Lethbridge rock climber taking talent to new heights

A local rock climber is taking her talents to new heights. Kennedy Moland will be representing Lethbridge in her third national rock climbing tournament in Montreal from May 18 to 20.

With rock climbing now being added to the list of sports in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Moland said her goal is to one day participate at the highest level.

Rock climbing requires not only speed, but agility and strength.

“We’ll go and do a warm up, just a real quick off the wall ground warm up and then normally my teammates, one of the coaches and I will go over to the weight room where we’ll do weight training, progressions, cardio stuff like that,” Moland said.

Moland has been training and climbing for four years and is very excited to compete in Montreal this year.

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Tanner Bexson, Moland’s climbing coach, said she not only trains hard, but does the extra conditioning exercises to help her compete.

“She trains three days a week, six hours a week and that doesn’t include the competitions she goes to. That includes itself, depending on the month, it could be up to about 16 hours a weekend. And that includes strength training, conditioning and wall climbing,” Bexson said.

The International Olympic Committee voted in 2016 to officially include rock climbing in the next Olympics. Each qualifying country will be allowed two athletes of each gender.

“There’s a Team Canada selection training camp where they look at the athletes and see what world cup’s they’re fit to go to and attend. Generally, you don’t go to all of them because that would be a lot,” Moland said.