Professional climber Nina Williams is known for her highball bouldering career. In her sport, Nina deals with fear and failure regularly. She's had to learn to manage both in a way that allows her to be safe, but still push herself to her limits.
Professional climber Nina Williams is known for her highball bouldering career. Highballing is somewhere between bouldering and free soloing. Climbers scale rocks 20 to 50 feet tall, sometimes even taller, without a rope. Nina was the first woman to climb a number of extremely challenging routes around the world, from Bishop, California to Rocklands, South Africa. In her sport, Nina deals with fear and failure regularly. She's had to learn to manage both in a way that allows her to be safe, but still push herself to her limits.
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Nina Williams:
I always go back to the somatic experience of climbing and some of my exercises for fear specifically is to visualize your fear as a tangible thing. For me, when I first felt fear, I imagined it as this ball of light in my chest, and whenever I got really scared, it would get super bright and big and I couldn't see anything and I couldn't think. So, it's like, okay, I'm going to, again, take this big deep breath. As I would breathe out, that ball would get smaller and it would stay contained right in my chest. I wouldn't ever wish my fear away because I know that my fear is a necessary part of my survival, but being able to contain it allowed me to take back some of that control.
Shelby Stanger:
Climber Nina Williams is known for her highball bouldering career. Highballing is somewhere between bouldering and free soloing. Climbers scale rocks 20 to 50 feet tall, sometimes even taller, without a rope. Nina was the first woman to climb a number of extremely challenging routes around the world, from Bishop, California to Rocklands, South Africa. She's climbed upwards of V13, which is a very high rating of pro-level bouldering. In her sport, Nina deals with fear and failure regularly. She's had to learn to manage both in a way that allows her to be safe, but still push herself to her limits. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. Nina Williams grew up in New England where she participated in all kinds of sports. When she was on a family vacation at 12 years old, Nina climbed one of those manmade climbing walls at a ski resort. Then she climbed it again and again. She couldn't get enough. When she got home from that trip, she joined a climbing team and started competing. Nina Williams, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Nina Williams:
Thanks for having me on, Shelby. I'm really happy to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
When you rock climbed in high school, what kind of rock climbing did you do? It sounds like you did it all.
Nina Williams:
So, high school and all throughout my early twenties, and even into now, I have primarily bouldered. So, bouldering is when you climb without any ropes, but you're not climbing very high up. I would do this outdoors, and again, I was competing as well, so I would do a lot of private and national level competitions around the country. Then as I got older, I kept competing, but outdoor climbing definitely took a big front seat.
Shelby Stanger:
How old were you when you started high bouldering?
Nina Williams:
I was probably about 15, or 16, 17.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So, taking me chronologically, you competed through high school, college. You went to UC Boulder?
Nina Williams:
Actually, college is a funny story. I went to University of Rhode Island for just three semesters, but I didn't know what I wanted to do and I felt like I was wasting money, so I dropped out and pursued climbing full time. I remember in that moment of dropping out, I was like, you know what? I've never been a great student anyways. I was always kind of mediocre in high school and I'm just not smart enough for higher education. It doesn't make sense for me to try and push through school. I was miserable, but I felt a lot of guilt and shame in dropping out because at the time everyone else was graduating or getting on with their lives. I felt like I had taken a huge step back, but I just knew that I wanted to climb. I didn't know what I wanted to do in life, but I was like, I just want to go out to Colorado and rock climb. So, that's what I did, but fast-forward a little bit. I did return to school in 2019 and I attended UC Boulder, studied communication and leadership management, and graduated in 2021.
Shelby Stanger:
Life isn't linear, and I imagine that rock climbing has taught you a lot about that. So, this decision that you made when you were younger, I'm guessing like 19, 20 to drop out of school?
Nina Williams:
Yeah, 19.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a really pivotal time in most people's life. So, quitting school, when society expects you to go to high school, go to college and you're going to go become a rock climber was a huge decision. How did you come to that decision? What did you learn from that?
