A year and a half ago, Caroline Winstel entered a climbing gym for the first time in her life. Today, she trains three times a week in that same gym — Climb Time Oakley — as a nationally ranked adaptive climber, member of Team USA Paraclimbing and advocate for accessible adaptive sports.

Winstel is training tirelessly to compete in her second USA Paraclimbing Nationals on March 26 and 27. Birmingham, Alabama, is hosting this year’s event at High Point Climbing gym, where Winstel’s performance could send her to compete a second time in the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) Paraclimbing World Cup.

Winstel thought her first competitive climbing experience would be a one-time thing, and it almost was when she mistakenly assumed her fourth-place rank in the 2021 Nationals wouldn’t qualify.

“I thought I had missed my shot,” she says. “And two months out, I was on the list and I was like what happened? Turned out you didn’t have to be top three to get an invitation. I had two months to train for my first international competition and I dug in.”

Going into the competition as an individual competitor allowed her status to fly under the radar briefly, but didn’t stop her from competing. She placed fourth at the IFSC Paraclimbing World Cup last year and says the sport redefined her relationship with herself and her body.

“Climbing has given me this opportunity to see my body and not hate it,” Winstel says. “For so long I hated my body, I felt like it betrayed me and let me down and all these really negative assumptions. So I made my goals for this year to love my body and love climbing to be priority number one. I can strengthen the muscles that will strengthen and that’s really cool to see.”

Winstel has an acquired physical disability that manifested when she was 18. She was a volleyball player at Tusculum University in…