Outdoor Retailer PreShow - Summer 2019 - 21

ai Lightner spent most
of his early childhood
getting into trouble.
He was a great kid,
smart and active, but he just
couldn't seem to stop climbing
things. When he was 4 years old,
his mother, Connie, walked outside
more than once to find Kai sitting
on top of their basketball hoop.
He would shimmy up the pole and
eat his lunch at the top. Connie
cut down the smallest trees in the
yard and left the big ones, because
she knew Kai would try to climb
them all and the flimsy ones might
break. The final straw came when
she found 6-year-old Kai hanging
from the top of a 50-foot flagpole
on Fayetteville State University's
campus, where she was working as
an assistant professor. A woman walking by wrote down the
address of Fayetteville's climbing
gym and handed it to Connie.
A few days after the flagpole
incident, Connie walked into The
Climbing Place with Kai and asked
the first person she saw, a kid
working the front desk, to show her
son how to rock climb. That gym
employee was Shane Messer, an
18-year-old who had just started
climbing six months earlier.
ULTIMATELY KAI LIGHTNER WOULD

become one of the best competition climbers in the world, thanks
in part to the coaching and mentoring of Messer. Kai is a seven-time
National Champion for sport
(lead) climbing, five-time National
Champion for bouldering, and fivetime Continental Champion (3x
sport, 1x bouldering, 1x combined).
At 14, he became the Youth World
Champion in lead climbing, and
he's ticked outdoor sport routes
up to 5.14d. He has also landed
top outdoor brands as sponsors,
including Adidas Outdoor, Black
Diamond, and Clif Bar.
In a sport with few African
American athletes, Kai's ascendancy is anomalous. Most kids
are exposed to climbing through
family or friends as role models.
A single mother working in the
demanding world of academia,
Connie Lightner, admittedly, was

never a rock climber. Meeting
Messer that day at the gym was a
pivotal moment-a spark that grew
into something much bigger.
When they first met, Connie
explained to Messer that Kai had a
lot of energy and difficulty focusing
on one thing. None of the sports he
had tried had clicked. She wanted to keep Kai out of trouble, but
most of all she wanted to channel
this climbing energy in a way that
wouldn't result in an ER visit. A
former semi-professional beach
volleyball player who had also tried
running, weightlifting, cycling,
football, and baseball as ways to
burn off his own endless energy,
Messer understood the unique
physical and mental challenge that
only climbing offered. He agreed
to show Kai around the gym.
The Climbing Place was old
school-just a handful of walls
with holds thrown up in random

with one thing," Kai says. "I could
focus on climbing for three hours
at a time. That's when I knew this
was the thing I wanted to do."
Messer saw Kai and Connie a
few more times at The Climbing
Place before he moved on to work
at a different gym across town,
Redpoint Climbing and Fitness.
Kai continued to climb, entering his first competition a few
months later. He loved being
part of a community united by
the same passion. "Plus, comps
were an outlet for my competitive
spirit," he says, "and I was always
going to give 110 percent."
Even at age 7, Kai loved having
a big crowd watching him climb.
Though at his first youth nationals
in the summer of 2007, it proved
to be a liability. Kai fell low on the
first climb because he kept turning
around to look at the spectators
and wave.

"I WENT FROM NOT BEING ABLE TO FOCUS
ON ANYTHING TO BEING OBSESSED WITH
ONE THING. I COULD FOCUS ON CLIMBING FOR THREE HOURS AT A TIME. THAT'S
WHEN I KNEW THIS WAS THE THING I
WANTED TO DO." - KAI LIGHTNER

order. There were no specific
routes to follow; instead, the
angle of the wall determined the
difficulty. Messer started young
Kai on the easiest wall, a slab
that was just less than vertical.
Lightner scurried up it, no problem. The next two walls, vertical
and slightly overhanging, were
no different. It was only when
Messer put Kai on the completely
horizontal roof that he was unable to get to the top. The 6-yearold tried over and over, but never
made it. Kai cried when it was
time to go. For days, he begged
his mother to go back to the gym.
A couple weeks later, he got to the
top of the roof. He was hooked.
"I went from not being able to focus on anything to being obsessed

"He was giving shoutouts to everyone in the audience, so he fell,"
Connie says. "He did much better
on the second one because he was
so mad he had fallen." Soon after,
Kai declared that he wanted to be
a national champion.
With no organized training
programs or elite teams near the
Lightners' home in Fayetteville-
and gym walls that topped out at
17 feet-Kai started working with
Emily Taylor, a coach out of Atlanta. Connie and Kai would spend
the weekend driving 5½ hours
to the city, training full days, and
then returning to North Carolina.
Taylor also taught Connie how to
coach Kai, how to create certain
routes, and how to execute different training plans. By age 10, Kai

reached his goal, standing atop the
podium as Youth Sport National
Champion. Next, he set his sights
on bouldering comps.
Taylor wasn't thrilled at the
idea of exposing young kids to the
high impact nature of the ropeless
discipline, so Kai and Connie went
to Triangle Rock Club in Raleigh,
where Messer was then working as
a routesetter.
"His coach in Atlanta [Taylor]
is the one who really gave him the
fundamentals and taught him how
to use his hips and body positions,"
Messer says, "but when he came to
me in Raleigh, he was starting to
go through puberty and needed to
be strong, too, not just use his hips
to be competitive."
Kai split his time between Taylor
in Atlanta and Messer in Raleigh,
focusing on different aspects of
training with each coach. In 2011,
Kai won his second Youth Sport
National Championship. He was
the only competitor to have topped
the last route.
Kai recalls standing on the
podium: "Everyone was cheering
and happy, but Shane was crying."
Messer was moving to Boston.
He'd become close to Kai, but also
to Connie. Growing up without
a mother of his own, Messer had
found a sense of family with the
Lightners. When Messer made
the move, Connie would call to
see how he was doing. "I talked to
Connie two to three times a week;
she was a mother figure to me,"
he says. "Connie and Kai are both
very loving. They take care of the
people who take care of them."
KAI'S NEXT GOAL WAS TO

become World Champion. But he
needed Messer. To keep their mentor-athlete relationship going, with
some 800 miles between them,
would be a significant challenge.
From ages 13 to 17, Kai would fly
to Boston for a week at a time and
train as much as possible, then go
home with a training plan to be
implemented by Connie. Kai says
the distance made him appreciate
Messer even more, and the strong
collaborative effort made for a
successful dynamic. In 2014, Kai

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Outdoor Retailer PreShow - Summer 2019

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