Nina Williams:
I just remember it was midterms of my third semester at URI and I was curled up on my dorm bed in the fetal position, and I hadn't studied for any of my exams and I was really failing a lot of my classes. I was just like, I can't do this anymore. It was that I didn't want to, and something I've learned about myself is there are moments where I cannot force myself to do something that I don't want to do. It has taken me places again, both good and bad, but that was a moment where I was like, I don't want this. I don't know what else, but I know that I do not want this, and this concept is certainly not original to me, but it's valuable to know what you want and it's just as valuable to know what you don't want. Those are two very distinct things, even though they kind of sound the same, but I knew that I didn't want to be in school.
Shelby Stanger:
Nina had to fight that voice in her head that told her leaving college was a mistake. She was only 19 years old and it was a big decision. Luckily, back in high school, Nina had had a formative experience in the competitive climbing circuit. It taught her how to work through feelings of self-doubt and failure. Rock climbing has taught me a lot about failure, and I've only done it a few times. What has rock climbing taught you about failure?
Nina Williams:
When I first started climbing and I first started getting into competition, I was one of two girls on my climbing team, but everyone else was a boy and my coaches were male, and climbing was a very male dominated sport at the time. So, I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed and to be the best and really to stand out, and I wanted other people to see me as a good climber and to think that I could be something great, but I didn't believe that in myself. So, when I got into competition, a year went by and I had an opportunity to go to my first national competition. During the regional prequalification comp, I ended up cheating. Essentially, back in the day, you would have three hours to climb your top five hardest climbs, and you would have to have a judge or a peer sign off on the climb that you did to say that they saw it.
So, I forged some signatures on climbs that I didn't send in the gym. So, I went off to nationals and didn't cheat at nationals because of the format. I placed fourth, so I got a spot on the climbing team. I got a jacket and a trophy and all this stuff, and I remember thinking, wow, this is the peak. This is my peak experience. This is the best I'll ever be in climbing. So, I went back home, got a lot of external validation and encouragement, but then of course that feeling didn't last. So, I continued to cheat in a few more competitions after that. I eventually got caught and I was put through the wringer, rightly so, but my climbing federation made an example out of me. They had me apologize in person to my competitors, and my coaches, and my gym community.
I had to write letters and read it out loud. They also banned me from the upcoming climbing season, but I had to still go and volunteer, and then I had to give back my trophy and lost my place on the climbing team. It was the hardest moment of my young person life where I questioned myself. Why am I doing this? Do I actually love climbing? Who am I climbing for? Because I feel like the biggest failure because I wanted to succeed, but I didn't want to put in the work. It was like, why do I want this success? What does this success really mean? At the end of the day, I did a lot of hard thinking, had a lot of hard conversations, and I was like, you know what? I love climbing regardless of how I have failed myself and my community in this moment.
I still love the movement and the sport and that sensation it gives me. So, I stuck with it and I kept competing, kept climbing outside and realized that was the most important question to ask is why? Why am I doing this? As long as that answer for me is motivating for myself and coming from a place of internal intent, not externally based, not based on what other people think, but what I feel about myself, then it makes any failure worth it because as long as I am doing something to progress and move forward, any failure is just part of that progress even though it feels like regression. You have to fail a lot in order to succeed. I tried to shortcut that and it didn't work. I learned a very, very hard lesson from that. So, I embrace all of the failures now because otherwise I'm robbing myself of growth and learning.
Shelby Stanger:
When Nina got up the courage to leave college, she kept some of the lessons from this experience in the back of her mind. School didn't feel like the right thing for her at age 19, but climbing did. Nina decided to move to Colorado and pursue the sport full-time. She took up jobs coaching kids at a local climbing gym and quickly gained a couple of small partnership deals. During her personal training, Nina honed in on highball bouldering and started to excel. She became an expert in climbing rocks as tall as four-story buildings without ropes, and the industry took notice. Today, Nina is a professional highballer who is sponsored by prestigious brands like The North Face and Scarpa. I want to talk a little bit more about highball bouldering. High bouldering is essentially climbing really high boulders, like over maybe 10 feet, 15 feet.
