From cook to elite climber: a Liuzhou native’s rise from ‘making rice balls and killing salmon’ to becoming one of China’s best
- Lu Chunfeng’s nearly decade-long journey has taken her from making snacks in a karaoke bar to joining the ranks of China’s elite athletes
- No stranger to hardship, Lu says the happiness she finds in climbing is more important than any material possessions
Climbing is fast becoming one of China’s most popular sports, and hundreds of climbing gyms have sprung up in first-tier cities where white-collar professionals can afford the membership and the equipment, which can be more expensive than in Europe.
But climbing is not just the preserve of the nation’s more affluent urbanites, and one of the country’s best female climbers is a cook from Liuzhou, in the Guangxi Autonomous Region.
Lu Chunfeng, or Xiaolu to her friends because of her small stature, first discovered climbing almost a decade ago. Now, Lu is an elite climber who not only makes a living from the sport, but is aiming to climb a 5.14 difficulty grade cliff that only three women in China have achieved.
Guangxi has an abundance of limestone cliffs, and in 2013 the 28-year-old’s friends took her climbing. “I was not really afraid, but I was a little chubby, I have never done any sports before,” she says. “I thought climbing was really fun, but I did not expect to keep it up for long.”
One day, Lu froze with fear, too afraid to commit to a difficult move, but “once I did it … this feeling of achievement … wow, I can do this!”