Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Tommy Caldwell’s near-death experience unlocks a completely new state of mind that propels him to become the greatest big wall climber of all time.
Tommy Caldwell
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.
Maya Shanker
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. One, he describes as a flow state.
Tommy Caldwell
To me, that flow state in its most pure form is this moment where it's almost like everything slows down. You feel weightless. You feel like your vision is acute. You notice detail in this incredible way. It's in the moment where all odds are against you, suddenly it's like the clarity comes.
Maya Shanker
Tommy tapped into this elusive, intoxicating mental state more than 20 years ago, and he's been relentlessly chasing it ever since.
I'm Maya Shanker, 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 to just hear a bit more about how it is that you got into climbing.
Tommy Caldwell
I got into climbing because of my father. He was a mountain guide, pretty extraordinary human being. He was a bodybuilder in the '80s and early '90s, 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 as his test subject. I was actually, at least socially and probably mentally, a pretty meek, delayed child in a lot of ways. I'm not good at the mental things. I'm socially really shy. And having a really macho dad, he's like, "We got to figure out ways to toughen this kid up, so that he can deal with the world." And he might have overcompensated a little bit, but...
Maya Shanker
I did not have a cool or adventurous childhood. So I'm curious to know what that's like. What's an example of something you would do with your dad?
Tommy Caldwell
To a lot of people, my childhood seemed pretty insane, especially back then. I mean, one example is we hiked to the Lost Arrow Spire, which is the spire that sits 2000 feet above Yosemite National Park, and we repelled down 400 feet off the rim of Yosemite Valley, with 2000 feet of exposure below us.
Maya Shanker
Wow.
Tommy Caldwell
I did this as maybe six or seven years old.
Maya Shanker
Were you scared? Did this stuff come naturally to you? Or was it really hard?
Tommy Caldwell
I think 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. 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 my life where I wonder if it's unhealthy. I don't get scared when I should.
Maya Shanker
Wait, can you say a little more about that?
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah. The types of climbing that I do in the higher mountains when I go to Patagonia, for instance, there's a lot of objective hazard. There's instances where you're climbing up a mountain and some rockfall event happens, and a big rock will fall and land on a ledge 20 feet away from you, and most people get freaked out by that kind of thing. They have this emotional kind of adrenal reaction, and I don't have that so much, and I wonder if that's unhealthy.
Maya Shanker
Was this just a natural trait that you had? Or did you feel like you were building it over time as a kid?
Tommy Caldwell
I feel like, for me, I was building it over time. There are certain climbs that I go and do. Climbs where I might fall 20, 30, 50 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 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, I guess.
Maya Shanker
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, I think my brain architecture is slightly different from yours.
Tommy Caldwell
It's probably more healthy your way, honestly.
Maya Shanker
When Tommy's 22, he gets invited to go on a climbing trip with three other climbers to Kyrgyzstan, 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, Beth Rodden.
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah, that was certainly my main motivation behind the trip, I would say. We were really, really kind of early on in our gating period at that time.
Maya Shanker
So this was during the still wooing her stage, is that why you were so excited to go?
Tommy Caldwell
Absolutely.
Maya Shanker
Okay, got it. So can you paint a little bit of a scene for me about when you first arrive in Kyrgyzstan? What is it like? And what climbing lies ahead of you?
Tommy Caldwell
We flew in, we 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 there 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, 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 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 yak milk and butter and fresh baked bread.
Maya Shanker
Oh, so nice.
Tommy Caldwell
It was like-
Maya Shanker
How hospitable.
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah, it was pretty idealistic. They had encountered climbing teams like us in the past, because this is a place that people had been coming and climbing for 10 or 15 years. So we knew that we would encounter them, so we brought toys to play with the kids and bits of candy and stuff.
It was absolutely beautiful. Certainly, sort of a dream trip. Everything I had kind of expected and hoped for, at first.
Maya Shanker
Can you describe the moment when you realized that you were in danger?
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah. 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 warmup climb on this mountain, which is about a 2000 foot nearly vertical rock cliff. And then we had spent the first day climbing about halfway up that wall, so a 1,000 feet up. The style of climbing we were doing, you climb a 100 or 200 feet up and then you haul all of your equipment up, which is food, water, portaledges. There's no horizontal places to sleep. So you set up your portaledges. And we have this hanging camp a thousand feet up this wall.
And that was actually the night of my birthday. Beth presents me with this candle, we sing Happy birthday you. There's no light pollution at all in this place, because you're literally 50 miles from the nearest source of electricity. And the stars are brilliant, and the moonlight is illuminating these snow covered peaks up valley. And it's a pretty incredible scene.
And so we go to beds feeling like everything's great, and then at very first light, the next morning we awake to gunshots. Just startled awake to gunshots. At 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. They were close by.
