten a lot more precise, and really awkward—or it's like these big powerful moves out of awkward positions. Those positions are really hard when you can't bend your back. That's been a really big struggle this year. Figuring out how to do this kind of new style of climbing and make it work for me and my body, because a lot of times I can't do it the way other people can do it. It usually is possible, but it's hard for me to see how it's going to be possible.

I just want to pause there because I feel like not being able to bend your back in climbing, that's like such a mind blowing thing! How does that even work?

So I'm lucky that my fusion is T2 through T12, so I can bend my neck and my lower back. But it's really those like side bending positions. Say you're stretching on the ground, you're in the pizza slice position, and you reached for your left foot or your right foot. Then twisting is basically all thoracic spine. So things like putting on my seatbelt in my car are really hard.

Can’t put on a seatbelt, but can climb a boulder.

[laughs] Life is funny.

I’ve seen some people say—and I know this has kind of become a calling card for you—that you climb with a “reckless abandon.” Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

I think as a kid, that was definitely true. I've grown out of it a little bit. Personality-wise, it's still definitely true. When I'm on the wall, I tend to really give it my all, even if the climb isn't asking for that. Sometimes it's a really slow move and you have to be really precise and I'm going really fast and just really diving at it. But I used to be really frantic. That’s something that I've kind of learned to use to my advantage: to climb fast and climb precisely, but not be quite as frantic. I think watching me used to be very nerve-racking for my friends and family.

What’s so interesting to me about climbing having three different disciplines is that they all seem to take very different mindsets. Bouldering, since you get as many tries as you want, seems like you can be a bit more carefree. Lead sounds terrifying, because if you slip on the first hold, you're done. Then speed seems like you want to turn your brain completely off to scale the wall as fast as possible.

That's basically exactly it. I was talking to my sports psych about this. So, in sport, there's closed systems and there's open systems. Closed systems are things like gymnastics, or figure skating. You have a routine that you've rehearsed and you're doing the exact same thing in practice as you are in competition. Open systems are things like a soccer game where anything can happen. You're having to evaluate as you go. You're not going to have the exact same situation in competition as practice. In climbing, speed climbing is a closed system, which takes a certain type of mental focus, and then the other two disciplines are open systems, which takes a different type of focus.

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Did the sports psych give you any advice on the different types of focuses that you should take to those different disciplines?

A lot of it has to do with neurological engagement level, as she puts it. It's a bell curve. You can be really low engagement, and be really chill, in that midrange—kind of hyped, but not too hyped—or you can be really high up on the scale, and jittery, which is usually not good. So figuring out where you want to be on that scale for each discipline is really important.

For speed, something that doesn't take as much focus because you know it so well, you want to be like an eight out of 10. Lead, you want to be more of a four, because you want to be really chill and relaxed, because you don't want to make a mistake. And then bouldering is in between those two.

Do you have techniques to move yourself up and down the scale, or to dial yourself back if you just came off a speed and you’re at a nine, and need to get to a four?

It’s going to be interesting because we start with speed, go straight into a bouldering round, and then we do lead. It goes from highest to lowest engagement in that way. My sports psych gave me three things to do: Caffeine, music, and visualization.

For example, at the Olympic qualifying event in Toulouse, I was at level 10 because of nerves, excitement, and pure terror about being at the event that I’d dreamed about for forever. So in the isolation zone, which is where they put you so that you can’t cheat and see the climbs beforehand, I was just listening to straight opera music to keep me calm. It was epic enough that made me feel like I was doing something important, but calming enough that I wasn’t getting my heart rate up. I have a little opera playlist now that I have for competitions. If I'm feeling nervous.

I also heard you say that, for that event, you imagined a good, medium and bad outcome.

It’s true. Something that I was really worried about, and talked to my sports psych about, was that I kept picturing, what if I don't make it? I was like, how do I stop doing that? [My sports psych] was like, “Well, you can't actually stop picturing bad outcomes. That's just human nature. We tend to do that. But what you can do, is when you're picturing those bad outcomes, also then picture a good outcome.” So any time I saw myself maybe slipping on that first move on lead climb, I also pictured myself topping the lead climb. Then, at least every time you have a bad thought, you also at least have a good thought.

What time are you doing the speed climb?

I actually just PRed yesterday which I was very excited about. My PR before was 8.05. I really wanted that sub-eight time, and yesterday I got a 7.9.

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So what's the difference between the 8 0 5 and the 7.98? Is it technical? Is it mental? When you're doing things with fractions of a second, how do you improve?

I like to describe speed climbing as like running the hundred-meter dash, but with marbles onto the course. Cause there's so many factors that can go wrong. Really, it's that muscle memory that's really important in speed climbing. Having that muscle memory makes you go faster because hitting everything perfectly is one thing that takes off a fraction of a second.

For me, I changed a couple aspects of my beta, which is how I do the moves. So I actually got worse for a bit, which was really frustrating. I was really doubting it. And then yesterday, all of it finally clicked and all of those changes felt natural and that made that difference of point 0.1.

Can you feel when you PR? Like, yesterday, when you finished, were you like, that was a PR?

I had a good feeling. That’s actually a funny thing about speed coming as well. If you start getting towards the top and thinking like, “Oh, this might be a 7.9, you're going to mess up.” You really have to stay anchored into exactly what you're doing.

You mentioned the beta there. You obviously think about how you’re going to climb, but because bouldering and lead are open systems, do you leave yourself open to new routes, or do you stick with what you planned?

It changes. In climbing, you can be on the wall and be like, “I think that was the wrong idea.” You have to evaluate while you're doing your sport, if you should do something else. You never really have that opportunity in other sports. Say you have a play in soccer and it goes wrong. You're just immediately already doing something else. You have to play defense or something else. That play is never going to happen ever again. In climbing, during that five minutes where you have to figure out the same boulder over and over again, you have to reevaluate and try something else, or try the same thing again in a different way, make those really small changes. You don't really find that in other sports.

It also strikes me that in climbing, you really gotta go for it. And that has to be nerve wracking, especially in lead, where if you miss, you’re done.

You really need that one hundred percent commitment. Even the other day, I was trying a climb where I had to run at the wall, and then jump. I was finding myself not close to doing it. I really felt like I could do this. I thought about it and was like, “Am I trying as hard as I possibly can? No I'm not.” I tried again and did it—and that's really what a lot of those moves take. Being able to do that, in competition, in front of a crowd, and maybe fall on your face, is part of it.

Last thing. How do you take care of your fingers?

Oh man, there are a lot of things. I have particularly sweaty hands, which is not great when you're trying to stick to holds. So I have a type of chalk I really like. Sometimes I use liquid chalk, which has alcohol in it. It dries out your skin and takes off all the oils. I have this stuff called Antihydral that denatures the proteins and the top layer of your skin, and makes it so sweat can't come through. So it dries out your hands. I also have salves. So if it's really raw, you have these like climbing salves to help heal it. If you go to a pool with climbers, everybody will be standing in the pool with their hands up, not in the water, so that they're not soaking them. We have been known to shower with gloves on to make sure that we don't get our hands too wet. And then if I'm doing dishes, I'm always using dish gloves. 

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By Clay Skipper

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQOlympicsGQ SportsMental HealthPodcasts