BOULDER, Colo — Brooke Raboutou is one of the world's best rock climbers and usually the USA Climbing athlete is outside climbing steep cliff walls or scaling rock-climbing walls at gyms to train.
But with stay at home orders and gyms closed down all over the country to stop the spread of COVID-19 she hasn’t been doing a lot of climbing, at least not the usual ways.
“I’ve been having fun finding new ways to train,” said Raboutou.
Raboutou has qualified for the upcoming Summer Olympics and even if it’s been postponed, she’s still training, literally climbing the walls of her Boulder home to do it and posting on her Instagram page about how her home has become her rock climbing gym.
She scales the backside of the stairs inside her home before pulling herself up to the second floor where she takes a spin around the hand railing and then makes her way to the rock fire place and climbs that too.
“I climb the chimney above the fireplace because it’s all little rocks,” said Raboutou. “When I first looked at them, I thought 'why I haven’t don’t this before?'"
That new rock-climbing course is impressive but the Raboutou family actually has a rock-climbing wall in the basement of their home.
Raboutou parents are both climbers as well and they had her climbing by the time she was 2-years-old. Her latest endeavor was just a fun way to train and pass a little time while climbing something different.
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