September 30, 2024 • 38 mins
Tommy Caldwell’s near-death experience unlocks a completely new state of mind that propels him to become a record-setting big wall climber.
We'll be back with new episodes in your feed later this fall, but in the meantime, enjoy Maya's conversation with Tommy Caldwell, one of our favorite episodes from the archives.
Connect with Maya on instagram @DrMayaShankar.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin hay Slight Changers, Happy Fall. Something about this time
of year gets me feeling a bit more introspective when
(00:37):
the cold weather arrives. There's something about the change in
seasons that reminds me that time is passing quickly, and
I get more philosophical about the choices I'm making in
my life and about what it even means to live
a good life. We're back with new episodes that explore
some of these questions soon, but in the meantime, I
(00:58):
revisited our archives and found an episode that I wanted
to share with you. One of my favorite favorite things
about interviewing people is when I realized that what I've
read about them publicly does not reflect their internal experience.
That's what happened when I spoke with Tommy Caldwell, one
of the best rock climbers in the world. At twenty two.
(01:18):
Tommy had a near death experience. He was held hostage
for six days on a climbing trip, and what he
took away from that experience, well, it kind of blew
me away. And that's the magic of this show. I
hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I definitely always felt like adversity is what brings us
to life, but this turned up the volume on that
in a pretty incredible way.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
That's Tommy Caldwell, who's considered one of the best rock
climbers in the world. When he was on a climbing expedition,
he had a near death experience where he was held
hostage for six days, and he says what he endured
on that mountain unlocked a completely new state of mind.
He describes as a flow state.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
To me, that flow state, in its most pure form
is like this moment where it's almost like everything slows down.
You feel weightless, you feel like your vision is a cue,
you notice detail in this incredible way. It's like in
the moment where all odds are against you, suddenly it's
(02:33):
like the clarity comes.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Tommy tapped into this elusive, intoxicating mental state more than
twenty years ago and he's been relentlessly chasing it ever since.
I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show that dives deep into the world of change
and hopefully gets us to think differently about change in
our own lives. So to jump in, I would love
(03:18):
to just hear a bit more about how it is
that you got into climbing.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I mean, I got into climbing because of my father.
He was a mountain guy, pretty extraordinary human being. He
was a bodybuilder in the like eighties and early nineties,
like big, super macho man. He had this incredible love
of adventure, and he was a middle school teacher, and
so he blended all those things together and used me
(03:44):
kind of as his test subject. Like I was actually,
at least socially and probably mentally, a pretty meek, delayed
child in a lot of ways. You know, I'm not
good at the mental things. You know, I'm socially really
shy and having a really macho dat. He's like, we
got to figure out ways to like toughen this kid
up so that he can deal with the world. And
(04:06):
he might have overcompensated a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
But I did not have a cool or adventurous childhood.
So I'm curious to know what that's like. Like, what's
an example of something you would do with your dad?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
I mean to a lot of people, my childhood seemed
pretty insane, especially back then. I mean, one example is
we heightd to the Lost Arrow Spire, which is the
spire that sits two thousand feet above the valley floor
or in you seventy National Park, and we repelled down
four hundred feet off the rim of Usemni Valley with
you know, two thousand feet of exposure below us.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
I did this as like maybe six or seven years old.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Were you scared? Like did this stuff come naturally to you?
Or was it really hard?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I think there were There's a couple moments from my
childhood where I remember feeling pretty scared, like this was
a bit much. But those were definitely the exceptions. Like
I developed a sort of fear tolerance that is probably
part of the reason I've been able to excel the
way I do now. But there's certainly been times in
(05:06):
my life where I wonder if it's unhealthy, Like I
don't get scared when I should.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
But can you say a little more about that?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, I mean the types of climbing that I do
in the higher mountains, like when I go to Patagonia,
for instance, there's a lot of objective hazard, Like there's
instances where you're climbing up a mountain and you know,
some rockfall event happens, and like a big rock will
fall and land on a ledge twenty feet away from
you and most people get freaked out by that kind
(05:36):
of thing, like they have this emotional kind of adrenal reaction,
and I don't have that so much, And I wonder
if that's unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Was this just a natural trait that you had or
did you did you feel like you were building it
over time as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
I feel like for me, I was building it over time.
Like there are certain climbs that I go and do,
climbs where I might fall twenty thirty fifty feet at
a time before I get caught from the rope. That
feels incredibly terrifying at first, early on in the season,
but I get more and more used to it over time.
So I think that can happen within a season or
on a certain climb, but I think it can also
(06:11):
happen in a way over the length of your life.
And so since I started really young doing this stuff,
I believe that that's why I am the way I am.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I guess, Yeah, it's so interesting, as you were simply
describing that, I felt tingles in my fingers and a
pit in my stomach imagining being at that height. So sadly, yeah,
I think my brain architecture is slightly different from yours.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably more healthy your way.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Honestly, When Tommy's twenty two, he gets invited to go
on a climbing trip with three other climbers to Kyrghyzstan,
this beautiful mountainous country in Central Asia. Tommy being Tommy,
is of course excited for the challenge, but the real
reason he wants to go is because of another climber
on the trip, Death Rowden.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, that was certainly my main motivation behind the trip.
I would say, we're really really kind of early on
in our dating period at that time.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So this was during the like still wooing her stage.
Is that why you were so excited to go?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, Okay, got it. So can you paint a little
bit of a scene for me about when you first
survived in Kyrgusan, Like what is it like and what
climbing lies ahead of you?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, so we flew in, come around this corner and
we see these magnificent snow covered peaks. If you've ever
been in a region like the Himalayas or something, the mountains,
they are just so big and so beautiful that it's surreal.
I mean, it looks like you're looking at a painting,
it looks completely unreal. And so those big snow covered
mountains are in the background, and then these big rock spires,
(07:43):
these incredible rock spires with perfect rock, the kind of
thing that climbers dream of, were kind of in the foreground.
So we flew and there was a bit of a
valley kind of below all of the rock spires, and
so that's where we made our base camp. And some
of the people that live in the valley came and
visited with us and brought us, you know, yak milk
(08:04):
and butter and fresh baked bread, and it was like, yeah,
it was svidible. Yeah, it was pretty idealistic, like they
had they had encountered climbing teams like us in the past,
because this is the place that people had been coming
and climbing for ten or fifteen years, so we knew
that we would encounter them. So we brought toys to
play with the kids and bits of candy and stuff. Yeah,
(08:28):
it was It was absolutely beautiful, certainly sort of a
dream trip. Everything I kind of expected and hoped for
at first.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Can you describe the moment when you realized that you
were in danger.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, So it was very distinct. We had been in
the valley for five or six days. We had sort
of walked around and scoped the rocks and decided that
we were going to do our warm up climb on
this mountain, which is about a two thousand foot nearly
vertical rock cliff. And then we had spent the first
day climbing about halfway up that wall, so a thousand
(09:03):
feet up. We you know, the style of climbing were doing.
