After dislocating her shoulder seven months ago, senior Annika Roberts can finally continue her rock climbing passion.

“I was doing this move called a ‘right hand Gaston,’ where you’re moving out and grabbing sideways. So you’re pulling sideways on a sharp sort of crimp, so it’s not a super good hold, but you’re pulling sideways,” Annika said. “Then you’re going to pull up on that shoulder and go out, so I was trying that move,” Roberts said.

Despite having done this move many times, she felt something go wrong with her shoulder.

“I jumped for the crimp, my hand caught it, I stuck on, I got my feet situated, and I pulled up onto my shoulder to grab the next hold or rock,” she said. “I just heard a really loud pop, and I felt something shift wrong in my shoulder. It was actually four pops; it sounded like a glowstick, and I just felt a whole lot of pain. Then I fell about 10 feet and hit the pad.”

Her coach, Catherine Berman, saw Annika get hurt and jumped to assess the injury.

“She was sitting there for a while, and we had heard the crack, so we knew something was wrong,” Berman said. “ So we asked her if she was okay, and she said she wasn’t. “

Two weeks after her injury, she started physical therapy, hopeful that she would get back to rock climbing soon. However, several months later, she was still recovering.

“I had a lot of people telling me that it should be going faster than this, it shouldn’t be taking this long, or it wasn’t that bad,” Annika said. “It was very discouraging to be told ‘only two weeks more’ of physical therapy and then do two months more of physical therapy. It’s just very frustrating to watch other people get better when you’re facing a setback.”

Watching Annika endure the lengthy recovery process, her sister, freshman Karina Roberts, feels that Annika’s injury has affected her physically and mentally.

“Physically, it’s been incredibly difficult for her to go through physical therapy and rehabilitate her shoulder to where she once was as a climber,” Karina said. “There’s also a mental aspect to it, too. I think it’s been hard for her to get back on the wall and overcome the mental block she’s faced since the injury,”

But through the support of her family and friends, Annika was able to find the motivation to power through her rehabilitation.

“I would say my friends and family helped me get through it. I knew my friends would be there when I got back and that they wanted me to get back to climbing,” she said. “And I really love rock climbing, and I knew that recovery was not an easy or fun thing to do, but that it was a setback that I was willing to try to overcome to get back to rock climbing.”

Eventually, she began climbing again but it came with a dose of hesitancy that something similar could happen again.

“I started climbing again about seven months after the injury. I was a mixture of both scared and excited,” Annika said. “When I injured it, there was no forewarning; it was like a freak accident. I can’t think of anything I was doing wrong that would have caused it. So I was afraid of climbing again because if I wasn’t doing anything wrong the first time, what would stop it from happening again?”

Karina believes that this experience has changed Annika’s approach to rock climbing.

“She’s become a better climber since her injury,” she said. “She may not be as technically proficient, but she’s more resilient and passionate.”

Though she hasn’t gotten to the same level before the injury, she is optimistic that she will get there soon.

“I’m definitely not back at the skill I was at; I’m on my way there. I’m getting there. There are just some movements that I am just not ready to do yet with my shoulder that I would’ve been doing eight months ago before I was injured,” Annika said. “But I would definitely say that there is a light at the end of the tunnel because I am climbing, and I’m climbing at a higher level than I was when I first started climbing again, and I think the progress is going faster.”

Though her injury was unfortunate, Annika believes this experience has a silver lining.

“I’ve learned that you don’t get what you want all of the time, and in life, there will be setbacks,” she said. “You just have to decide how much it means to you and how much work you’re willing to put in to do something, and that sometimes it’s a longer road than you want.”