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 binoculars, and we could see these heavily armed militants on the ground. We felt very vulnerable. We were expecting bullets to just rip through the bottom of the portaledge at any moment.
Maya Shanker
Wow. So in that moment, are you thinking, "Okay, they might have missed slightly with the first few shots, but we're going to die?"
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah. That's exactly what we were 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.
Maya Shanker
You're literally affixed to a vertical wall in a tent, right? There's literally no escape route.
Tommy Caldwell
Right. I mean, moving-
Maya Shanker
Wow.
Tommy Caldwell
... out of the way would've been a several hour process to just get up and around the corner or something.
Maya Shanker
Okay. So you hear these gunshots, what happens next?
Tommy Caldwell
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 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 to us and he is like, "You guys are just going to 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 Army fatigues, so they look 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.
Maya Shanker
A conflict had broken out in the country between the Kyrgyz Army and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Up on the mountain, a small group of the militants had captured a Kyrgyz 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.
Tommy Caldwell
He just looked very stern. He looked kind of scared, and very stern, and he had blood all over his pants. And I think there was that one moment in there where John looked over at us and he is like, "We're hostages. I think we're hostages." And so that's kind of when it struck us.
Maya Shanker
The militants waste no time. They lead Tommy and Beth and the other climbers into the mountainside at gunpoint. And as they start to cross a river, a group of Kyrgyz soldiers appear at the top of the hill and start shooting at them.
Tommy Caldwell
This battle breaks out, essentially, and we hide in this bush. And Beth and myself and this Kyrgyz 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 Kyrgyz soldier went first. And 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 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 war scene. We were hiding behind this boulder. Bullets were ricocheting off the boulder. We were behind it sitting on the dead body of this other Kyrgyz soldier.
Maya Shanker
God.
Tommy Caldwell
And they were shooting these mortars across at us. I mean, we were kind of certain that we were going to die at any moment.
Maya Shanker
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?
Tommy Caldwell
Definitely, running on adrenaline. Totally surreal. I feel like that is not the rest of life at all. And I think it was fear that was more intense and far different than anything I had noticed. In some ways, I was used to dealing with fear, because of my climbing life, but this was just way different.
Maya Shanker
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 Sharipov. During the day, the militants lead them around in what ultimately ends up being a big circle, looking for hiding places.
Tommy Caldwell
And we don't have any food. We had to abandon all of our food, except I had managed to shove five or six energy bars into my pocket. So each day, in the evening, we would split one of those energy bars between the six of us, and that's-
Maya Shanker
Wow.
Tommy Caldwell
... the only food we had. And we do kind of feel like we're all in it together. We share our food with them. They didn't just take all of our food, they shared it with us. Those six 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, by rivers, under boulders. It was always super cold. Our teeth were chattering all day long, every day, to the point where our jaws and our mouths got really sore. We'd be sitting there hiding for 14 hours of daylight or whatever, and it would feel like a week.
Maya Shanker
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?
Tommy Caldwell
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 mental clarity. You feel like you are almost more alive than ever, as you're starving to death. Your body starts to kick into this survival mode, and so you sort of alternate between that, and then other times of just feeling really lethargic and really slow and really hungry.
So we just traveled around that for six nights, getting progressively weaker. And then, finally, on that last night, things are pretty desperate. And so we were left on this night with just the young, scared soldier, Sharipov, and told to climb up this incredibly steep mountain. It was true rock climbing. It was kind of terrain that if you fell on, it didn't seem like you would stop. You would just continue falling, bouncing down the mountain, until you got to the bottom.
And Sharipov was really scared. We were actually having to lead the way, because we were climbers. We would 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 he stumbled, we could catch him so he didn't just fall down the mountain. And so in all of our minds, if there was a time to escape, this was it.
Maya Shanker
I'm curious, I mean, it seems like the very natural instinct to help others was kicking in for you. You're spotting this guy, you're leading the way, you're helping him. There are these competing feelings towards him and the situation leading to bizarre behaviors in you. It's so fascinating that you can build this kind of camaraderie with a person who might, ultimately, lead to your death, yet, you have that kind of empathy towards their circumstance and their situation.
Tommy Caldwell
I think it felt different at different times. 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 Sharipov who we were with, he was probably about my age or maybe even younger. I think he was 18 years old at the time. He was a hired mercenary. He was, obviously, super frightened himself. 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. It started to rain a tiny bit, and all of us were like, "If we don't escape this scene pretty soon we are going to succumb to hypothermia."
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 at her when we were maybe 50 or a 100 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'd come around, 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 rush up ahead of all of us, he as in Sharipov. And I then started to sneak up behind him, and he was so focused on staying attached to the mountain, grabbing the right handholds 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, and he started to fly off the mountain side. He fell about 20 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.
