VOA常速英语:走近攀岩运动

Really I think I was born to be an off-width climber.
That was what my body was designed for. And clearly it was what my personality was designed for,
because it requires an ability to believe in yourself, beyond your physical capacity.
My name is Pamela Shanti Peck, and I’m a professional rock climber.
Utah is my favorite place to climb because we have these massive sandstone cliffs,
and often I’m the very first person to climb those particular cracks, so it’s like being some sort of an explorer.
I climb in a traditional-style, which means that I have specific gear that’s designed for placing in a crack,
and as I climb, that gear catches me if I fall.
Choosing when to place the gear, whether you’re going to place the gear, what are the chances you’re going to fall,
it just adds the component of reading the space as I climb and that makes it a little more exciting for me.
Being a professional rock climber as a woman is relatively new.
When I started in this particular style, it was a 2010.
I was the first woman to devote myself to off width-climbing,
and there was a lot of resistance to that and I was criticized for everything, it didn’t matter what.
I was criticized for wearing my hair down. I was criticized for what I wore when I climbed.
Ultimately, all that criticism really inspired me to continue climbing.
All right, good to go.
It is a dangerous sport, so there’s a lot that goes into it.
I’ve climbed despite having broken ribs and various other injuries.
In a way, maybe that’s a form of meditation.
I’m able to put the pain in the background, and I will make myself climb and allow myself to feel that pain after I finished the climb.
And then this is an unpleasant moment where I am getting some blood work done after falling and needing to have surgery on my kidney.
I’ve had two really bad injuries.
The one was a fall where I had kidney surgery, and then the other was that one where I had the back injury.

It’s always historically been, maybe, the least popular style of climbing there’s ever been,
because of the physical brutality of this style.
But I very quickly realized that it was a technically brilliant style and an artful style,
and that I could change it, that I could find new routes, and that I could establish new techniques,
and my focus, as I said many times, is to bring grace to the grovel.
I think my greatest passion or obsession as a climber aside from just you know climbing off-width, is looking for routes that are improbable.
I’ll drive down these canyons and I’ll look for routes that no one else has seen before,
and it takes a certain eye, a lot of imagination, a lot of creativity.
It’s like being an artist, having the idea of a book, the idea for a painting,
and I’m just seeking out those ideas and then I’ll create them.
My emphasis is on finding lines that tell a really good story.
One of the joys of establishing a route is then you get to name the route.
One of them is named the Kill Artist, so that probably gives you a little bit of an idea of what that experience is like.
I think as far as first ascents now,I’ve lost track but oh well over a 100 at this point.
My father, Robert Pack, is a poet and he wrote this poem for me to express his apprehensions about my climbing
but also to express his understanding for what I do.
Down on firm planet earth, my wife and I share apprehensions,
that are easy to explain, as dread of helplessness,
and yet without the ecstasies in disciplined suspension of her breath, are almost weightless floating there,
perhaps the vast, unfathomable, uncertainty of parenthood possesses in its dark dismal depths of mad exhilaration of its own.