Who was your childhood hero and do you consider yourself a role model now? Does it influence you at all that other people look up to you?
My childhood was a long time ago but my heroes were The Beatles and my big brother. My brother was outrageously inventive and adventurous, he successfully had me bungie jumping off the garage roof with dad's old army belt as a harness and the rubber bumper ring from a wringer washing machine for the bungie.
I would be better described as an institutional climber than a role model.
I would be genuinely disappointed if younger climbers tried to emulate me.
I prefer to see them pick up a few tricks and move on.
I spend years on a single project.
However, I hope that over time they recognise that one of the useful qualities in climbing is that of persistence over raw ability.
What were your greatest failures / setbacks / injuries? How did you cope with them and how did you come back from them?
I came to hard climbing late in life, you'd think that would be a recipe for injury, but as a kid, the monkey bars were my life. I was completely obsessed, doing 100 back drop rotations by the knees, doing backward pull overs, etc. It was probably good tendon development.
Even now, at 58 years of age I do not "warm up". Never have, never will.
It hasn't made me an exceptional climber, and I'm not saying injuries won't happen, but I'm mostly injury free.
Just keep climbing, accept injuries but there's no need to get too identified with injury.