Those who know Erica Meister are most likely not surprised by this. She is softness edged with iron. Her tiny frame — five-foot-three — supports a six pack and sinewy, muscle-rippled arms. She mutters devastatingly incisive quips so quietly they almost go unnoticed. Her hair is compacted daily into a tight, straight Dutch braid that stretches in one thin line down to her waist. The most fragile thing about her is her eyes, large and cornflower-blue. I wanted to, so I did it is a way of life for her. One night she pulled out a full-size woolen hoop skirt from her closet. It was sewn into a fifties-style cone shape reaching from hip to ankle, and spanned a two-foot radius on the floor. “I was sad last winter,” she said, “so I sewed this hoop skirt.” The silent follow-up: Because why the heck not?

For her, speed-climbing is a long hard grind followed by ten hot seconds of catharsis. “You don’t consciously realize what you’re doing. You’re just relying on your body [to know] what to do. I remember very little [about races]. I remember starting and I remember finishing.” As a result, a considerable amount of self-trust is required. To think too hard is to choke — to think too little is to become sloppy. “One of my biggest problems is my mental game. Speed climbing is very mental. It’s about being in the competition, being in the heat of the moment, and doing what you need to do. Which sounds very easy, but it isn’t.”

When she first began to train herself, she asked around her gym for advice. “[I was told] ‘You get out what you put in,’ and that is probably the single most important piece of advice I’ve ever received,” she says. At first she didn’t take the advice so seriously. When asked about her early climbing days, this is what she regrets. “I think if anything, I would have given up more,” she says. “When I was younger, I didn’t take climbing as seriously as I now wish I had.” Now, it’s obvious that she’s committed to putting it in. She’s joined the Stanford climbing team, but most of her training is still self-administered. She has brought two black weighted vests from home. Weekdays after class, you can find Erica trembling in plank position in one of those vests, or doing pull-ups from her lofted bed, waiting for the thirty-second timer on her phone to go off. The fridge is stocked full with celery, Tofurkey, and carrots. She wakes up at 8 AM to work out each day, and practices self-studied meditation in the hours before sleep. Erica is “putting it in”, hard.

And she’s expecting results. “I certainly hope I’m not at the peak of what I can do,” she says. There’s a strong possibility she isn’t. For one, sport climbing has just been added to the 2020 Olympic roster as an exhibition sport, and Erica is a strong contender. “Right now, I’m on a path that is gonna take me to a lot of competitions and is going to keep the Olympics in the back of my mind,” she says. Then she backs up. “Obviously, a lot can change in four years… and there’s lots of opportunities here at Stanford that I want to explore.”

Still, the future looks bright. No matter what, she’ll still be doing pushups on the dorm-room floor, staying up late for climbing practices and “putting it in” on the daily; no matter what, she’s excited to see where those six bedside books will take her.