"Privately I'm also a lead-climber type"

On April 18 Angy Eiter, 22, is beginning the new season at the Boulder WC in Hall, Austria. Why walls are like books, what she’s expecting from 2008 and where her lust for adventure might take her a few years down the line she disclosed in an interview.

“A route is,” you say “like a book.” But how do learn to read?

Through experience. You have to climb a lot of different routes until you become aware of what the route planner was really thinking – which moves and movements he wants to see you do. But like a book, you can also interpret each one yourself, of course. Then you say to yourself: he could have meant the move in this or that way. But I can play out my individual strengths if I solve the problem a different way.

Are there routes that are like thrillers and others like romance novels?

Hmm ... let’s say that there are some that are more harmonious and others that demand choppier moves. My favorites are the ones that are challenging technically and strength-wise, which you can still solve fluidly.

Staying with that image, do you expect light or heavy literature at the season opener in Hall ...?

It’s definitely going to be brutally difficult. Bouldering isn’t my specialty discipline, you know, and the competition is going to be very strong.

Are you also a lead-climber rather than a bouldering type in other areas of life?

Yes. I’m more a thinker, the disciplined one. Bouldering is more about spontaneity, explosiveness and risk. That’s not really me.

At the beginning of April you went through two days of tests at the Red Bull training center in Thalgau. Are we going to see the fittest Angy that ever was?

I’m very happy with my performance tests – whereby the physical values don’t mean you can transfer them one-to-one to performing well on the wall. My fitness is more helpful to me between contests; that I can recuperate much faster, for example.

What goals have you set yourself this year?

The highlights are the eight World Cup events, the EC and the Rock Master in Arco. In these events I want to climb the best I can: process-oriented rather than product-oriented, so to speak. Because good results come automatically if your performance has been top-class.

On April 24 the extreme climber Stefan Glowacz is embarking on a seven-week expedition on Baffin Island where he wants to climb an undiscovered wall far from any kind of civilization. On the way there he’ll be confronted with cold, the most adverse weather conditions and dangerous polar bears. Does this category of your sport fascinate you at all? Or does it leave you cold?