Nina Williams:
Yeah, they are somewhere in the 20 to 30, up to 50 foot range. The tallest highball that I've done is about 50 feet.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you're climbing without ropes?
Nina Williams:
Yeah, without ropes. Most all of standard climbing is actually very safe, and then highball bouldering is not as safe because you introduce a bit more risk when you don't have a rope and you still go high off the ground.
Shelby Stanger:
What does it look like to train for highball bouldering?
Nina Williams:
What does it look like to train for highball bouldering? Lots of falling, lots of falling practice, but for me, the majority of my super tall highballs have been done on a rope first. There's a couple ethics in highball bouldering. One ethic is the ground up ethic where you start at the ground and you go up and you don't know what's coming, and you're just getting a little higher and a little higher and you keep falling. Then the other ethic is putting a rope down first and rehearsing the moves and knowing what's going to happen, and then starting from the bottom and doing the climb. For me, the experience of highball bouldering has always been about presence in the moment and control. Again, knowing that I am in a dangerous position, but also trusting in myself and knowing that I'm safe.
So, rehearsing the moves ahead of time helps me visualize and get into that moment of fear, because when I'm on a rope, I actually picture myself climbing it without a rope, and I let all of the fear sensations move through me, and I notice where the fear is happening. Is it a tightness in my chest or are my legs shaking? Maybe my hands are really sweaty, my eyes are darting all over the place, and I just let my body feel those emotions and those fears, and then I just sit with it and I think, okay, this is okay. I can feel that fear and acknowledge it, but I don't have to let it dictate my actions or what I do next.
Shelby Stanger:
I've heard you talk about falling like a cat, which just sounds so cool. How did you learn to do that?
Nina Williams:
So, when I was living back in New England, I was really inspired by a climb called Speed of Life, which is in Farley, Massachusetts, and it's got a really steep angle like this, and there are these tiered boulder landings underneath it. It creates this sort of chimney slanted thing like this. So, when you climb up and you fall, you have to angle your body. You either have to jump backwards onto a flat part, or you have to slide down this weird chute, and I would just learn to immediately look down at wherever my feet were going.
A big thing about falling is, oh, don't look down. You always want to look down because if you don't look down, you can't see where you're going. So, whenever I fall, I immediately find a spot on the ground to aim for. Then over time, I learned to let out a bunch of my breath as I fell to try and avoid getting all tense and tight, because if you fall and you're very tight, you can injure yourself more. So, I started doing that on the climb Speed of Life, but then when I went out to California where the climbs were much taller in the 30 to 40, 50 foot range, I would fall and fall just straight down. Again, just try and relax my body as much as possible.
Shelby Stanger:
If you go to her Instagram, you can see videos of Nina methodically moving up giant boulders. Many of the holds she uses are tiny, with just enough surface for her to place her toe or grip with her fingertips. There are moments when it looks like she's definitely about to fall, but she busts out a dynamic move, eking her way higher. When we come back, Nina tells me some stories about a couple of the scarier climbs she's done and talks about the mindfulness practices that help her manage fear.
Professional climber Nina Williams has been scaling rock walls since she was a preteen. She's had legendary sends on some of the world's most difficult climbs. Nina attributes a huge part of her success to her ability to fall. For years, she practiced how to fall like a cat, distributing her weight evenly amongst her limbs and relaxing her body as much as possible. Even with this unique skill, Nina sometimes finds herself in hairy situations. Some of her favorite highball memories are moments when she's felt fear, but has been able to overcome it. Let's talk about some of your favorite highball routes that you've climbed. Do you have any stories?
