“The Comeback” follows Vivienne Cerne as she takes a career-ending fall while bouldering at G1 Climbing and Fitness in Broomfield, Colorado.

Instead of letting this usually career-ending knee injury take her out of climbing forever, Cerne describes the nearly two-year recovery journey and how much physical therapy she needed throughout this whole process of recovery. A big factor in this is when Cerne says, “I’d climb on the wall, I’d boulder a little bit, come down, and limp around the gym.”

Cerne has grown up rock climbing and was an absolutely incredible athlete in the youth competition circuit in the United States. Cerne is currently living in Colorado, but she is originally from Iowa.

As she is now studying at CU Boulder, she has also moved into the collegiate level of competition. She has been on the CU climbing team every year while she has been at CU Boulder.

Climbing is a sport unlike any other. There is no other sport that tests the limits of the human body as much as climbing does. Not only do you need to be incredibly strong physically in order to be at the top of the sport, you also need to have an incredibly strong mental game on top of that.

Vivienne Cerne excels in every single aspect of the sport of rock climbing. From the raw strength that she has in order to climb incredibly difficult problems to the sheer mental strength that she has built in order to fight for the send or climb at her absolute limit. And because of all of this fortitude, she has gotten through these past two years, and Cerne now says she is “excited to train a lot in the next few months to feel really good at Nationals and Team Trials this year.”

Recovery is still going on, but Cerne is now not only back to where she was physically before the injury, but she has actually come back stronger than she was prior to blowing up her knee.

Now that Cerne is pretty much out of the woods, she is “very excited to climb competition-style boulders, and that feel natural again,” and to return to climbing competitions, especially the USA National Team Trials in early 2027.