On February 26, 2017, Margo Hayes, 19, became the first woman to successfully climb La Rambla in Siurana, Spain. La Rambla is a 5.15a-rated climb, which is considered to be the hardest rating possible. (Climbing grading continues to evolve, but as of spring 2017, a 5.15a route is the most difficult for women.) By 'sending' that route (meaning, in climber lingo, successfully climbing it) Hayes has made a nice crack in the glass ceiling of the typically male-dominated professional climbing world.
“I can’t even remember having thoughts. I was so joyful and felt disbelief. I had to have a friend pinch me,” Hayes tells SELF about conquering La Rambla. To celebrate, she took her friends and fellow climbers Jon Cardwell and Matty Hong, as well as photographer Greg Mionske, out for burgers—sounds like your typical teenager’s celebration.
But Hayes is not your typical teenager. The Colorado native has been climbing for nine years and can now count tackling La Rambla as her biggest accomplishment yet. And as a professional climber sponsored by The North Face, the opportunities that lie ahead of her are endless. Combined with her commitment and work ethic, it seems like nothing can get in her way.
SELF chatted with Hayes to find out what everyday life is like when you’re a young woman making rock-climbing history. Spoiler alert: It's a little different than most 19-year-olds you probably know.
Many of the big climbing competitions are in Europe, so Hayes now splits her time between her home state of Colorado and France. She’s had an apartment in the latter since September 2016 and plans to stay through October 2017.
Hayes’s first meal of the day normally consists of oats or oatmeal and a protein shake. Her go-to recipe: overnight oats with almond milk and flax seeds. When she’s not in the mood to prep one of those ahead of time, she’ll whip up plain ol' oatmeal or drink a Vega protein shake—always the chocolate flavor, she says.
“Some days I’ll be at the gym for hours, climbing and running or conditioning,” Hayes says. Whether she’s in Colorado or France, she sticks with her base training, which is all the indoor gym exercises that prep her for climbing. She doesn’t often use the moving climbing wall (think of a treadmill, but vertical), but instead will sometimes work on endurance by climbing up the regular rock wall for 35 minutes, climbing back down, resting, and repeating again.
When Hayes is in France, she also adds a lot of walking to her daily routine. She can walk anywhere from five to 10 miles a day, she says. She walks to her French classes, to the gym, and to the grocery store. No matter where she is, Hayes says she always listens to her body, “and on days I feel like I need to take it easy, I take it easy.”
She doesn’t work with a strength or conditioning coach (although she works with coach Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou on Team ABC in Boulder), so she’s on her own to mix up her workout routine. “I mostly work with my own body weight. Sometimes I’ll do something with lighter weights or machines, but really not very often,” she says. To keep her arms strong, she'll sometimes do pull-ups with additional weight.
When she’s in France, Hayes says she can find an outdoor climb anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours away. (Even getting to La Rambla took just a 45-minute flight.) She’ll meet up with friends, hop on a train or bus, and practice her outdoor climbing.
“I think outdoor climbing really complements competition climbing, and the reverse,” she says.
“Pretty much every night, I make a big salad,” Hayes says. “The first time people see me eat dinner, they’re like, ‘You eat that whole thing?’” She admits that she eats super healthy, but she eats a lot of food. Her go-to salad add-ons include salmon or chicken, plus brown rice or quinoa. She also loves sweet potatoes, avocado, and chia seeds.
With her surroundings drastically changing from Colorado to France, how she preps her food depends on where she is. “When I’m home in Boulder, most of the time we cook in, or on the grill, but in France my apartment is so small that when I cooked salmon, it smelled for weeks.” She leans more heavily on the vegetables that are in season and is open to trying new veggies she might not get at home—hearts of palm is a typical one she stumbled upon in France.
We all know it’s best to put our phones away before we go to bed, but Hayes has learned it’s even more important for her to ditch technology to get focused before climbing. “Sometimes [social media] can be too much coming in and it’s a distraction. It’s easier to ground yourself when all that is not going on.”
Leading up to a competition, she also consciously drinks more water and eats really healthy so that she’ll feel at the top of her game.
As a sleep meditator myself, I was thrilled to hear that Margo does it too. “I definitely go through phrases where I don’t meditate for a little while and then have the realization that I want to ground myself some more, so I get back into it,” Hayes says. She was introduced to meditation when she was very young—because of her competitive nature—by her mom’s friends. They saw she was very high energy and competitive as a child and could use a little mental breather. “That helped me learn how to focus on myself, so now that’s not an issue for me."
Meditation is helpful for relaxing and unwinding, but Hayes says it also helps her get in the zone before competing. She mostly focuses on her breathing and says it grounds her and helps her visualize. “It’s an amazing tool for me.”
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