In the first episode of season 1 of Buddy Check, Freddie tells her story of how she first learned to climb. Then, we dive into the preliminary findings from Céline Hequet’s PhD research on the climbing community. Céline is a sociology PhD student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is observing and interviewing rock climbers who identify as men about their experience with mentorship and mentoring others, their romantic relationships within climbing, and about how they perceive and understand their own masculinity. Her research will help to explain a pattern we’re seeing in climbing today, where many more women are participating in the sport and many attribute at least part of their mentorship to a heterosexual, romantic relationship.