Young climbing talent

Our spotlight now shines on the 2016 Scottish Paraclimbing Champion, Rebecca Gilchrist. 13 year old Rebecca from Rothes is an absolute inspiration.


How did Rebecca get into climbing?

Becca first got the "bug" for climbing when she had a taster session in P7 with Inveravon Primary School because the swimming pool was already being used! She absolutely LOVED IT! Following on from this she successfully completed her 'Introduction to Climbing' course with Tony Brown at Speyside Climbing Centre.

Rebecca Gilchrist 1


Inspirational

When Becca first started climbing, she struggled to walk from the car park to the hall where the climbing wall is, as the pain in her legs was too much to cope with. Climbing does not come easy for her due to intense pain from her Fibromyalgia, which affects muscles, tendons and ligaments all over her body - they do not appreciate being used. She also has fairly bad asthma, hypermobile joints (especially her hips and ankles) which gives a real challenge with bouldering in particular, and Raynauds disease, so often cannot feel her fingers and toes.

Becca always has a ready smile for everyone and never lets on how much pain she is struggling with. She thinks the climbing community is a very very friendly one to be part of and she finds all the other paraclimbers to be wonderful and very inspirational.

Rebecca Gilchrist 7

So Rebecca, what’s your favourite type of climbing?

Top roping indoors. I love the auto belay.


Why do you like climbing?

It's a sport I can manage. I don't really know why but I find it fun, and really like it.


Tell us a funny climbing story?

When I went climbing one time at Speyside Climbing Centre with Audrey and a few friends there, Kaitlin and myself were on a really easy route, but because the route was so easy we decided to make it a challenge, by doing games, like dancing up or playing 'Simon Says' while climbing. If we did something wrong, we had to do a forfeit, like go up to my parents and say I wanted to eat nothing but brussel sprouts until my next birthday, or sing a song like 'Singing in the Rain'.

* We hope you didn't have to eat too many brussel sprouts?!

What do you do when you’re not climbing?

I go to school, play video games, see my friends, go horse riding when I can and do my homework.


Do you have any advice for people thinking about becoming a paraclimber?

Just go for it and don't worry about where you come or what other people think, just have a go.


How's Rebecca's school life?

Becca now goes to Grantown Grammar School and loves it there. They do a fabulous job of nurturing their pupils and make school fun and a joy to be at. The headteacher and teachers are very enthusiastic about their jobs and this passes on down to the pupils. It is a school that should be proud of itself.

Rebecca Gilchrist new 3 Rebecca Gilchrist new 4

Rebecca you are awesome!

Not only is Rebecca our 2016 Scottish Paraclimbing Champion, which is impressive enough, her love and attitude towards climbing, despite the challenges she faces, is truly inspiring. Rebecca is a credit to herself and the sport.


Find out more

  • If you think you or your child might like to give climbing a go, but have special needs and don't know how to get started, just ask for advice at your local climbing wall, or get in touch with the ClimbScotland team and we'll try to help point you in the right direction.

This site uses cookies to store information on your computer. See our Cookie Policy for further details on how to block cookies.
I am happy with this
 

Cookies

What is a Cookie

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is a piece of data stored by a website within a browser, and then subsequently sent back to the same website by the browser. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember things that a browser had done there in the past, which can include having clicked particular buttons, logging in, or having read pages on that site months or years ago.

NOTE : It does not know who you are or look at any of your personal files on your computer.

Why we use them

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

  • recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
  • measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast
  • analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our website so we can make them better

You can manage these small files and learn more about them from the article, Internet Browser cookies- what they are and how to manage them

Learn how to remove cookies set on your device

There are two types of cookie you may encounter when using our site :

First party cookies

These are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site.

We use cookies in several places – we’ve listed each of them below with more details about why we use them and how long they will last.

Third party cookies

These are cookies found in other companies’ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

We do not control the dissemination of these cookies. You should check the third party websites for more information about these.

Log files

Log files allow us to record visitors’ use of the site. The CMS puts together log file information from all our visitors, which we use to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors move around it. Log files do not contain any personal information about you. If you receive the HTML-formatted version of a newsletter, your opening of the newsletter email is notified to us and saved. Your clicks on links in the newsletter are also saved. These and the open statistics are used in aggregate form to give us an indication of the popularity of the content and to help us make decisions about future content and formatting.