For Paraclimber Raveena Alli, Growth Sometimes Looks Like Falling

Before getting on the wall in the final round of a paraclimbing competition, 17-year-old Raveena Alli, a climber who's blind, usually has six minutes to preview the top rope route with her caller, Fernando Vásquez. He tells her how it'll feel — easy, pumpy, familiar, unfamiliar — and how it'll flow. He talks her through the resting spots and the cruxes — the hardest moves. When Alli starts climbing, Vásquez gives her the direction, distance, and shape of the next hold through Bluetooth headsets, referencing a clock face and everyday objects: "12 o'clock, close, muffin."

Vásquez never rushes his calls, matching his tone to Alli's intentional movement. As she climbs, she engages her biceps to find control, adjusts her feet to find balance, and pushes off from her legs to find power. She loves it when these moves feel natural, but she also likes it when they don't. In training, Alli will fall on a tricky move a few times before Vásquez gives her more direction. "He's big into — which I like — having me attempt it, having me fall, because that's when you really learn most about how your body will respond to your movements," Alli says. "I would've quit a long time ago if I had just always gone to the top, because that's kind of boring."

As a member of the Atlanta, Georgia chapter of Team Catalyst, Alli has competed in adaptive climbing both nationally and internationally, moving to the adult field in 2022. She placed third in her international debut at the 2022 Paraclimbing World Cup in Salt Lake City. But when Alli took first at the US Paraclimbing Nationals in 2022 and 2023, there were no other competitors there to claim silver or bronze in the events' B1 — total blindness — category.

Alli was born with a condition called congenital bilateral anophthalmia, which kept her eyeballs from developing. She's been totally blind all her life and wears prosthetic eyes, which puts her in B1. It's hard to find B1 climbers at the highest levels of competition. This dearth of blind peers comes in part from low public awareness of the sport, Alli says. But soon, there will be a global spotlight on paraclimbing: in June 2024, the International Paralympic Committee voted to add the sport to the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympic Games. "It fills me with optimism," Alli tells PS. "It's a powerful step in the right direction. My greatest hope is that other blind people and other people with unique abilities will say, 'Oh, look, they can do it, why shouldn't I be able to?'"

Alli started climbing when she was around 6 years old. Her mother, Hayley, encouraged her to take lessons after she tried the sport during a birthday party at a gym in her hometown of Atlanta. When Alli was 8, she joined Team Pinnacle, which caters to kids of all abilities and is based at Stone Summit Climbing & Fitness Center. Two years later, she joined her current team at the same gym: Team Catalyst, where she met Vásquez, her coach and caller for more than a decade. When they first paired up, Alli was full of energy getting on the wall, Vásquez remembers. "Her whole attitude was like, she wanted to go at it," he says. "She wanted to go."

Since then, Vásquez has watched Alli's climbing mature, as she's built up her stamina, patience, ability to multitask, and proprioception — a sense of your body in space. Alli worked on these skills over time, but she's always easily interpreted Vásquez's calls, he says: "Throughout the years, it's gotten to the point where I can just give her a string of information and she will nail it."

For Alli, climbing is about growth, and growth comes from falling. "Growth looks like those moments where I don't quite make it," she says. "Even when I do, it's really about: What did I learn about my body on this climb? Or how did my coach and I learn to collaborate better as a team? It's really just being able to take every climb and think, 'What did I learn from this?'"

Alli doesn't consider herself the fiercest competitor. At most events, she's just happy to have an outlet for focusing on her own growth as a climber and to meet other differently abled athletes. But since she's begun competing nationally, Alli has found she's not only the rare B1 climber, but also the rare teenager among older athletes.

She and her mother point to climbing's costs and hesitation toward a lesser-known sport as barriers to entry for youth. Competitive climbers and their families pay for specialized gear, gym memberships, and national or international travel. And because blind and low vision climbing isn't well known, parents may not have a clear concept of the sport's relatively safe practice of top roping on routes set for static movement.

That's where the Paralympics come in. Exposure by way of the biggest stage in sports could drive up participation and usher in resources, says John Muse, vice president of sport at USA Climbing. "When sport climbing became part of the Olympics, it shifted things in the US," Muse says. "There was a lot of excitement around it and increased interest in competition rock climbing. Paraclimbing is going to see the same influx."

When Alli competed at the 2023 IFSC Paraclimbing World Championships in Bern, Switzerland, she had a taste of the community that comes with taking part in international competitions. She was able to meet more B1 athletes and other climbers from around the world. Alli listened to their varying strategies for hard moves.

In fact, one of her favorite moments was waiting in isolation with her competitors before climbing. "That's when you can really feel the energy," Alli says. "There is a genuinely encouraging energy of: we're competing, but we're all in this together."

Alli hopes for more of that connection throughout her competitive climbing career. She plans to compete for as long as she can, and one day, she'd like to mentor young adaptive climbers.

After graduating from Atlanta Girls' School in May, Alli now works for the Partnership for Southern Equity and is studying at Georgia Tech. She hopes to bring her experiences moving through the education system as student who's blind to a career advancing social justice and equity. Alli wants to find ways to fill the system's gaps in training and services for differently-abled students. She has similar hopes for her sport: "The goal now is just to spread the education, spread the knowledge, and hopefully get more uniquely abled people involved," Alli says.

Suzie Hodges is a freelance writer drawn to stories in science, environmental conservation, and outdoor sports. In addition to POPSUGAR, her work has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Blue Ridge Outdoors, and The Daily Beast. Previously, she was a writer at an environmental conservation organization called Rare and at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.