You climb one hundred or two hundred feet up, and
then you haul all of your equipment up, which is food, water,
portal ledges. There's no horizontal places to sleep, so you
set up your porta ledges, and we had this hanging
camp a thousand feet up this wall. And that was
actually the night of my birthday. Beth presents me with
(09:24):
this candle, we seeing Happy birthday. It's like there's no
light pollution at all in this place because you're literally
fifty miles from the nearest source of electricity, and the
stars are brilliant and these you know, the moonlight is
illuminating these these snow covered peaks up valley, and it's yeah,
it's a pretty incredible scene. So we go to beds,
(09:46):
feeling like everything's great. And then at very first light
the next morning, we awake to gunshots, like just startled
awake to gunshots. And first we thought that it was
just some hunters in the valley, probably, but then bullets
started to hit this roof of rock that was right
above us, and so we realized they were actually shooting
at us.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
They were close by.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
We had a big camera with us with a long
telephoto lens, and so we pulled out that camera and
we could look down to the ground, almost like looking
through you know, binoculars, and we could see these heavily
armed militants on the ground. We felt very vulnerable, like
we're expecting bullets to just rip through the bottom of
the portal edge at any moment.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Wow. So in that moment, are you thinking, Okay, they
might have missed slightly with the first few shots, but
you know we're going to die.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, that's exactly what we're worried about. There's no way
to run away. I mean, it's just complete vulnerability. It's
like somebody's shooting at you and you can't hide behind anything.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, you're literally a fix to a vertical wall in
a tent right there. There's literally no escape.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Route, right, yeah, I mean moving out of the way.
It would have been you know, a several hour process
to just get up and around the corner or something.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Okay, So then so you hear this these gunshots. What
happens next.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Through our telephoto camera lens, we see them sort of
waving at us to come down, and we know that
we have no other option. Basically, they've got these big guns.
They've proved that they're good shots with these guns, and
so we're like, we have to go down. So we
have a discussion and we decide that John Dickey, who
is the oldest member of our expedition, will go down
(11:33):
and try and talk to them. We're just trying to
be super optimistic at this point. Maybe they just want information,
we don't really know. And so John starts descending down
the wall. Takes him probably nearly an hour, and he
gets down there and we have these two way radios
and he had taken one of them. When he gets
down there, he just sounds very serious. He radios back
(11:55):
to us and he's like, you guys are just gonna
have to come down. So the other three of us
just start descending down the wall and When we get
to the ground, we're confronted with a pretty scary scene.
I would say there's two heavily armed men that are
wearing this combination of like army fatigues, so they look
(12:17):
pretty scary, but their demeanor is actually pretty chill. They
wait for us. We get to the ground and they're
just kind of sitting around, not really saying that much,
and then they just kind of wave us on to
follow them back to base camp.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
A conflict had broken out in the country between the
Krgeese Army and the Islamic Movement of Zbekistan. Up on
the mountain, a small group of the militants had captured
a KRGEE soldier, and when Tommy and the rest of
his climbing crew were forced down the mountain, they were
able to get a closer look at the soldier.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
He just looked very stern, you know, he looked kind
of scared and very stern, and he had blood all
over his pants. And I think there was at one
moment in there where John looked over at us and
he's like, we're hostages. I think we're hostages, And so
that's kind of when it struck us.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The militants waste no time. They lead Tommy and Beth
and the other climbers into the mountain side a point,
and as they start to cross the river, a group
of Kirki soldiers appear at the top of the hill
and start shooting at them.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
This battle breaks out essentially, and we hide in this bush,
and Beth and myself and this Kurky soldier end up
in this bush together. The next thing that happened is
the rebels told us one by one to run up
behind this boulder, and the Kirky soldier went first, and
(13:37):
as soon as he got up behind the boulder, we
heard these handgun shots which were different than the rifle shots,
and they had just shot him in the shot him
in the head right there, and then the rest of
us had to go up and hide behind that boulder.
As this battle sort of erupted around us. It was
a full on like war scene. We're hiding behind this boulder.
The boulder was getting you know, bullets were ricocheting off
(13:58):
the boulder. We were behind it, sitting on the dead
body of this other Kurky soldier, and they were shooting
these these mortars across at us. I mean, we were
kind of certain that we're going to die at any moment.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
I'm just imagining the juxtaposition of going from these immensely
peaceful climbs in this expansive valley to absolute life or
death insanity. What do you remember feeling?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Definitely riting on adrenaline, totally surreal. I feel like that
is not like the rest of life at all. And
I think it was fear that was more intense and
far different than anything I had noticed. Like in some
ways I was used to dealing with fear because of
my climbing life, but this was just way different.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Tommy, Beth and their crew managed to make it out
of this skirmish alive, but they're still being held captive
by two militant rebels. They can't communicate with their captors
because they don't speak the same language, but from what
they can glean, there's an older guy who seems to
be in charge, and then a teenager named Scheripov. During
the day, the militants lead them around in what ultimately
(15:09):
ends up being a big circle looking for hiding places.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
And we don't have any food. We had We had
to abandon all of our food, except I had managed
to shove like five or six energy bars into my pocket.
So each day we would in the evening, we would
split one of those energy bars between the six of us,
and that's the only food we had, and we do
kind of feel like we're all in it together, like
we share our food with them. They didn't just take
(15:33):
all of our food. They shared it with us, those
six you know, energy bars that we had, and the
demeanor became pretty friendly a lot of the time. And
then during the daylight hours, we would hide in usually
just absolutely miserable hiding spots like you know, by rivers,
under boulders. It was always super cold, you know, our
(15:56):
teeth were chattering all day long, every day, to the
point where where our jaws and our mouths got really
sort We'd be sitting there hiding for fourteen hours of
daylight or whatever, and it would feel like a week.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Did you ever worry that you were going to die
of hypothermia, so it's not just the potential of being killed,
but also you just might die from extreme conditions.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yeah, no, that was definitely a worry of ours. We
were probably on the verge most of the time, and
we're at a point where we can't really just sit
through these conditions. Anymore. But then weirdly, at times, I
think this is sort of a proven thing that happens
when you go through this severe hunger, is you have
these moments of like mental clarity, like you feel like
(16:40):
you are almost more alive than ever as you're starving
to death, your body just sort of starts to kick
into this like survival mode, and so you sort of
an alternate between that and then other times of just
feeling really lethargic and really slow and you know, really hungry.
So we just traveled around like that for six nights,
(17:01):
getting progressively weaker, and then finally on that last night,
things are pretty desperate, and so we were left on
this with just the young scared soldier Serpov, and told
to climb up this incredibly steep mountain. It was you know,
true rock climbing, Like it was kind of terrain that
if you fell on it didn't seem like you would stop.
(17:22):
You would just continue falling until you got you know,
bouncing down the mountain until you got to the bottom.
And sherif Pov was really scared, we were actually having
to lead the way because we were climbers. We would
you know, grab his hand and pull him up over
rock steps. We would point out footholds for him to
step on. We would sort of spot him in case
(17:44):
he stumbled, we could catch him so he didn't just
fall down the mountain. And so in all of our
minds like if there was a time to escape, this
was it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
So I'm curious, and it seems like the very natural
instinct to help others was kicking in for you. Right,
you're spotting this guy, you're leading the way, you're helping him.
Who were these competing feelings towards him and the situation
leading to kind of bizarre behaviors in you. It's so fascinating,
right that you can build this kind of camaraderie with
(18:16):
a person who might ultimately lead to your death, if
you have that kind of empathy towards their circumstance and
their situation.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I mean, I think it felt different at different times,
Like at times I was like, we should outlast this,
We should be good human beings as long as we can.
In a way, these rebels, I didn't see them as
super evil people, especially Cherpov who were with like he
was just he was younger, or he was probably about
my age or maybe even younger. I think he was
eighteen years old at the time. He was a hired mercenary.
(18:43):
He was obviously super frightened himself, you know. He like,
who's to say, if I didn't grow up in a circumstance,
I wouldn't have been right there with him. So I
thought it was sort of morally wrong to try and
take these guys' lives. But I think on this last night,
clouds started to roll in. I started to raigin a
tiny bit, and all of us were like, if we
don't escape this scene pretty soon, we are going to
(19:04):
succumb to hypothermia. Yeah, So as we were getting to
the top of the mountain, I knew that our opportunity
to push him was going to be gone soon. And
Beth had been adamantly against killing somebody this whole time,
but it was getting pretty dire. So I looked over
her when we're at her, when we were maybe fifty
(19:26):
or one hundred feet below the top of this mountain,
and I was like, do you think I should And
she didn't say anything, which to me that meant that
she thought she'd come around, like she thought that this
was probably the right thing to do. And so when
he saw the top of the mountain kind of close.
