EUGENIE LEE

Eugenie Lee was just 13 years old when she landed a spot on the British Juniors climbing team. Ten years on, her hobby-turned-career has seen her travel the world and compete at the highest level. Alongside climbing, Lee works as a model, fronting campaigns for the likes of Nike and Dazed.

 To celebrate the launch of Nike’s 247 range – a collection that takes you seamlessly through the moments in between movement, stretching and flexing for the everyday – Lee shares a day in her life, from cats to climbing, cooking to reading, and the pieces that accompany her from climbing wall to meditation and everything in between.

 This is 24 hours with Eugenie Lee.

The first thing I do when I wake up…
… is to cuddle my cats – Hercules (my boyfriend named that one) and Yakult (like the little probiotic drink) - have apple tea and meditate in bed. My parents used to go backpacking in Turkey a lot when I was younger, and I would drink this [apple tea] everywhere I went. It’s part of my routine now.

I open my doors so that cold air comes in…
… and I start my Headspace routine. It starts with some breath work; you start to focus on how that feels in your body and how your body’s feeling and your breath is moving. It releases a lot of happiness, I think.

My coach wants me to meditate for at least 10 minutes every day.
 Some days I don’t do it… I think some people are like, ‘Oh meditation, it’s 10 minutes of breathing a day,’ but it’s not that easy to get it done.

I’m a bad morning person. But we’re quite lucky…
… we live in a high-rise flat and we have floor-to-ceiling windows, so when the sun rises, we get the full view. To be honest, that gets me up in the morning; I’m ready to start the day if the sun is on me. But if it’s not, I love training and I love going climbing, so I usually look at my training plan or I see if I’ve got any messages from my coach and that normally gets me ready to go.

I like the feeling of movement. I think I’m a creative person, and climbing can be quite creative in the way you decide to contort yourself, to make a new fill easier. A lot of people think climbing is brute strength - like finger strength, being able to do pull-ups - but it’s really not. It’s a lot about finding the efficient movement – I like that.

My main creative outlets are climbing and my home.
I love furniture, I love furniture design, and I love collecting little things that make me happy every day. And I guess having a home that feels like a still life. I grew up in a house that was very much like that and therefore I’ve continued.

My style is eclectic.
I like lots of different things and different things make me feel more on different days. My clothes and style tastes bring together lots of different feelings. I wouldn’t say I’ve got one particular style; it’s just every day it’s something that makes me feel me. Sometimes they’re really colourful, sometimes I like to wear really baggy clothes, sometimes I like to wear more tight clothes. I’m dressing for the mood.

I don’t have any style icons…
… because I’m not trying to be someone else. I’m trying to feel the most me I can feel.

Comfort is the thing I look for most when working out.
I hate that feeling when the fabric bunches up in certain places. I’ve definitely gone through a lot of clothes and trial and error.

I enjoy makeup but I don’t wear a lot. I’m also quite conscious that I’m in dusty, chalky walls all day and that gets quite cemented on your face. I try not to cover my face too much because I feel like natural textures and spots can be quite beautiful or nice to have. I try to look put together but not cover what I look like.

In modelling they cover your face so much…
… because obviously you’re doing a 10-hour day changing so you do need that heavy coverage but it’s nice to feel exactly how I look as well. People always have those ideas of how they want you to look for a shoot and then it’s not like it’s not you but it’s different from what you look like. It’s a version of [me] but not quite, so I like to just keep myself me.

As a kid, I always climbed things.
I would climb the house, I’d climb trees… so it just felt very natural. I used to go to this place in Stoke Newington [London] called The Pirate’s Playhouse. It was this jungle gym with slides and ball pits, and right next to that was The Castle Climbing Centre. I think I just wandered into the wrong building and my mum signed us up there. Well, she signed my dad up and then we joined my dad later.

My entire training group is very inspiring.
I look up to all of them and the nice thing about climbing is, like everything, everyone does everything so differently that you can learn a bit from everyone. My parents inspire me. I used to not want to be like them at all and I feel like the older I get the more I absolutely love who they are. When I look back on the time [as a teenager], I wish I didn’t spend that much time rejecting them; they’re great.