Nina Williams:
Let's see. One of my very first highballs out in Bishop, California is a climb called Footprints. I had climbed the top part of it just once on a rope, and then I didn't really expect to get through the bottom part of the climb because that's where the most difficulty is. So, the next day I went back and I had a bunch of pads and I was just working the bottom moves, again, not expecting myself to get through, but lo and behold, I suddenly found myself in the upper section of this climb, and I remember thinking, well, okay, I've done this once before, and the top half of this climb isn't nearly as difficult as the bottom half. So, I was like, I know that I have the physical capability to do this, so let's just go. So, I'm climbing, climbing, climbing, and I get to about two thirds of the way up this boulder, which is about 40, 45 feet tall.
I remember looking down and having to put my foot on a little foothold that when I was climbing on a rope, I didn't think twice, but I looked at this small foot and it looked a lot smaller, and a lot greasier, and more insecure than I remembered it. I froze, and I guess I don't actually remember what I was thinking, but I remembered that feeling in my body of just, I didn't move. A few seconds passed by that felt like forever, but then I remember thinking, having an actual thought of, this is a serious situation. You cannot stay here.
My body started getting really scared, but my mind recognized that, and it said, okay, if you were two feet off the ground right now, you wouldn't think twice about this, and so just picture that you're two feet off the ground. So, it's like my mind kicked my body into gear, and then I put my foot on that foothold, and I pressed and I finished up the top of the climb. I remember getting to the top and having this release, just my body was kind of shaking a little bit, and I was like, I don't really want to feel like this again.
Shelby Stanger:
Have you had any other sketchy situations like that?
Nina Williams:
Yeah, I've had a few. Well, I'll get into a story that I haven't told very often, and it's not a highballing story, it's a free soloing story. Free soloing is when you climb a really big formations with no rope. All you have are your climbing shoes and your chalk and I've been hesitant to share this story because the concept of free soloing is a difficult one for me because while I do free solo, I don't free solo a whole lot. I think free soloing is a very personal decision, also because free soloing is not something I want to encourage, but I know that people free solo anyways. So, it's kind of like, how do you talk about free soloing without talking about free soloing? So, free soloing for me has been very personal, also a very perfect and just beautiful way for me to be present with myself because of the extreme high risk.
Anyways, a couple years ago, I had this idea to do a local challenge here in Boulder, Colorado called the Longs Peak Triathlon. You start in Boulder and you bike 40 miles up to Longs Peak Trailhead, and then you run about five miles to the base of the Diamond, which is like a 900-foot sheer face on Longs Peak. You climb a route called the Casual Route, and then you run seven miles back down to the trailhead, and then you bike 40 miles back down to Boulder. So, I decided that I wanted to do the Longs Peak Triathlon just on my own. I was like, well, if I'm going to do it on my own, then I should probably make sure that I can solo the Diamond. So, two summers ago, I went and soloed the Diamond, made sure that I could do it. I was like, oh, cool. The climbing's actually pretty casual in terms of difficulty. Then the second time I went, I tried to find a partner, but for a variety of reasons, nobody wanted to go climb the Casual Route.
So, I just went by myself and I thought, well, it's a really nice day. The weather window is here. I'm going to just feel it out, and if anything feels off, I'm not going to do it. But as it happens, it was a perfect day, and I started up and I just remember feeling so light and free. I was having fun, and suddenly I went through some moves that felt a little harder than I remembered, and I was like, huh, well, okay. I know I'm supposed to take a left at Table Ledge, and there's this feature above me, and I think if I just go around this feature, Table Ledge will be right there. So, I'm climbing up and I go through some harder moves, and I'm like, man, I really don't remember this part of the climb. I looked down and the place that I was supposed to turn was about 30 or 40 feet down and to my left. So, I was in unknown terrain.
Shelby Stanger:
And you're how many feet in the air?
Nina Williams:
Probably 7 or 800 feet.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. That's scary.
Nina Williams:
Yeah. It was a moment where I remember thinking, okay, everything that I have experienced in highball climbing, all of the mental practices, all of the breath work that I've done, it has kind of all led up to this moment. I need to decide if I want to downclimb first or if I want to keep going. So, in that moment, I was like, well, I don't want to downclimb because I just didn't feel comfortable doing that. I thought about the rest of it, and I was like, well, I'm pretty close to the summit. I know that there's no super hard climbing up here, and I can see a fairly obvious way, so I'm just going to keep going with the knowledge that if I have to downclimb, I will, but from here on out, I'm going to keep going to the summit.