He got a little bit excited. He started to sort
of rush up ahead of all of us. He is
(19:48):
in Sharapov, and I then started to sort of sneak
up behind him. And he was so focused on like
staying attached to the mountain, you know, like grabbing the
right hand holds and stuff, that he really didn't even
notice me. And I ran up behind him, and I
just grabbed his gun strap and just tugged backwards on it,
(20:08):
and he started to off the mountain side. He fell
about twenty feet, hit this ledge that was below us,
bounced off of it like the sloping ledge, and then
out of sight, just in the blackness.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We'll be right back. With a slight change of plans,
I'm maya shunker, and this is a slight change of plans.
Tommy Caldwells made the bold decision to push one of
his captors off the cliff. Years later, a journalist working
on the story discovers that Cherapov did not actually die
from the fall, but at the time, Tommy assumes he's
(20:45):
killed Schherapov, and for Tommy, the reality of what he
just did comes crashing down on him.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
It's just like this flood of emotion is going through me.
I like can't believe what I've just done. I remember
like closing my eyes incredibly tight and like seeing like
weird starry visions. I mean, it was just like it's
almost hard to explain it. It was just like emotionally
overwhelming way that I've never experienced.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Beth was really comforting me. I mean she'd like, I,
like I said, I was deeply in love with this woman,
and she was, and I didn't know she'd suddenly think
that I was like this evil person because we hadn't
really been able to talk it out what I was
about to do. So she was the one who was like,
you're You're my hero. You We're gonna be okay because
of you, and trying to say the right things to
help me in that moment.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
The moment doesn't last long, though, with one of their
captors pushed off the mountain and the other one out
of sight. Tommy and his team know they need to
seize the moment and get out of there as quickly
as possible, so they run down the mountain and find
safety at a military outpost, and eventually they all make
it back to the US. Almost immediately, Tommy's dad notices
a change in him.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I mean, I felt like for a time I sort
of receded into a ball. I didn't talk to anybody
except for Beth about personal things, but Beth on a
few other clubes friends. I didn't talk to my parents
that much about it, So I think he probably had
that take more than most because he knew me a lot.
And then I just didn't want to discuss this with him.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
What aspect of the experience made you most uncomfortable talking
about with your dad?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I think I was just I just didn't know how
to think about the experience. Like I didn't know for
a while whether whether I, you know, was kind of
an evil person for having done this thing, or whether
I was kind of a hero for saving us. I
was both, But I'd also learned. I think very few
people get to find out how they will react in
(22:48):
super intense experiences like that. Everybody sort of wonders, And
I now knew that when things are really bad, I
was able to kind of like rise to the occasion
and do something that was really hard for me and
really fight for survival in this way that I think
I was. I was a bit proud of at the time,
but I didn't want to seem proud. I didn't want
(23:10):
to feel I didn't want to feel proud in a
lot of ways. But I think kind of deep down
I was a little bit proud, like I felt empowered.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Interesting, So, so did the adversity you faced in Kyrgyzstan
change your understanding of yourself or actually just reinforce what
you had believed all along about what you were capable of.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
I think it it reinforced more than changed, but it
also revealed a lot. It opened up a ton of curiosity,
like I wanted to learn more. I wanted to in
some ways get back to that place of being in
this incredibly meditative like flow state that I felt like
I had experienced it at times in Kyrgyzstan. I think
(23:53):
in some ways my climbing ever since then has been
an effort to almost get back there in a way
and learn more. Yeah, almost like an addiction potentially. I
think I saw Kyrgyzstan as this like fuel to put
me on this higher plane where I could like use
(24:13):
that adversity to fuel my life in a lot of ways,
and and sort of my pursuit of of my craft,
which continues to be climbing to this day.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, man, you are such a climber at heart. Like
the fact that you're describing Kirkgason as being a flow
state in which you had like you know, deep mental acuity,
and you're that's as a lay person, right, That is
a truly astonishing way of interpreting those events.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Well I didn't go there first. I probably win a
lot of.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Places in that year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yeah, that's the place that I ended up finding to
be the one that suited me. But if you think
about it, like you know, I can I can equate
it to situations as a child where I was up
on some big wall with my dad and you know,
surrounded by some incredible thunderstorm and things get really real
and my dad would look at me in these kind
of moments with these wild eyes would be like, this
is what brings us to life. So that was built
(25:12):
into me from a really young age.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Interesting, Okay, Yeah, I think my parents were like, why
don't we go inside? Now there's thunder? You would prefer
not to die? Okay? Anyway, anyway, can you describe more?
I think for a lot of listeners the'll be curious
what you mean by this flow state that you experienced
in Kyrgyzstan, Like, what does it feel like? What were
(25:35):
you what were you trying to reach psychologically when you
came back and started climbing again.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
To me, that flow state in its most pure form
is like this moment where it's almost like everything slows down.
You feel weightless, you feel like your vision is a
cute you notice detail in this incredible way. It's like
a physiological change that is incredibly easy to notice when
(26:05):
it happens. You know, it's like in the moment where
all odds are against you, suddenly it's like the clarity
comes and it's completely surreal and completely magical. I feel
like I had experienced that in Kyrgyzstan, and so I
was trying to get back there in climbing, but I wasn't.
I wasn't finding that flow sted in that way. So
I did start to shift some of my climbing to
(26:27):
like this mega endurance days where you're out, you know,
sleep deprived for you know, fifty hours in a row,
and a lot of times these climbs would take four
or five days, and I started to do them in
one day, like twenty four hour pushes.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Okay, I'm pausing only because if I were an alien
descending on this planet and I heard that there's this
guy named Tommy Caldwell who went through a harrowing experience
in Kyrgyzstan, who's now trying to replicate aspects of that
trip on his own volition in normal life. I think
(27:01):
I think the alien would batny, that's all. It's why
I admire climber so much. It's the relentless focus and resolve.
And again, I flirted as a musician with flow right
in my childhood, and I in my own way, I
crave that too. There there's something about engaging with art,
(27:22):
and I guess I see climbing as an art form too,
that can put you in a certain mental state that's
really hard to can't. You can't recruit it in daily
life at will, right, it's not. It's one of these
elusive things that happens when all the stars align right,
or at least that's how it's been in my own experience.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, now I can tell you have like you have
the craving and the thirst for it, and yeah, I
felt like I need to pursue that a lot in
my life since then. But in some ways I never
got back to that place that I was in Kyrgyzstan,
like that flow state that I experienced that really comes
from this you can really only access when when your
(27:59):
life really is on the line. Even though I was
pushing way harder than I was before, I wasn't. I
wasn't ever getting back to that, to that place, to
the incredible flow state.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Tommy spent the next year after his return from Kyrgyzstan
trying to access that high, that flow state in his clients.
Whatever downtime he had, he spent with Beth in this
little fixer upper cabin they bought in the mountains of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Then one day I was working on the house. I
was trying to use the tools and not knowing how
to use them properly. I ended up chopping off my
index finger on my left hand with a table saw.
So this is kind of like worst case scenario.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Can you describe the moment where you realize that your
index finger is no longer on your hand.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I felt this numbness, and I looked down at my
left hand and saw that the finger was completely severed.
Like I didn't know where the other part of it
was so I think I immediately panicked. I yelled to Beth.
