Little Words Project, the original word bracelet brand celebrating the power of kindness, is proud to have created an exclusive collection with Gold Medal gymnast, NY Times Best Selling author, and mental health advocate: Laurie Hernandez. While enduring yet another grueling training season, Laurie simultaneously designed ten bracelet styles featuring words that represent her unique personal journey in and outside of the gym. Laurie hopes that these wearable reminders will help others feel inspired and empowered on a daily basis. 

“Little Words Project was the perfect partner to bring words that mean so much to me straight to those who need them most. I hope this collection helps inspire others to be brave, have resilience, and to always be kind no matter what,” explained Hernandez. 

Little Words Project is honored to partner with Laurie. “Our brand has always been about lifting people up and starting a kindness movement through the power of words. Laurie is the epitome of everything we stand for, and we couldn’t be more grateful to have worked on this partnership with her for our customers-––both existing and new ones,” said Adriana Carrig, CEO and founder of Little Words Project. 

The collection will also have a philanthropic component to honor a cause that is very near and dear to Laurie’s heart. She has been known for her activism in the mental health space. On May 17th, a portion of the net profits from the “Grow As You Go” bracelet will be donated to One Mind––an organization that promotes research and advocacy to enable all individuals facing mental health challenges to build healthy, productive lives.

The Laurie Hernandez x Little Words Project Collection will launch on May 10, 2021. Shop the collection at LittleWordsProject.com or Nordstrom.com. For more information on the campaign and to see exclusive video footage including a vlog from Laurie, follow Little Words Project on IG. 

To download hi-res images and campaign video click here. 

About Little Words Project 

Little Words Project is on a mission to spread kindness with the power of words. As the original word bracelet brand, Little Words Project is internationally recognized for their handcrafted word bracelets and their loyal community of customers. Each bracelet is meant to be worn, shared, and tracked during its lifetime. For more information, visit www.littlewordsproject.com.

Climbing Magazine

Brooke Raboutou grabs a 23mm edge—just 9/10 of an inch—with her left hand and pulls her chin above the wooden hangboard at the Mesa Rim Climbing Center in San Diego, California. Raboutou locks off with one arm, and then lowers slowly back down. It’s early December 2019, the tail-end of the fall semester of her sophomore year as a marketing major at the University of San Diego where she has maintained a 3.8 GPA. As she rests between pull-ups, Raboutou quizzes herself on economics with flash cards. With the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on the horizon—for which she became the first-ever American competitor to qualify in the inaugural climbing competition—Raboutou can’t afford any downtime.

Of course, in the months that followed, the world was thrown into coronavirus havoc. Climbing gyms, including Mesa Rim, would close. The Olympics would be postponed until summer 2021. (For more on the Games, visitclimbing.com/competition.) And Raboutou, age 19, and her fellow Olympians would be forced to wait another year for their shot at a medal (all climbers who qualified will maintain their berth in 2021). But all this upheaval would not change three key truths: Brooke Raboutou is the first American climber to become an Olympian. She is perpetually busy and trains with persistence, whether in San Diego, at the USA Climbing Training Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, or quarantined at home in Boulder, Colorado. And she’s still aiming for Olympic hardware.

Born in April 2001 to professional climbers Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou and Didier Raboutou, Brooke started climbing at two years old, scrambling up angled structures that her father built. Brooke’s brother, Shawn, three years her senior, was climbing too, well on his way to becoming one of Brooke’s biggest influences. The Raboutous spent every summer climbing in Southern France, near Didier’s hometown of Toulouse. In the fall and spring, the family would return to their home in Boulder.

At age 11, Brooke became one of the initial members of ABC Kids Climbing, a youth climbing program that began in the Aughts in an upstairs room at the Boulder Rock Club and now has its own 7,200-square-foot training center nearby in town. Robyn, who won multiple World Cup competitions in Europe throughout the 1990s and an overall World Cup championship for the 1995 lead season, coached the team. Meanwhile, Didier, a former French national competition climber and among the initial 1980s wave of French sport climbers to redpoint 5.14, retired from competing and became the chief designer of ABC Kids’ spatial training offerings—think obstacle courses, but for young climbers. Brooke climbed with an elite group, including Margo Hayes, Megan Mascarenas, Emily Harrington, Katie Brown, and Shawn. (An impressive climber himself, Shawn, now 22, made the first ascent of Off the Wagon Sit[V16] in Val Bavona, Switzerland, in 2018 and repeated Rocky Mountain National Park’s Creature from the Black Lagoon [V16] in 2018 and Rocklands, South Africa’s Finnish Line[V15] in 2019.)