I love a sausage sandwich.
On days I go to Leeds (I train in Leeds and live in Sheffield), I’ll have a sausage sandwich in this builder’s café. Other days, I have Kanji, which is a Chinese porridge with rice – like a savoury porridge – that fuels me. I put rice in the rice cooker and use sesame seed oil, salt, pepper, spring onions and you could use century eggs – like a fermented egg – and then I usually have chicken or pork with that as well.

I do a lot of flexibility and agility work.
I draw a lot of inspiration from ballet dancers and yoga to create that. We do a lot of gym-based conditioning; lots of heavyweight pull-ups and that kind of thing. I always do some sort of flexibility and mobility before I start climbing. And then on the days I’ve not finished training too late, I do flexibility work in the evening.

Straight after our training sessions we do conditioning…
… like gym work, and finger board – it’s what we train our finger strength on. We do it maybe three times a week. You literally just hang on it and sometimes you use weights, or you do a longer amount of hanging - it depends on what you’re training at that moment. Feet are something that are really rejected in climbing, but they’re such a vital part. That’s why I’ve been doing a lot of ballet, a lot of ankle strengthening. I think climbing’s still quite a new sport and we’re still figuring out what the best ways of training are…

 We fit out feet into really tiny shoes…
… which is quite unhealthy. Often climber’s feet are overlapping in your shoes, so I’ve been trying to wear open or wider shoes so you can spread your toes and be healthier.

Being on the British [climbing] team from a young age…
… and being able to travel to countries with a team rather than my parents was always very fun, very cool. A lot of those friends I made as a kid I still have now. It feels like you’ve grown up with them. The friendships I’ve made have been highlights. 

The most beautiful place I’ve climbed outdoors would be South Africa.
The rock’s this red sandstone-looking rock - it’s really stunning. I was a dirt bag for a couple of weeks, and I loved it. I used to wake up in the mornings and go for a walk with this weird farm dog that hung around the campsite and we’d go to the boulders and the waterfalls. It was such a good time.

With modelling I’ve travelled a lot.
One of the times I went to Hong Kong, that’s my dad’s country. I was working there for three months, and I think it would have been a really lonely time if I hadn’t had climbing. I was able to go straight into a climbing community there and everyone was so welcoming. I made quite a few friends and that’s been something nice to have from climbing.

Before the last three years, modelling and climbing didn’t really go together.
They’re such different worlds, it felt like I was playing a character when I was modelling, which wasn’t a bad thing – it was fun in a way. I got to be a different person ad I got to separate it from the stress of competition climbing. But now, I guess with climbing becoming a popular sport, there’s people in the creative industry seeing it as something different than the climbers see it, for fashion but also for movement, it’s been interesting. I’m not sure where it’s going to go but it’s meant I’ve had a nice break from either side whenever I needed to: I can escape the world of modelling through climbing, and I can escape my climbing struggles through modelling.

When we get in from training, we’re absolutely exhausted.
We walk through the door, and we sit on the sofa – just like that – for 10 minutes. Then once we’ve got the energy, we’re like now I’m starving, I need to get food into me, so we usually cook. Recently my boyfriend and I have been enjoying reading. So, food, cats, we watch a film, maybe read some books.

The last book I read was Three Women by Lisa Tadaeo.
It’s probably one of my favourite reads as an adult. I’ve got a few books I really want to read, one of them is Self Help by Lorrie Moore, and there’s a Japanese author Mieko Kawakami and the book’s called Breast and Eggs – it looks really interesting. I’ve gotten really into female authors at the moment. I think in a way, the way they think and talk about love resonates a lot more with me. I guess in the past a lot of books about mental health and stuff have been for men, but they haven’t really talked much about the struggles women go through. But now that there are a lot more women authors, I’m getting more into things written by women.

I grew up on a lot of Chinese and central American food.
I make this thing called mango chicken. I cook mango and chicken together and pair it with guacamole and some veg. I also love a traditional Hong Kong soup. It’s got carrot and sweet potato, pork and orange peel, and lots of spices. It’s super good for you - or it feels good for you – it’s got lots of vitamins.

My favourite part of the day is actually the middle of the night…
My cat wakes me up at three or four AM. She comes under the covers and cuddles for the rest of the night, and she sticks her paws out from the covers and looks like a human. That’s one part of my day that I’m never upset about. Training can go badly, and I’ll be upset, so it’s not always my favourite part of the day, and some mornings there’s no sun and it’s grey… but when she [the cat] comes in and comes under the covers with me, that’s my favourite part.