I was just like, oh, I just cut off my finger,
And she came over and we found it like laying
on the ground, ran into the house, put it on ice,
(29:05):
and drove to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
What is going through your head on the drive to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I mean I was. I was certainly panicking. I mean
all I could think about was climbing, Like I had
gotten to this place where I was, I was a
professional climber. I was living kind of my ultimate life
I had, but there's all this curiosity about where I
could take it. It was sort of my coping mechanism
for Kyrgyzstan in some ways, like this was the thing
that I could focus on that could both distract me
(29:32):
and empower me, and that was what was keeping me
happy and stable in life. And then suddenly maybe that
is gone too. So I was panicking. I mean, at first,
we're just we're just holding on to hope. I'd heard
stories about people chopping off fingers and then reattaching them
and everything being just fine. You know, like finger reattachment
(29:53):
surgery is usually relatively successful thing. At least it was
in my mind. The doctor came into the room and
he you know, sat bethling me down, and he's like,
we've done everything we can. Your finger is dead. We're
going to do one final surgery and remove it. And
you know, I'm sorry. And he was a climber. Actually
that our doctor ended up being a climber as well,
(30:14):
and he and so he along with that, he said
that he told us that he's like, you should start
thinking about what else you want to do in life,
because you're not you're not going to be able to
like be a professional climber anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And when you first heard that, do you agree with him?
I mean, did you believe that was going to be
the case?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, I mean I think I heard that, and I
was just like incredibly sad and trying to absorb that.
I mean, once again, I feel like this has been
a theme in my life. I have these things that
are said or things that happened to me that are
almost like too grand for me to comprehend in the moment,
and it takes a long time to really figure it out.
But he left the room and then Beth looked over
(30:52):
at me and she's like, fuck that guy. He has
an idea, what well you're capable of it? That was
like the perfect thing to say, you know, I think
I came out of that hospital with like kind of
this conviction that was driven partially from like this idea
that I might be able to overk him, but also
driven a lot by the fear that I've that I
just like this thing that was incredibly important to me,
and I wanted to do everything I could, like I
(31:13):
might as well do everything I can at that point
to try and prove him wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Do you think you're experiencing Kyrgyzstan increased your resolve to
give climbing another go? Like do you think you would
have actually tried if that experience hadn't happened and you
hadn't seen your limits?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I think what it did for me is that it
made me not fear failure in a weird way, like
I'd had to confront the worst things that I can
imagine in my life in a lot of ways, and
in some ways it like wasn't so bad, you know.
I Mean it was really bad in some ways, but
in other ways, I'm like, I lived through it. I
can find strength through this and that drive, that drive
(31:53):
that you can feel only in those moments is like
this moment that you have to seize, you know, It's
like that only lasts for so long, and so you
have to capture it, absorb it, and let it, let
it like push you forward.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah. Yeah, big change can do that. Wow. What were
those early first few climbing days Like, so.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I went straight to the climbing gym, I think from
the hospital, Like I don't only think we went home inane.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I love that though you're so passionate about it, you
couldn't wait to get back on Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I mean I'd been laying in a hospital bed for
two weeks, so I was pretty excited to move. And
then the doctor had told me that since the finger
was gone, I couldn't really do any more harm, and
so I was really curious to see how my you know,
newly remodeled hand was going to work. And we went
straight to the gym and it was. It was really
hard at first, and I was like, Okay, this is
(32:48):
a starting point I can I can take this and
improve on it. And then, you know, I went back
to the climbing gym at first, like basically every day,
and each day I would feel a little bit stronger
and a little bit stronger, and before I knew it,
I was sort of exceeding my own expectations. And that
started this pretty incredible flywheel where I was like, Wow,
this is actually working. My strength is coming back, And
(33:11):
within a couple of months, I actually was back at
the level of climbing that I had been before I
chopped off my finger. Like, I went back to other
climbs that I had had as climbing project, and I
was able to do them again, and I was like, Wow,
this is working. I can't believe I'm overcoming this. This is
so exciting. And then I didn't stop there. I just
kept on getting better and better, and you know, in
(33:33):
some ways it was like a super magical time for me.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
There's no manual for how to climb with nine fingers,
so you're also having to relearn key form elements of climbing, right,
how does that happen? Like do you have to fully
adjust your your strategy like the way that you climb
a wall.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Yeah, I mean it's experimental. Climbing is always experimental, like
you're always playing with how to do moves differently, and
so I was just doing that, but without a finger,
you know, I sort of cherished that experimenting, Like my
dad actually welded me up the specific finger strength like
weightlifting machine just for your fingers though, and so I
started using that a bunch, and I got more and
(34:17):
more scientific about building finger strength.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Okay, so you decide to climb one of the most
impossible rock faces I think in the world. Is that right?
I mean, the Don Wall. Most people deemed it impossible.
And I want to know what was your motivation for that?
What were you hoping to achieve?
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, I mean so this was after my you know,
after I came back from chopping off my finger. You know,
that was sort of when I kept just doing harder
and harder roots, and I became the person that knew
more about big wall free climbing on El Capitan than
any you know, I'd spent more time up there, I'd
done more roots than anybody. The Don Wall, it is
(34:58):
by far the hardest big wall free climb in the
world to anybody except for me, at the time, just
looked like a pane of glass. Like you look up
at the wall and you're like, there's nothing to hold
on to. There's no way you could ever climb this thing.
Like I said, I had spent so much time up
there that I knew that sometimes these little edges formed
on these faces that look totally blank from below. But
(35:18):
this is just it was such a big scale that
piecing it together was this incredible puzzle, which ended up
taking me a year just to figure out the route,
and then another like seven years to build the strength
and everything to pull it together. I guess I saw
pushing that venue to be the one place in the
(35:39):
world where I could really explore something that nobody else had.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
At any point, did you experience the intensity of the
Kyrgyzstan flow state when you were climbing the down wall.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I feel like I did actually on the final on
the final go, like when we successfully climbed to the thing.
So me and my partner Kevin Jorgan said, you know,
we spent seven years. We would fix ropes to the wall,
and we would descend up and down the ropes, and
we would try all the different sections and we would
learn it all, and then when we finally went up
and successfully climbed the route. I think when I climbed
(36:14):
those pitches, it was this moment of incredible flow, like
sudden there was so much pressure and anxiety and excitement
wrapped up in the seven years of preparing for this
that when it happened, it felt magical, like that clarity emerged.
I felt weightless. There was this incredible flow. It was yeah,
(36:36):
very magical.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Hey, thanks for listening. See you next week when I
talk with Megan Phelps Roper. She grew up a devout
believer in the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most
rabid hate group in America, but then in her mid twenties,
she walked away from it all.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
It felt like this physical, like I had a giant
boulder sitting on my chest and I couldn't breathe, and
I couldn't see around it, and I had no vision
of the future. I had no idea what my life
was going to look like.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
A slight change of plans is created an executive produce
by me Maya Schunker. Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries,
including our producer Mola Board, associate producers David Jaw and
Julia Goodman, executive producers Mea Lavelle and Justin Lange, senior
editor Jen Guera, and sound design and mixed engineers Ben
(37:57):
Holliday and Jason Gambrell. Thanks also to Luis Gara who
wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith who helped arrange
the vocals, incidental music from Epidemic Sound, and of course,
of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You
can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram at
doctor Maya Schunker. I have to say I'm a little
(38:26):
bit I was a little bit sheepish about doing this
interview because I was like a budding concert violinist as
a kid, and then when I was fifteen, I had
a hand injury in which I tore tendons in my
hand and doctors told me that I could never play again.
