Kyra Nelson had a strong bouldering season a year ago, but how things ended left her upset.
Nelson, now 16, finished with a bunch of second-place finishes in her early-season tournaments, but didn’t make it past the first day of the divisional competition. That meant she didn’t have the chance to qualify for the national championship tournament.
“That really motivated me to work harder this year,” Nelson said.
One year and a ton of training later, Nelson is now a mere few days from competing for a national title. And she enters the championships with quite a few wins under her belt already this year.
This year’s USA Climbing Youth National Championships start on Friday, and Nelson has quite a bit of familiarity with the location. The tournament will be held at Portland Rock Gym in Beaverton.
“I’ve trained there a lot, but the course changes for the competition, so it will still be new,” Nelson said.
In bouldering, each climber has four minutes to scale the course. Until their first attempt at climbing, they aren’t allowed to see the course. When the round starts, they are turned around to face the climbing wall, and then they have four minutes to get as high up as they can.
Nelson said her goal coming into the season was to qualify for nationals. Still, the season doesn’t technically end there. If she qualifies high enough, she could end up on the USA Youth National Team to compete in the Youth World Championships, which will take place later this summer in Finland.
Nelson qualified for the national competition thanks to the strong work she’s been putting in this season.
This year, Nelson competed in four qualifying tournaments. She finished first in her division in all four. She also scored a first-place finish in the regional tournament. Nelson earned a spot in the national competition with a third-place finish in the regional competition, which took place in Lynwood, Wa., in February.
To get to that point, Nelson has trained at various climbing gyms in the region for two to five hours on a daily basis, as well as spending plenty more time doing strength and endurance training. That’s all in addition to her time in school, where Nelson just finished up her sophomore year at Horizon Christian School.
“I pretty much just go to the gym right after school and start training,” Nelson said. “Sometimes I come home for a bit, and then my mom will drop me off at the gym for a few hours.”
There’s also the work Nelson has done with her eating habits. She said she’s been a vegetarian for the last four or five years, which helps her to eat clean, but it also makes it difficult for her to get enough protein sometimes. Nelson said she makes a lot of smoothies with protein in them to keep her energy up with all the training she does.
Her mother, Tracy Nelson, said it’s been fun for the family to see Kyra train so hard and see the immediate results this year.
“It’s all her,” Tracy Nelson said. “She’s the one who does it. It’s not coming from her parents at all. It’s a completely intrinsic motivation, and she’s very disciplined and dedicated. She has put in a ton of hard work in this last year to get where she’s at. We’re super proud of her.”
