To see Shauna Coxsey on a climbing wall is to witness the extraordinary. We are inside one of the units of an industrial park in Fulham, in a facility called the Climbing Hangar, where the walls are covered in coloured plastic blobs of varying sizes and people come along to try their hand at a new sport called bouldering.
Except Coxsey isn’t climbing up the wall. She is dancing across it, sashaying up the vertical and gliding under the overhang with balletic ease. Her hips swinging, her legs reaching improbable angles, she is a flurry of graceful, smooth, rhythmic movement. Which is rather a contrast to me, trying to climb alongside her, in a staccato mish-mash of knees and elbows and panicked looks at the floor, currently a long, long way down below.
“The brilliant thing about our sport is that in places like this, the very beginner climbs on the same wall as an international, everyone in the same space together,” she says. “I always tell people if you can climb the stairs you can find a way to get to the top of the wall. Really, anyone can do it.”
Though not like she does. As she speaks, she pivots her body through 180 degrees, wraps her toes around a tiny plastic protuberance and hangs upside down from the wall like a bat.