Maya Shanker
We'll be right back with a Slight Change of Plans.
I'm Maya Shanker, and this is a Slight Change of Plans. Tommy Caldwell's made the bold decision to push one of his captors off the cliff. Years later, a journalist working on the story discovers that Sharipov did not actually die from the fall, but at the time, Tommy assumes he's killed Sharipov. And for Tommy, the reality of what he just did comes crashing down on him.
Tommy Caldwell
It's just like this flood of emotion is going through me. I can't believe what I've just done. I remember closing my eyes incredibly tight and seeing weird starry visions. I mean, it was just like... It's almost hard to explain it. It was just emotionally overwhelming in a way that I've never experienced.
Beth was really comforting me. Like I said, I was deeply in love with this woman, and I didn't know if she'd suddenly think that I was 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 my hero. We're we're going to be okay because of you." And trying to say the right things to help me in that moment.
Maya Shanker
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.
Tommy Caldwell
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, Beth and a few other close 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.
Maya Shanker
What aspect of the experience made you most uncomfortable talking about with your dad?
Tommy Caldwell
I think I just didn't know how to think about the experience. I didn't know for a while whether I 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 super intense experiences like that.
Everybody sort of wonders, and I now knew that when things are really bad, I was able to 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 a bit proud of at the time. But I didn't want to seem proud. 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. I felt empowered.
Maya Shanker
Interesting. 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?
Tommy Caldwell
I think it reinforced more than change, but it also revealed a lot. It opened up a ton of curiosity. 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 in some ways my climbing ever since then has been an effort to almost get back there in a way and learn more. Almost like an addiction, potentially. I think I saw Kyrgyzstan as this fuel to put me on this higher plane where I could use that adversity to fuel my life in a lot of ways, and my pursuit of my craft, which continues to be climbing to this day.
Maya Shanker
Man, you are such a climber at heart. The fact that you're describing Kyrgyzstan as being a flow state, in which you had deep mental acuity, and as a layperson, that is a truly astonishing way of interpreting those events.
Tommy Caldwell
Well, I didn't go there first. I probably went a lot of places-
Maya Shanker
It's taken years.
Tommy Caldwell
... throughout that year. And that's the place that I ended up finding to be the one that suited me. But if you think about it, I can equate it to situations as a child where I was up on some big wall with my dad and 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 and be like, "This is what brings us to life," so that was built into me from a really young age.
Maya Shanker
Interesting. Okay. I think my parents were like, "Why don't we go inside now? There's thunder. We would prefer not to die."
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah, exactly.
Maya Shanker
Okay. Anyway. Can you describe more, I think, for a lot of listeners, they'll be curious what you mean by this flow state that you experienced in Kyrgyzstan. What does it feel like? What were you trying to reach psychologically when you came back and started climbing again?
Tommy Caldwell
To me, that flow state in its most pure form is this moment where it's almost like everything slows down. You feel weightless. You feel like your vision is acute. You notice detail in this incredible way. It's like a physiological change that is incredibly easy to notice when it happens. 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 finding that flow state in that way. So I did start to shift some of my climbing to these mega endurance days, where you're out sleep-deprived for 50 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 24-hour pushes.
Maya Shanker
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 the alien would bat an eye. That's all. It's why I admire climbers so much. It's the relentless focus and resolve, and again, I flirted as a musician with flow, in my childhood and in my own way, I crave that too.
There's something about engaging with art, 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... You can't recruit it in daily life at will. It's one of these elusive things that happens when all the stars align, or at least that's how it's been in my own experience.
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah, no, I can tell you have the craving and the thirst for it. And 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... that you can really only access when your life really is on the line. Even though I was pushing way harder than I was before, I wasn't ever getting back to that place, to that incredible flow state.
Maya Shanker
Tommy spent the next year after his return from Kyrgyzstan trying to access that high, that flow state in his climbs. Whatever downtime he had, he spent with Beth in this little fixer upper cabin they bought in the mountains of Colorado.
Tommy Caldwell
Then one day I was working on the house, and 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 worst case scenario.
Maya Shanker
Can you describe the moment where you realized that your index finger is no longer on your hand?
Tommy Caldwell
I felt this numbness, and I looked down at my left hand and saw that the finger was completely severed. 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, "Ah, I just cut off my finger." And she came over and we found it laying on the ground, ran into the house, put it on ice, and drove to the hospital.
Maya Shanker
What is going through your head on the drive to the hospital?