So my life had to take a totally different route
from that point forward. But I feel like you would
have been the dude to play the violin with like
(38:47):
four fingers and like crush it. So I just feel like, yeah,
didn't really step up. I was like, oh, the doctor
said I can't play, I guess I won't play. But anyway,
some of us are than others.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
I'm glad we could start the interview by me one
Pushkin hay Slight Changers, Happy Fall. Something about this time
of year gets me feeling a bit more introspective when
(00:37):
the cold weather arrives. There's something about the change in
seasons that reminds me that time is passing quickly, and
I get more philosophical about the choices I'm making in
my life and about what it even means to live
a good life. We're back with new episodes that explore
some of these questions soon, but in the meantime, I
(00:58):
revisited our archives and found an episode that I wanted
to share with you. One of my favorite favorite things
about interviewing people is when I realized that what I've
read about them publicly does not reflect their internal experience.
That's what happened when I spoke with Tommy Caldwell, one
of the best rock climbers in the world. At twenty two.
(01:18):
Tommy had a near death experience. He was held hostage
for six days on a climbing trip, and what he
took away from that experience, well, it kind of blew
me away. And that's the magic of this show. I
hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I definitely always felt like adversity is what brings us
to life, but this turned up the volume on that
in a pretty incredible way.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
That's Tommy Caldwell, who's considered one of the best rock
climbers in the world. When he was on a climbing expedition,
he had a near death experience where he was held
hostage for six days, and he says what he endured
on that mountain unlocked a completely new state of mind.
He describes as a flow state.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
To me, that flow state, in its most pure form
is like this moment where it's almost like everything slows down.
You feel weightless, you feel like your vision is a cue,
you notice detail in this incredible way. It's like in
the moment where all odds are against you, suddenly it's
(02:33):
like the clarity comes.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Tommy tapped into this elusive, intoxicating mental state more than
twenty years ago and he's been relentlessly chasing it ever since.
I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show that dives deep into the world of change
and hopefully gets us to think differently about change in
our own lives. So to jump in, I would love
(03:18):
to just hear a bit more about how it is
that you got into climbing.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I mean, I got into climbing because of my father.
He was a mountain guy, pretty extraordinary human being. He
was a bodybuilder in the like eighties and early nineties,
like big, super macho man. He had this incredible love
of adventure, and he was a middle school teacher, and
so he blended all those things together and used me
(03:44):
kind of as his test subject. Like I was actually,
at least socially and probably mentally, a pretty meek, delayed
child in a lot of ways. You know, I'm not
good at the mental things. You know, I'm socially really
shy and having a really macho dat. He's like, we
got to figure out ways to like toughen this kid
up so that he can deal with the world. And
(04:06):
he might have overcompensated a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
But I did not have a cool or adventurous childhood.
So I'm curious to know what that's like. Like, what's
an example of something you would do with your dad?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
I mean to a lot of people, my childhood seemed
pretty insane, especially back then. I mean, one example is
we heightd to the Lost Arrow Spire, which is the
spire that sits two thousand feet above the valley floor
or in you seventy National Park, and we repelled down
four hundred feet off the rim of Usemni Valley with
you know, two thousand feet of exposure below us.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
I did this as like maybe six or seven years old.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Were you scared? Like did this stuff come naturally to you?
Or was it really hard?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I think there were There's a couple moments from my
childhood where I remember feeling pretty scared, like this was
a bit much. But those were definitely the exceptions. Like
I developed a sort of fear tolerance that is probably
part of the reason I've been able to excel the
way I do now. But there's certainly been times in
(05:06):
my life where I wonder if it's unhealthy, Like I
don't get scared when I should.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
But can you say a little more about that?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, I mean the types of climbing that I do
in the higher mountains, like when I go to Patagonia,
for instance, there's a lot of objective hazard, Like there's
instances where you're climbing up a mountain and you know,
some rockfall event happens, and like a big rock will
fall and land on a ledge twenty feet away from
you and most people get freaked out by that kind
(05:36):
of thing, like they have this emotional kind of adrenal reaction,
and I don't have that so much, And I wonder
if that's unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Was this just a natural trait that you had or
did you did you feel like you were building it
over time as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
I feel like for me, I was building it over time.
Like there are certain climbs that I go and do,
climbs where I might fall twenty thirty fifty feet at
a time before I get caught from the rope. That
feels incredibly terrifying at first, early on in the season,
but I get more and more used to it over time.
So I think that can happen within a season or
on a certain climb, but I think it can also
(06:11):
happen in a way over the length of your life.
And so since I started really young doing this stuff,
I believe that that's why I am the way I am.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I guess, Yeah, it's so interesting, as you were simply
describing that, I felt tingles in my fingers and a
pit in my stomach imagining being at that height. So sadly, yeah,
I think my brain architecture is slightly different from yours.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably more healthy your way.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Honestly, When Tommy's twenty two, he gets invited to go
on a climbing trip with three other climbers to Kyrghyzstan,
this beautiful mountainous country in Central Asia. Tommy being Tommy,
is of course excited for the challenge, but the real
reason he wants to go is because of another climber
on the trip, Death Rowden.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, that was certainly my main motivation behind the trip.
I would say, we're really really kind of early on
in our dating period at that time.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So this was during the like still wooing her stage.
Is that why you were so excited to go?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, Okay, got it. So can you paint a little
bit of a scene for me about when you first
survived in Kyrgusan, Like what is it like and what
climbing lies ahead of you?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, so we flew in, come around this corner and
we see these magnificent snow covered peaks. If you've ever
been in a region like the Himalayas or something, the mountains,
they are just so big and so beautiful that it's surreal.
I mean, it looks like you're looking at a painting,
it looks completely unreal. And so those big snow covered
mountains are in the background, and then these big rock spires,
(07:43):
these incredible rock spires with perfect rock, the kind of
thing that climbers dream of, were kind of in the foreground.
So we flew and there was a bit of a
valley kind of below all of the rock spires, and
so that's where we made our base camp. And some
of the people that live in the valley came and
visited with us and brought us, you know, yak milk
(08:04):
and butter and fresh baked bread, and it was like, yeah,
it was svidible. Yeah, it was pretty idealistic, like they
had they had encountered climbing teams like us in the past,
because this is the place that people had been coming
and climbing for ten or fifteen years, so we knew
that we would encounter them. So we brought toys to
play with the kids and bits of candy and stuff. Yeah,
(08:28):
it was It was absolutely beautiful, certainly sort of a
dream trip. Everything I kind of expected and hoped for
at first.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Can you describe the moment when you realized that you
were in danger.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, So it was very distinct. We had been in
the valley for five or six days. We had sort
of walked around and scoped the rocks and decided that
we were going to do our warm up climb on
this mountain, which is about a two thousand foot nearly
vertical rock cliff. And then we had spent the first
day climbing about halfway up that wall, so a thousand
(09:03):
feet up. We you know, the style of climbing were doing.
You climb one hundred or two hundred feet up, and
then you haul all of your equipment up, which is food, water,
portal ledges. There's no horizontal places to sleep, so you
set up your porta ledges, and we had this hanging
camp a thousand feet up this wall. And that was
actually the night of my birthday. Beth presents me with
(09:24):
this candle, we seeing Happy birthday. It's like there's no
light pollution at all in this place because you're literally
fifty miles from the nearest source of electricity, and the
stars are brilliant and these you know, the moonlight is
illuminating these these snow covered peaks up valley, and it's yeah,
it's a pretty incredible scene. So we go to beds,
(09:46):
feeling like everything's great. And then at very first light
the next morning, we awake to gunshots, like just startled
awake to gunshots. And first we thought that it was
just some hunters in the valley, probably, but then bullets
started to hit this roof of rock that was right
above us, and so we realized they were actually shooting
at us.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
They were close by.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
We had a big camera with us with a long
telephoto lens, and so we pulled out that camera and
we could look down to the ground, almost like looking
through you know, binoculars, and we could see these heavily
armed militants on the ground. We felt very vulnerable, like
we're expecting bullets to just rip through the bottom of
the portal edge at any moment.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Wow. So in that moment, are you thinking, Okay, they
might have missed slightly with the first few shots, but
you know we're going to die.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, that's exactly what we're worried about. There's no way
to run away. I mean, it's just complete vulnerability. It's
like somebody's shooting at you and you can't hide behind anything.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, you're literally a fix to a vertical wall in
a tent right there. There's literally no escape.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Route, right, yeah, I mean moving out of the way.
