Ten years on one boulder, and a team of her own.
Alex Johnson won her first youth national title at twelve and her first adult national title at thirteen. In 2008 she became the first American to win a Bouldering World Cup on US soil. In 2010 she won another in Switzerland, which made her the first American with two Bouldering World Cup golds.
She stepped away from competition after taking silver at the 2015 national championships and spent the years that followed outside, putting up first ascents in the Southwest and making first female ascents up to V14. The Swarm, in Bishop, California, took ten years. She first tried it in 2011 and sent it in March 2021.
Coaching ran through all of it. Alex started teaching clinics as a teenager, and in February 2018 she took a full-time job as head coach of the youth team at Vertical Endeavors, the Minneapolis gym where she grew up climbing. She ran the Elite Team, sixteen climbers between ten and eighteen. She has written that the kids’ hunger to learn got her climbing for fun again, and that led to training, a run at the Tokyo 2020 team, and eventually The Swarm.
Her own coaching business, DELPHI Climbing, grew out of that. Alex builds personalized training plans in six, nine, twelve and eighteen-week blocks, with competition strategy, movement analysis and mindset work. The climbers she has coached include youth and open national champions, World Cup competitors and Olympians, along with V14 climbers and weekend regulars pushing their own limits. More at delphiclimbing.com.
Alex is a member of the Rhino Pro Team.