So, kept going, used again, all of those tactics that I had developed over the years, the mantras, the breathworks, just being in my body, being very present, keeping calm. I got to the top with moments of, not fear. I am totally honest in saying that I wasn't ever scared in that time, but I was nervous. I remember topping out and getting that visceral automatic feeling that I had in that early experience on Footprints back in Bishop of my body was kind of shaking and I was processing what had just happened. I remember being proud of myself, and I also had a lot of shame because I got lost on the climb. I didn't put in the amount of time that I should have on the route to get to know it. It taught me a really big lesson in that for me, it's not the difficulty of the climb, it's actually the awareness and knowledge of what it means to be in the big mountains and to actually pay attention to your surroundings.
Shelby Stanger:
Rock climbing can be a risky sport, especially when there are no ropes. While she does her best to avoid them, Nina does encounter life and death situations. She takes these moments seriously. In addition to training physically, Nina has worked really hard to train her mind. She's done a lot of research and practice to recognize fear, learn how it manifests in her body, and move through it. The way you told your story, you're very thoughtful, and I can tell you think a lot about mindset and you have to. So, what do you use? What are these techniques? Can you give me some of your tricks on a wall?
Nina Williams:
Sure. So, I always go back to the somatic experience of climbing. So, whenever you can put yourself into your body and think, well, I say think, but really feel where the tension is in your shoulders, in your chest, in your arms, in your legs. So, one thing that, again, not original to me, I learned it from Arno Ilgner, who is the author of The Rock Warrior's Way. He talks about doing a body scan. So, especially if you're roped climbing or even bouldering and you feel yourself getting scared, you find a point right in front of your eyes and you kind of relax your eyeballs first, and you try and relax your whole face. You're not looking around and darting your eyes around or moving your body. You're just gazing really softly ahead of you, and you take a big deep breath and you kind of push some of that tension and weight down.
So, you start relaxing into your chest, you sag your body into your feet. You want to put more weight into your hips, down into your legs, straighten your arms, and you just take a second to not think about what you're going to do next or what you messed up beforehand. You're just there with yourself. And learning about this body scan from Arno was the start of me realizing how important it's to just be with your body. Some of my exercises, for fear specifically, is to visualize your fear as a tangible thing. Imagine it as an object, or you can give it a name. You can picture it as a little gremlin on your shoulder or something, but for me, when I first felt fear, I imagined it as this ball of light in my chest. Whenever I got really scared, it would get super bright and big, and I couldn't see anything and I couldn't think.
So, when I imagined my fear as this actual circular ball, it's like, okay, I'm going to, again, take this big deep breath all the way in the chest, breathe out, and as I would breathe out, that ball would get smaller and it would stay contained right in my chest. I wouldn't ever wish my fear away because I know that my fear is a necessary part of my survival, and it's a part of me, but being able to minimize it and feel like I could contain it, allowed me to take back some of that control of the fear. In controlling the fear, I say control a lot as if it's actually something that I can manipulate, but the reality is when you feel like you can control something, you actually release its control over you. So, in that releasing, I just accept the fear, how it manifests in my body, and I say, okay, I'm still going to try hard and I'm still going to push through.
Shelby Stanger:
While Nina encounters risk more than the average person, there are definitely lessons here for anyone who feels doubt or fear. I love how she visualizes fear in order to minimize and contain it. Nina Williams, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are such a joy to talk to, and I could listen to you tell climbing stories all day long. If you want to follow Nina Williams and see what she's up to, check out her Instagram at Sheneenagins. That's S-H-E-N-E-E-N-A-G-I-N-S, Sheneenagins. Shout out to Ben at the Wilderness Coworking space in Minneapolis, Minnesota for recommending that we bring Nina on the show. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motala and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show. Take time to write a review wherever you listen, and remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.