It would have been you know, a several hour process
to just get up and around the corner or something.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Okay, So then so you hear this these gunshots. What
happens next.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Through our telephoto camera lens, we see them sort of
waving at us to come down, and we know that
we have no other option. Basically, they've got these big guns.
They've proved that they're good shots with these guns, and
so we're like, we have to go down. So we
have a discussion and we decide that John Dickey, who
is the oldest member of our expedition, will go down
(11:33):
and try and talk to them. We're just trying to
be super optimistic at this point. Maybe they just want information,
we don't really know. And so John starts descending down
the wall. Takes him probably nearly an hour, and he
gets down there and we have these two way radios
and he had taken one of them. When he gets
down there, he just sounds very serious. He radios back
(11:55):
to us and he's like, you guys are just gonna
have to come down. So the other three of us
just start descending down the wall and When we get
to the ground, we're confronted with a pretty scary scene.
I would say there's two heavily armed men that are
wearing this combination of like army fatigues, so they look
(12:17):
pretty scary, but their demeanor is actually pretty chill. They
wait for us. We get to the ground and they're
just kind of sitting around, not really saying that much,
and then they just kind of wave us on to
follow them back to base camp.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
A conflict had broken out in the country between the
Krgeese Army and the Islamic Movement of Zbekistan. Up on
the mountain, a small group of the militants had captured
a KRGEE soldier, and when Tommy and the rest of
his climbing crew were forced down the mountain, they were
able to get a closer look at the soldier.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
He just looked very stern, you know, he looked kind
of scared and very stern, and he had blood all
over his pants. And I think there was at one
moment in there where John looked over at us and
he's like, we're hostages. I think we're hostages, And so
that's kind of when it struck us.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The militants waste no time. They lead Tommy and Beth
and the other climbers into the mountain side a point,
and as they start to cross the river, a group
of Kirki soldiers appear at the top of the hill
and start shooting at them.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
This battle breaks out essentially, and we hide in this bush,
and Beth and myself and this Kurky soldier end up
in this bush together. The next thing that happened is
the rebels told us one by one to run up
behind this boulder, and the Kirky soldier went first, and
(13:37):
as soon as he got up behind the boulder, we
heard these handgun shots which were different than the rifle shots,
and they had just shot him in the shot him
in the head right there, and then the rest of
us had to go up and hide behind that boulder.
As this battle sort of erupted around us. It was
a full on like war scene. We're hiding behind this boulder.
The boulder was getting you know, bullets were ricocheting off
(13:58):
the boulder. We were behind it, sitting on the dead
body of this other Kurky soldier, and they were shooting
these these mortars across at us. I mean, we were
kind of certain that we're going to die at any moment.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
I'm just imagining the juxtaposition of going from these immensely
peaceful climbs in this expansive valley to absolute life or
death insanity. What do you remember feeling?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Definitely riting on adrenaline, totally surreal. I feel like that
is not like the rest of life at all. And
I think it was fear that was more intense and
far different than anything I had noticed. Like in some
ways I was used to dealing with fear because of
my climbing life, but this was just way different.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Tommy, Beth and their crew managed to make it out
of this skirmish alive, but they're still being held captive
by two militant rebels. They can't communicate with their captors
because they don't speak the same language, but from what
they can glean, there's an older guy who seems to
be in charge, and then a teenager named Scheripov. During
the day, the militants lead them around in what ultimately
(15:09):
ends up being a big circle looking for hiding places.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
And we don't have any food. We had We had
to abandon all of our food, except I had managed
to shove like five or six energy bars into my pocket.
So each day we would in the evening, we would
split one of those energy bars between the six of us,
and that's the only food we had, and we do
kind of feel like we're all in it together, like
we share our food with them. They didn't just take
(15:33):
all of our food. They shared it with us, those
six you know, energy bars that we had, and the
demeanor became pretty friendly a lot of the time. And
then during the daylight hours, we would hide in usually
just absolutely miserable hiding spots like you know, by rivers,
under boulders. It was always super cold, you know, our
(15:56):
teeth were chattering all day long, every day, to the
point where where our jaws and our mouths got really
sort We'd be sitting there hiding for fourteen hours of
daylight or whatever, and it would feel like a week.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Did you ever worry that you were going to die
of hypothermia, so it's not just the potential of being killed,
but also you just might die from extreme conditions.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yeah, no, that was definitely a worry of ours. We
were probably on the verge most of the time, and
we're at a point where we can't really just sit
through these conditions. Anymore. But then weirdly, at times, I
think this is sort of a proven thing that happens
when you go through this severe hunger, is you have
these moments of like mental clarity, like you feel like
(16:40):
you are almost more alive than ever as you're starving
to death, your body just sort of starts to kick
into this like survival mode, and so you sort of
an alternate between that and then other times of just
feeling really lethargic and really slow and you know, really hungry.
So we just traveled around like that for six nights,
(17:01):
getting progressively weaker, and then finally on that last night,
things are pretty desperate, and so we were left on
this with just the young scared soldier Serpov, and told
to climb up this incredibly steep mountain. It was you know,
true rock climbing, Like it was kind of terrain that
if you fell on it didn't seem like you would stop.
(17:22):
You would just continue falling until you got you know,
bouncing down the mountain until you got to the bottom.
And sherif Pov was really scared, we were actually having
to lead the way because we were climbers. We would
you know, grab his hand and pull him up over
rock steps. We would point out footholds for him to
step on. We would sort of spot him in case
(17:44):
he stumbled, we could catch him so he didn't just
fall down the mountain. And so in all of our
minds like if there was a time to escape, this
was it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
So I'm curious, and it seems like the very natural
instinct to help others was kicking in for you. Right,
you're spotting this guy, you're leading the way, you're helping him.
Who were these competing feelings towards him and the situation
leading to kind of bizarre behaviors in you. It's so fascinating,
right that you can build this kind of camaraderie with
(18:16):
a person who might ultimately lead to your death, if
you have that kind of empathy towards their circumstance and
their situation.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I mean, I think it felt different at different times,
Like at times I was like, we should outlast this,
We should be good human beings as long as we can.
In a way, these rebels, I didn't see them as
super evil people, especially Cherpov who were with like he
was just he was younger, or he was probably about
my age or maybe even younger. I think he was
eighteen years old at the time. He was a hired mercenary.
(18:43):
He was obviously super frightened himself, you know. He like,
who's to say, if I didn't grow up in a circumstance,
I wouldn't have been right there with him. So I
thought it was sort of morally wrong to try and
take these guys' lives. But I think on this last night,
clouds started to roll in. I started to raigin a
tiny bit, and all of us were like, if we
don't escape this scene pretty soon, we are going to
(19:04):
succumb to hypothermia. Yeah, So as we were getting to
the top of the mountain, I knew that our opportunity
to push him was going to be gone soon. And
Beth had been adamantly against killing somebody this whole time,
but it was getting pretty dire. So I looked over
her when we're at her, when we were maybe fifty
(19:26):
or one hundred feet below the top of this mountain,
and I was like, do you think I should And
she didn't say anything, which to me that meant that
she thought she'd come around, like she thought that this
was probably the right thing to do. And so when
he saw the top of the mountain kind of close.