As a child, Brooke climbed nearly every day. “What stood out the most with both Shawn and Brooke was their passion for the sport and their desire to try hard and take competitions seriously even at the early age of six,” Robyn recalls of her children’s focus at gym competitions around Colorado. The payoffs came quickly: Brooke became the youngest person to climb 5.14b when she sent Welcome to Tijuana in Rodellar, Spain, at 11 years old. Around the same time, she also sent Dead Serious (V10) in Hueco Tanks, Texas. Other accomplishments included Southern Smoke(5.14c) in the Red River Gorge and Fragile Steps (V13) in Rocklands.

Even though she climbs hard outside, Brooke has always loved competing. “Because [competing] was fun, it became a passion,” she says. In 2015, she earned silver in the Youth B age category for a Combined discipline (bouldering, lead, and speed) at the IFSC’s World Youth Championships. At the following year’s Youth Worlds, she won gold. This was the same year—2016—that climbing was confirmed as an Olympic sport. In the Combined discipline at the Youth Pan- American Championships the next year, she placed first. “I always wanted the combined title,” Raboutou says, crediting her early experience in all three disciplines with landing her the Olympic berth.

Brooke’s—and the rest of her family’s—accolades became prologue this past summer at the Combined portion of the IFSC’s World Championships in Hachiōji, Japan, where she qualified for Tokyo. There, Brooke placed sixth in speed climbing (clocking 9.129 seconds, only 2.134 seconds off the world record) in her second run against Poland’s speed specialist, Aleksandra Miroslaw; tenth in bouldering; and seventh in lead climbing for a total score that placed her in ninth overall. An abundance of Team Japan competitors in the top eight spots surpassed that country’s Olympic quota, which meant that while Brooke did not make the finals, she did punch her Olympic ticket. Other Americans would follow suit­­—Kyra Condie and Nathaniel Coleman qualified for the Games in Toulouse, France, in November 2019, and Colin Duffy qualified at the Pan-American Championships in Los Angeles in March 2020.

In late December 2019, Brooke modeled for her sponsor Adidas Terrex, as well as Sports Illustrated and Southwest magazines, and then did voice-over work for a Petzl video series on her Olympic qualification (the L’héritage and L’ascension videos from Louder Than 11). In between, she also took final exams—including that economics juggernaut—visited Boulder to spend time with her family, and trained at the USA Climbing headquarters in Salt Lake City. “I go to class, then I climb, then usually I have class again, then I come back and do homework and hang out with my roommates, then go to bed … and repeat,” says Brooke. While she values education, she has also decided to take the spring 2020 semester off to train—and continues to do so even with the Games delayed. She plans to return to school this fall, and then take the spring 2021 semester off to train as well.

The Olympic postponement has brought unique opportunities: a popular takeover of USA Climbing’s Instagram page and a chance to show fans how she trains at home. Two of Brooke’s cheeky videos in March 2020—Tour de my house and Tour de my kitchen—helped spawn a social media craze of quarantined climbers sharing their own furniture-climbing footage. “I wanted to think of ways that I could cheer up my followers without using my home wall, since a lot of people don’t have a home wall,” Brooke says. “I was just thinking of ways that other people can stay active and in touch with climbing around their house without a home wall; the child in me came out.”

Eventually, all the quarantining and training will be preamble to the Olympics themselves, and Brooke will be ready to compete—just like she always has been.

Daryl Homer, David Boudia, and Roderick Townsend are part of the Ralph Lauren team that helped unveil the Olympic and Paralympic Closing Ceremony uniforms for 100 Days Out from the Olympic Games.

People Magazine

Homework, prom and … gold medals.

Colin Duffy, 17, is opening up about how he’s managed to juggle being a high school student with his climbing career, especially in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics this summer.

“It’s not super easy to balance everything,” Duffy, of Broomfield, Colorado, tells PEOPLE during the Team USA Tokyo Olympics Media Summit, “but I just have adjusted to a pretty busy schedule, I manage my time well through training and climbing and getting assignments done.”

The high school junior adds of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Olympics delay, “Through these hard times I’ve been able to climb lots and also succeed academically. So, I’m fortunate enough to just be able to manage everything.”

Duffy, who is the youngest member of the USA Climbing team, also notes that his school’s shift to virtual learning amid the pandemic has afforded him more training availability. He explains, “School being online for the majority of this year has also been super beneficial since I have a lot more free time than I typically would.”

The athlete started climbing when he was just five years old, learning at ABC Kids Climbing in Boulder where he still trains today with Brooke Raboutou, a fellow USA Climbing team member.

Duffy is now a 10-time Youth National Champion, and won gold at the 2020 IFSC Pan-American Championships.

This year marks the first time that climbing has been a sport at the Olympic Summer Games. Men’s and women’s climbers will separately compete in three disciplines — speed climbing, bouldering, and lead climbing — to be in contention for a medal.