At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking I didn’t look like your “average” rock-climber. Firstly, I’m a woman. Secondly, I’m fat, and as a fat woman, it’s been made very clear to me over the years that it was almost unnatural for me to exercise. I’ve had a deeply troubling relationship with exercise – from being singled out at school for my slow cross-country times as one of the bigger girls, to exercising addictively to fit into my wedding dress. Exercise for me as a fat woman was never meant to be for pleasure; for my kind, it had to be for weight loss. I couldn’t possibly go out on a run and not obsessively be counting how many calories I’d burnt. I simply wasn’t allowed to.

And yet… here I was, at a bouldering centre. Subtly adjusting my sports bra to cover my pillowing side-boob, I looked up at the wall in front of me which was peppered with multi-coloured handholds; some had rough edges like sandpaper while others were glossy and smooth. What they all had in common was that they were adorned with white, dusty chalk and fingerprints as if from a crime scene. I had to crane my neck to see the top – but I was going to climb it.