He got a little bit excited. He started to sort
of rush up ahead of all of us. He is
(19:48):
in Sharapov, and I then started to sort of sneak
up behind him. And he was so focused on like
staying attached to the mountain, you know, like grabbing the
right hand holds and stuff, that he really didn't even
notice me. And I ran up behind him, and I
just grabbed his gun strap and just tugged backwards on it,
(20:08):
and he started to off the mountain side. He fell
about twenty feet, hit this ledge that was below us,
bounced off of it like the sloping ledge, and then
out of sight, just in the blackness.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We'll be right back. With a slight change of plans,
I'm maya shunker, and this is a slight change of plans.
Tommy Caldwells made the bold decision to push one of
his captors off the cliff. Years later, a journalist working
on the story discovers that Cherapov did not actually die
from the fall, but at the time, Tommy assumes he's
(20:45):
killed Schherapov, and for Tommy, the reality of what he
just did comes crashing down on him.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
It's just like this flood of emotion is going through me.
I like can't believe what I've just done. I remember
like closing my eyes incredibly tight and like seeing like
weird starry visions. I mean, it was just like it's
almost hard to explain it. It was just like emotionally
overwhelming way that I've never experienced.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Beth was really comforting me. I mean she'd like, I,
like I said, I was deeply in love with this woman,
and she was, and I didn't know she'd suddenly think
that I was like this evil person because we hadn't
really been able to talk it out what I was
about to do. So she was the one who was like,
you're You're my hero. You We're gonna be okay because
of you, and trying to say the right things to
help me in that moment.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
The moment doesn't last long, though, with one of their
captors pushed off the mountain and the other one out
of sight. Tommy and his team know they need to
seize the moment and get out of there as quickly
as possible, so they run down the mountain and find
safety at a military outpost, and eventually they all make
it back to the US. Almost immediately, Tommy's dad notices
a change in him.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I mean, I felt like for a time I sort
of receded into a ball. I didn't talk to anybody
except for Beth about personal things, but Beth on a
few other clubes friends. I didn't talk to my parents
that much about it, So I think he probably had
that take more than most because he knew me a lot.
And then I just didn't want to discuss this with him.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
What aspect of the experience made you most uncomfortable talking
about with your dad?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I think I was just I just didn't know how
to think about the experience. Like I didn't know for
a while whether whether I, you know, was kind of
an evil person for having done this thing, or whether
I was kind of a hero for saving us. I
was both, But I'd also learned. I think very few
people get to find out how they will react in
(22:48):
super intense experiences like that. Everybody sort of wonders, And
I now knew that when things are really bad, I
was able to kind of like rise to the occasion
and do something that was really hard for me and
really fight for survival in this way that I think
I was. I was a bit proud of at the time,
but I didn't want to seem proud. I didn't want
(23:10):
to feel I didn't want to feel proud in a
lot of ways. But I think kind of deep down
I was a little bit proud, like I felt empowered.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Interesting, So, so did the adversity you faced in Kyrgyzstan
change your understanding of yourself or actually just reinforce what
you had believed all along about what you were capable of.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
I think it it reinforced more than changed, but it
also revealed a lot. It opened up a ton of curiosity,
like I wanted to learn more. I wanted to in
some ways get back to that place of being in
this incredibly meditative like flow state that I felt like
I had experienced it at times in Kyrgyzstan. I think
(23:53):
in some ways my climbing ever since then has been
an effort to almost get back there in a way
and learn more. Yeah, almost like an addiction potentially. I
think I saw Kyrgyzstan as this like fuel to put
me on this higher plane where I could like use
(24:13):
that adversity to fuel my life in a lot of ways,
and and sort of my pursuit of of my craft,
which continues to be climbing to this day.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, man, you are such a climber at heart. Like
the fact that you're describing Kirkgason as being a flow
state in which you had like you know, deep mental acuity,
and you're that's as a lay person, right, That is
a truly astonishing way of interpreting those events.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Well I didn't go there first. I probably win a
lot of.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Places in that year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yeah, that's the place that I ended up finding to
be the one that suited me. But if you think
about it, like you know, I can I can equate
it to situations as a child where I was up
on some big wall with my dad and you know,
surrounded by some incredible thunderstorm and things get really real
and my dad would look at me in these kind
of moments with these wild eyes would be like, this
is what brings us to life. So that was built
(25:12):
into me from a really young age.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Interesting, Okay, Yeah, I think my parents were like, why
don't we go inside? Now there's thunder? You would prefer
not to die? Okay? Anyway, anyway, can you describe more?
I think for a lot of listeners the'll be curious
what you mean by this flow state that you experienced
in Kyrgyzstan, Like, what does it feel like? What were
(25:35):
you what were you trying to reach psychologically when you
came back and started climbing again.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
To me, that flow state in its most pure form
is like this moment where it's almost like everything slows down.
You feel weightless, you feel like your vision is a
cute you notice detail in this incredible way. It's like
a physiological change that is incredibly easy to notice when
(26:05):
it happens. You know, it's like in the moment where
all odds are against you, suddenly it's like the clarity
comes and it's completely surreal and completely magical. I feel
like I had experienced that in Kyrgyzstan, and so I
was trying to get back there in climbing, but I wasn't.
I wasn't finding that flow sted in that way. So
I did start to shift some of my climbing to
(26:27):
like this mega endurance days where you're out, you know,
sleep deprived for you know, fifty hours in a row,
and a lot of times these climbs would take four
or five days, and I started to do them in
one day, like twenty four hour pushes.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Okay, I'm pausing only because if I were an alien
descending on this planet and I heard that there's this
guy named Tommy Caldwell who went through a harrowing experience
in Kyrgyzstan, who's now trying to replicate aspects of that
trip on his own volition in normal life. I think
(27:01):
I think the alien would batny, that's all. It's why
I admire climber so much. It's the relentless focus and resolve.
And again, I flirted as a musician with flow right
in my childhood, and I in my own way, I
crave that too. There there's something about engaging with art,
(27:22):
and I guess I see climbing as an art form too,
that can put you in a certain mental state that's
really hard to can't. You can't recruit it in daily
life at will, right, it's not. It's one of these
elusive things that happens when all the stars align right,
or at least that's how it's been in my own experience.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, now I can tell you have like you have
the craving and the thirst for it, and yeah, I
felt like I need to pursue that a lot in
my life since then. But in some ways I never
got back to that place that I was in Kyrgyzstan,
like that flow state that I experienced that really comes
from this you can really only access when when your
(27:59):
life really is on the line. Even though I was
pushing way harder than I was before, I wasn't. I
wasn't ever getting back to that, to that place, to
the incredible flow state.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Tommy spent the next year after his return from Kyrgyzstan
trying to access that high, that flow state in his clients.
Whatever downtime he had, he spent with Beth in this
little fixer upper cabin they bought in the mountains of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Then one day I was working on the house. I
was trying to use the tools and not knowing how
to use them properly. I ended up chopping off my
index finger on my left hand with a table saw.
So this is kind of like worst case scenario.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Can you describe the moment where you realize that your
index finger is no longer on your hand.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I felt this numbness, and I looked down at my
left hand and saw that the finger was completely severed.
Like I didn't know where the other part of it
was so I think I immediately panicked. I yelled to Beth.
