The Impact Driver Podcast has featured routesetters who are also gym directors, competition chiefs, nonprofit founders and industry veterans. This episode features its own host. After more than three years of putting guests in the hot seat, Holly Chen finally sat down in it herself, getting interviewed by Head Routesetter of the Spot Max Donovan.
Chen works a dual career of both routesetter and writer/journalist. She sets at the Spot Climbing Gyms in Colorado, where she was among the founding setters of Death Moth, a competition set by and for women, nonbinary and gender nonconforming climbers. As a journalist, she reports on the intersection between adventure sports, health, culture and technology. Her bylines have appeared in Alpinist Magazine, Climbing, the Himalayan Journal, Desire Lines Collective and Climbing Business Journal. Chen’s writing has also been shortlisted by the International Sports Press Association.
In this episode, Chen talks about pattern recognition, compositional decision making, the ceiling of the routesetting industry, and what it actually takes to stick around in a profession that gives you plenty of reasons to leave.
General Topics Covered
- The unlikely overlap between reading, writing and routesetting: why pattern recognition is a skill that connects all three
- How literary structure maps onto competition and commercial setting, and why you should understand the rules before you consider breaking some
- Why competition setting feels more like journalism and commercial setting feels more like fiction writing
- Where to experiment and where not to: the case for taking risks in commercial setting before bringing ideas into a comp
- The ceiling of the routesetting industry—how low it actually is, and why the industry being relatively young is both a limitation and an opportunity
- Adjacent careers in the climbing world and why the most interesting paths are often the ones nobody has walked yet
- What many former competitive climbers bring to setting and what they don’t
- How to build a more diverse setting team and why intention moves the needle
- Why camaraderie might be the most underrated retention tool in the industry
- Setting pet peeves, the editor-headsetter analogy, and why being direct is a skill worth cultivating
Show Notes
- Find Holly Chen on Instagram and more of Holly’s work
- The Spot Gyms and the Spot Routesetting
- Death Moth
- The hero’s journey story structure
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Climbing Business Journal Gym Map
- Lessons From the Sharp End of Modern Setting – CBJ Podcast with Mike Bockino
- Put a Drop in the Bucket When You Can – CBJ Podcast with Taylor Fragomeni
- You Can Strip My Boulder – CBJ Podcast with Blake Green
Closing Notes
If you’d like to nominate someone as a guest next guest, have a topic you want to see us tackle or have questions, we’d love for you to reach out. You can find our pitch form here.
The Impact Driver Podcast is a production of the Climbing Business Journal. Today’s episode is sponsored by Rungne, Cascade Speciality, Trango, the Climbing Wall Association and Walltopia. It was edited and produced by Holly Yu Tung Chen, Megan Cheek, Scott Rennak and Joe Robinson, and our theme music is by Devin Dabney.
All photos below are courtesy of Holly Chen.
