World Champion Climber and Mother on Balancing Two Callings

Words by Emily Harrington

As a professional climber, I make appearances and do press year-round, and I genuinely do enjoy meeting people and having conversations. However, there is one question that always makes me cringe, which is some variation of “so now that you are a mom, do you still climb/since you are a mom, do you miss climbing/are you retiring from climbing now that you have a toddler?”

There was never a question that I was going to keep climbing. I’m always shocked that people think it’s an either or situation. You can be a mom and a climber—things just might change a little bit. 

I met my husband, Adrian Ballinger, on Mount Everest, near Camp 2, around 22k feet. He made me an espresso and we started talking. No one feels good at that elevation but later on back at basecamp we were able to connect. I moved from Boulder and we built a business and life together in Tahoe. 

We knew we wanted to have a baby but the timing of when wasn’t easy and it was hard to understand when and how we could make it happen. I was working on climbing the Golden Gate Route on El Capitan in under 24 hours, a multi-year project requiring a lot of training and sacrifice, and several nights spent sleeping in our van or on the side of a 3000 feet tall cliff—a lifestyle not exactly conducive to parenthood.

As an elite athlete I had to ask myself if I was prepared to sacrifice the time and energy it takes to be pregnant, deliver, nurse, and then get back into elite athlete shape. Would I be able to come back and feel like I used to on the wall? Would I be aged out of my climbing prime? Did I have time to push off having a baby for two years? My male climbing colleagues didn’t have to think like this—they just had children with their partners; maybe they took time off to be at home or did less expeditions but they didn’t grapple with the enormous physical and mental toll pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum demand from a woman.

In 2020, I became the first woman to climb the Golden Gate route on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in less than 24 hours. It was a major life accomplishment and having that dream secured made it easier to wrap my head around motherhood. It felt like there would be no better time to take that next step.

When I was pregnant with my son; I didn’t stop climbing, or skiing, or training; but I did have to adapt the way in which I did those things and at what intensity. I was also convinced at the beginning that pregnancy and motherhood wouldn’t change who I was or what I chose to do with my life, but as my pregnancy progressed, I felt the slight shifts taking place in my psyche. I shied away from taking risks I used to not think twice about and once my son was born, I found myself not wanting to leave him for long periods of time to go climbing.  Instead of mourning the “loss” of myself I felt pretty comfortable and content with the change. It was as if the very thing I was afraid of (motherhood changing me) did in fact happen, but I was at peace with it in a way I could have never predicted.

Breastfeeding was probably the biggest surprise in terms of how much energy and time it took from me that I did not foresee. It took so much time, was exhausting and overwhelming, and I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to regain my fitness again while nursing. I was so frustrated that my body wasn’t bouncing back as quickly as I had hoped. As a result, I fought harder to get fit, under-fueled myself in an effort to “get back” to where I was and ended up even more drained. In the end I needed to give myself more time and rest in order to still feed my son and stay healthy. After I finished breastfeeding my fitness returned and so did my energy, but no one talks about how hard that period of time is. I wish I had known.

I was lucky to have friends and peers to go through the parenthood journey with. One of my climbing partners, Alex Honnold, and his wife Sanni McCandless Honnold had a child at around the same time as we did, and the director of my film Girl Climber and longtime friend Jon Glassberg’s twin daughters were born around that time as well. So, there were friends from the community to lean on, to share the experience with, and learn from. 

These days my outdoor pursuits involve my son as much as we can, and I am slowly doing more without him as well, because climbing and skiing don’t always work well with a toddler in tow. We are doing our best to raise our son outdoors. He is only three and he has traveled all over the world with us. We took him skiing with us in Patagonia this summer, we go hiking, and he loves to be with us when we climb. I made the decision that several month-long expeditions to uncharted mountains or up and down Everest aren’t something I am going to do anymore or at least not for the foreseeable future. I’m a climber and a mom, but those things aren’t mutually exclusive. If anything, they are a perfect balance.

Emily Harrington is one of the most decorated climbers in the world, having scaled some of the biggest walls and peaks on the globe. She is a five-time national sport climbing champion, two-time North American champion in the sport and was runner up in the Sport Climbing World Championships. Emily free-climbed El Capitan in Yosemite in six days. She has summited Everest, speed climbed Cho Oyu (and skied down) and climbed other high-altitude peaks in Nepal, China, Myanmar, Crimea and Morocco.

Harrington, who is a North Face sponsored athlete, became the first woman to free climb ‘Golden Gate’ on El Capitan in under 24 hours. Her film, Girl Climber, follows her journey leading into that accomplishment and is available on platforms now. In 2026, Emily served as the on-air co-announcer for Alex Honnold's Skyscraper Live. When not climbing, she lives in Tahoe with her husband, the pro ski mountaineer Adrian Ballinger, and her three year old son, Aaro, and their rescue dog, CAT.