Tommy Caldwell
I was certainly panicking. I mean, all I could think about was climbing. I had gotten to this place where I was a professional climber. I was living kind of my ultimate life. I had all this curiosity about where I could take. It was sort of my coping mechanism for Kyrgyzstan, in some ways. This was the thing that I could focus on that could both distract me 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 holding onto hope. I had heard stories about people chopping off fingers and them reattaching them, and everything being just fine. Finger reattachment surgery is usually relatively successful thing, at least it was in my mind. The doctor came into the room and he sat Beth and 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 I'm sorry." And he was a climber, actually, our doctor ended up being a climber as well. So along with that, he told us, he's like, "You should start thinking about what else you want to do in life, because you're not going to be able to be a professional climber anymore."
Maya Shanker
And when you first heard that, did you agree with him? I mean, did you believe that that was going to be the case?
Tommy Caldwell
Well, I mean, I think I heard that, and I was just incredibly sad and trying to into 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 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 at me and she's like, "Fuck that guy. He has no idea what you're capable of." And that was the perfect thing to say.
I think I came out of that hospital with kind of this conviction that was driven, partially from this idea that I might be able to overcame, but also driven a lot by the fear that I just lost this thing that was incredibly important to me. And I wanted to do everything I could, like I might as well do everything I can at that point to try and prove him wrong.
Maya Shanker
Do you think your experience in Kyrgyzstan increased your resolve to give climbing another go? Do you think you would've actually tried if that experience hadn't happened and you hadn't seen your limits?
Tommy Caldwell
I think what it did for me is that it made me not fear failure in a weird way. 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 wasn't so bad. 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 that you can feel only in those moments is this moment that you have to seize. It's like, that only lasts for so long, and so you have to capture it, absorb it, and let it push you forward.
Maya Shanker
Yeah. A big change can do that. Wow. What were those early first few climbing days?
Tommy Caldwell
So I went straight to the climbing gym, I think from the hospital. I don't only think we went home yet.
Maya Shanker
Oh, my gosh. Tommy, that's insane.
Tommy Caldwell
I mean, I'd been-
Maya Shanker
I love that though. You were so passionate about it. You couldn't wait to get back on.
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah. 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 newly remodeled hand was going to work. And we went straight to the gym and it was really hard at first. And I was like, "Okay, this is a starting point. I can take this and improve on it."
And then I went back to the climbing gym at first, 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 within a couple of months, I actually was back at the level of climbing that I had been before I chopped off my finger. 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 is so exciting." And then I didn't stop there. I just kept on getting better and better. And in some ways it was a super magical time for me.
Maya Shanker
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? Do you have to fully adjust your strategy, the way that you climb a wall?
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah. I mean, it's experimental. Climbing is always experimental. You're always playing with how to do moves differently. And so I was just doing that, but without a finger. I sort of cherished that experimenting. My dad actually welded me up this specific finger strength like weightlifting machine just for your fingers though. And so I started using that a bunch. And I got more scientific about building finger strength.
Maya Shanker
Okay. So you decide to climb one of the most impossible rock faces, I think, in the world. Is that right? I mean, the Dawn Wall.
Tommy Caldwell
Yeah.
Maya Shanker
Most people deemed it impossible. And I want to know, what was your motivation for that? What were you hoping to achieve?
Tommy Caldwell
So this was after I came back from chopping off my finger. That was sort of when I kept just doing harder and harder routes. And I became the person that knew more about Big Wall free climbing on our El Capitan than... I'd spent more time up there. I'd done more routes than anybody. The Dawn Wall, it is 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. You'd look up at the wall and you're like, "There's nothing to hold onto. 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 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 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 world where I could really explore something that nobody else had.
Maya Shanker
At any point did you experience the intensity of the Kyrgyzstan flow state when you were climbing The Dawn Wall?
Tommy Caldwell
And I feel like I did actually on the final go, when we successfully climbed the thing. So me and my partner, Kevin Jorgeson, 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 those pitches, it was this moment of incredible flow. 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, very magical.
Maya Shanker
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 groups in America, but then in her mid-20s, she walked away from it all.
Megan Phelps-Roper
It felt 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.
Maya Shanker
A Slight Change of Plans is created and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries, including our producer, Mo LaBorde, associate producers, David Zha and Julia Goodman, executive producers, Mia Lobel and Justine Lang, senior editor, Jen Guerra and Sound Design in mix engineers, Ben Tolliday and Jason Gambrell. Thanks also to Luis Guerra, who wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith, who helped arrange the vocals. Incidental music from epidemic sound. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Li. You can follow a Slight Change of Plans on Instagram @drmayashanker.
I have to say, 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 15, 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've been the dude to play the violin with four fingers, and 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-
Tommy Caldwell
Guys-
Maya Shanker
... are tougher than others.
Tommy Caldwell
... I'm glad we could start the interview by me one upping you.
The Host
