INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - A 17-year-old student is climbing to new heights - and she's doing it quickly!
Piper Kelly is mastering the sport of speed climbing, conquering climbing walls in mere seconds.
"The wall is an official wall, it's certified, it's 15 meters and people train on it, they build up their muscle memory, they drop their times down and they just race," Kelly said.
Speed climbing is a relatively new sport, with the International Federation of Sport Climbing establishing unified timing and scoring for the event just within the last decade. Around roughly the same time, Piper was sliding into her first climbing harness. Her father, John, is a climber himself and introduced his daughter to the sport when she was just nine years old.
It didn't take long for him to realize Piper was really good.
"Maybe not necessarily speed, but just climbing in general. We started climbing at the gym and the coach at the gym was, like, 'Hey, why don't you guys come join the team?'," he said. "And she made it to bouldering nationals her first year of competitive climbing, so you pretty much knew she had talent."
"At the beginning, I did experience some heights...fear of heights and stuff like that. But I've done the wall so many times now, I just go and the feeling you get when you have a really smooth run, you kind of feel like you're flying," Piper said.
Piper has soared up the ranks of the sport, receiving an invitation to this weekend's Speed Climbing Nationals in Denver, where she'll face off against adult women from across the country.
"I have two runs to put up the fastest time I possibly can and whoever has the fastest time is the winner," she said.
She says there's a $10,000 cash purse for the winer at the Denver event, but it's not always about the money.
"Most climbing events don't have money prizes," Piper said. "The adult national championships usually have some money, but I'm not really doing it for that."
Instead, she's doing it for the pure fun of climbing.
The sport is getting more recognition on the international stage. It's been added as a new event for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
"Olympics would be nice, it's a nice goal," Piper said. "I'm not knocking it out of the picture completely, but this national event will really show me how I stack up, at least in speed climbing.
"Climbing is a pretty small community, so I feel like the opportunity to, like, represent my country, represent my state...not a lot of rock climbers coming from Indiana...so I just want to represent.
"That would be awesome. I can't even imagine," her father said.