I was just like, oh, I just cut off my finger,
And she came over and we found it like laying
on the ground, ran into the house, put it on ice,
(29:05):
and drove to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
What is going through your head on the drive to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I mean I was. I was certainly panicking. I mean
all I could think about was climbing, Like I had
gotten to this place where I was, I was a
professional climber. I was living kind of my ultimate life
I had, but there's all this curiosity about where I
could take it. It was sort of my coping mechanism
for Kyrgyzstan in some ways, like this was the thing
that I could focus on that could both distract me
(29:32):
and empower me, and that was what was keeping me
happy and stable in life. And then suddenly maybe that
is gone too. So I was panicking. I mean, at first,
we're just we're just holding on to hope. I'd heard
stories about people chopping off fingers and then reattaching them
and everything being just fine. You know, like finger reattachment
(29:53):
surgery is usually relatively successful thing. At least it was
in my mind. The doctor came into the room and
he you know, sat bethling me down, and he's like,
we've done everything we can. Your finger is dead. We're
going to do one final surgery and remove it. And
you know, I'm sorry. And he was a climber. Actually
that our doctor ended up being a climber as well,
(30:14):
and he and so he along with that, he said
that he told us that he's like, you should start
thinking about what else you want to do in life,
because you're not you're not going to be able to
like be a professional climber anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And when you first heard that, do you agree with him?
I mean, did you believe that was going to be
the case?
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, I mean I think I heard that, and I
was just like incredibly sad and trying to absorb that.
I mean, once again, I feel like this has been
a theme in my life. I have these things that
are said or things that happened to me that are
almost like too grand for me to comprehend in the moment,
and it takes a long time to really figure it out.
But he left the room and then Beth looked over
(30:52):
at me and she's like, fuck that guy. He has
an idea, what well you're capable of it? That was
like the perfect thing to say, you know, I think
I came out of that hospital with like kind of
this conviction that was driven partially from like this idea
that I might be able to overk him, but also
driven a lot by the fear that I've that I
just like this thing that was incredibly important to me,
and I wanted to do everything I could, like I
(31:13):
might as well do everything I can at that point
to try and prove him wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Do you think you're experiencing Kyrgyzstan increased your resolve to
give climbing another go? Like do you think you would
have actually tried if that experience hadn't happened and you
hadn't seen your limits?
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I think what it did for me is that it
made me not fear failure in a weird way, like
I'd had to confront the worst things that I can
imagine in my life in a lot of ways, and
in some ways it like wasn't so bad, you know.
I Mean it was really bad in some ways, but
in other ways, I'm like, I lived through it. I
can find strength through this and that drive, that drive
(31:53):
that you can feel only in those moments is like
this moment that you have to seize, you know, It's
like that only lasts for so long, and so you
have to capture it, absorb it, and let it, let
it like push you forward.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah. Yeah, big change can do that. Wow. What were
those early first few climbing days Like, so.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I went straight to the climbing gym, I think from
the hospital, Like I don't only think we went home inane.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I love that though you're so passionate about it, you
couldn't wait to get back on Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I mean I'd been laying in a hospital bed for
two weeks, so I was pretty excited to move. And
then the doctor had told me that since the finger
was gone, I couldn't really do any more harm, and
so I was really curious to see how my you know,
newly remodeled hand was going to work. And we went
straight to the gym and it was. It was really
hard at first, and I was like, Okay, this is
(32:48):
a starting point I can I can take this and
improve on it. And then, you know, I went back
to the climbing gym at first, like basically every day,
and each day I would feel a little bit stronger
and a little bit stronger, and before I knew it,
I was sort of exceeding my own expectations. And that
started this pretty incredible flywheel where I was like, Wow,
this is actually working. My strength is coming back, And
(33:11):
within a couple of months, I actually was back at
the level of climbing that I had been before I
chopped off my finger. Like, I went back to other
climbs that I had had as climbing project, and I
was able to do them again, and I was like, Wow,
this is working. I can't believe I'm overcoming this. This is
so exciting. And then I didn't stop there. I just
kept on getting better and better, and you know, in
(33:33):
some ways it was like a super magical time for me.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
There's no manual for how to climb with nine fingers,
so you're also having to relearn key form elements of climbing, right,
how does that happen? Like do you have to fully
adjust your your strategy like the way that you climb
a wall.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Yeah, I mean it's experimental. Climbing is always experimental, like
you're always playing with how to do moves differently, and
so I was just doing that, but without a finger,
you know, I sort of cherished that experimenting, Like my
dad actually welded me up the specific finger strength like
weightlifting machine just for your fingers though, and so I
started using that a bunch, and I got more and
(34:17):
more scientific about building finger strength.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Okay, so you decide to climb one of the most
impossible rock faces I think in the world. Is that right?
I mean, the Don Wall. Most people deemed it impossible.
And I want to know what was your motivation for that?
What were you hoping to achieve?
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, I mean so this was after my you know,
after I came back from chopping off my finger. You know,
that was sort of when I kept just doing harder
and harder roots, and I became the person that knew
more about big wall free climbing on El Capitan than
any you know, I'd spent more time up there, I'd
done more roots than anybody. The Don Wall, it is
(34:58):
by far the hardest big wall free climb in the
world to anybody except for me, at the time, just
looked like a pane of glass. Like you look up
at the wall and you're like, there's nothing to hold
on to. There's no way you could ever climb this thing.
Like I said, I had spent so much time up
there that I knew that sometimes these little edges formed
on these faces that look totally blank from below. But
(35:18):
this is just it was such a big scale that
piecing it together was this incredible puzzle, which ended up
taking me a year just to figure out the route,
and then another like seven years to build the strength
and everything to pull it together. I guess I saw
pushing that venue to be the one place in the
(35:39):
world where I could really explore something that nobody else had.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
At any point, did you experience the intensity of the
Kyrgyzstan flow state when you were climbing the down wall.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I feel like I did actually on the final on
the final go, like when we successfully climbed to the thing.
So me and my partner Kevin Jorgan said, you know,
we spent seven years. We would fix ropes to the wall,
and we would descend up and down the ropes, and
we would try all the different sections and we would
learn it all, and then when we finally went up
and successfully climbed the route. I think when I climbed
(36:14):
those pitches, it was this moment of incredible flow, like
sudden there was so much pressure and anxiety and excitement
wrapped up in the seven years of preparing for this
that when it happened, it felt magical, like that clarity emerged.
I felt weightless. There was this incredible flow. It was yeah,
(36:36):
very magical.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Hey, thanks for listening. See you next week when I
talk with Megan Phelps Roper. She grew up a devout
believer in the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most
rabid hate group in America, but then in her mid twenties,
she walked away from it all.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
It felt like this physical, like I had a giant
boulder sitting on my chest and I couldn't breathe, and
I couldn't see around it, and I had no vision
of the future. I had no idea what my life
was going to look like.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
A slight change of plans is created an executive produce
by me Maya Schunker. Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries,
including our producer Mola Board, associate producers David Jaw and
Julia Goodman, executive producers Mea Lavelle and Justin Lange, senior
editor Jen Guera, and sound design and mixed engineers Ben
(37:57):
Holliday and Jason Gambrell. Thanks also to Luis Gara who
wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith who helped arrange
the vocals, incidental music from Epidemic Sound, and of course,
of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You
can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram at
doctor Maya Schunker. I have to say I'm a little
(38:26):
bit I was a little bit sheepish about doing this
interview because I was like a budding concert violinist as
a kid, and then when I was fifteen, I had
a hand injury in which I tore tendons in my
hand and doctors told me that I could never play again.
So my life had to take a totally different route
from that point forward. But I feel like you would
have been the dude to play the violin with like
(38:47):
four fingers and like crush it. So I just feel like, yeah,
didn't really step up. I was like, oh, the doctor
said I can't play, I guess I won't play. But anyway,
some of us are than others.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
I'm glad we could start the interview by me one
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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