Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  Coffee, gum, bingeing, food obsession, depression, anxiety, angst—I know these devils. I conducted my own one-man Minnesota Starvation Experiment until my world broke open. As one friend, a dietitian, Lisa Lanzano, M.S. R.D., who has worked with eating-disorder patients for the last sixteen years, told me, “If you weren’t eating anything, it’s not surprising that you had the kind of exacerbations of those mood states.”

  In 1980s and 1990s sport climbing, and certainly also today, “staying light” was seen as the key to performance—our sport’s dirty little open secret. In Jerry Moffatt: Revelations, Jerry Moffatt confesses as much as he ponders retirement after twenty years at the top: “It was feeling like a young man’s sport. For years, I had been living on 1,500 calories a day. I was training nearly every day as hard as possible. My immune system was beaten down from all the work.… Because of this I was often ill or injured.”6 Moffatt always appeared preternaturally ripped in photographs, his legs with the twiggy look coveted by sport climbers. Given that Moffatt’s intake was only 1,500 calories on days during which he probably burned 4,000, his honed physique is hardly surprising. When I look at photos of myself climbing shirtless from my early twenties, I likewise marvel at the fine striations of back muscle, the coils and bindling of ligaments and tendons popping from my shoulders, my breastbone close to the surface, skin papery, rib cage visible, blue webs of vein popping off my hip bones: Climborexic perfection.

  Like all obsessed climbers, if Moffatt had a particular goal he might diet even harder. In 1993, Moffatt established one of Yosemite Valley’s most difficult boulder problems, The Dominator, a concatenation of wicked “power” moves—which recruit explosive muscular force—on fingertip holds out a bald, ten-foot overhang. To succeed, he went on a strict diet. “As a pure power problem, I didn’t need any stamina, so didn’t need any carbohydrates,” wrote Moffatt. “I was keen to lose the weight to give me the edge on that first move and I was so excited about doing it that I could hardly eat anyway.”7 Moffatt ate only salad for a week. His stomach was a “void,” and he lay awake come night with his belly grumbling, picturing the moves on The Dominator, reckoning that he could eat properly after he succeeded—which he did. I couldn’t tell you how many nights I’ve passed just like this at climber campgrounds, my stomach so braided in knots that I hovered in a twitchy nightmare state just shy of sleep. Or plain awake, I was so hungry. On the worst nights my heart palpitated, spitting spare beats, fighting to find a rhythm even as I deprived it of electrolytes and my body consumed its own fat (not glucose, from carbs) due to ketosis.

  My friend Jim Karn was America’s top sport climber in that epoch, winning a World Cup event at La Riba, Spain, in 1988 and taking third overall in the World Cup some years later. Karn is tall, lanky, and dark-haired, a whip-smart overachiever who since retiring from the sport has gone on to help design a host of innovative climbing equipment with Metolius Mountain Products. Back in the day, he onsighted 5.13 (did it on his first try, with no prior knowledge of the route) and redpointed 5.14 when such standards were exceedingly rare. (America’s first 5.14 was climbed in 1986, a blank, 140-foot vertical wall called To Bolt or Not to Be, completed by the French climber JB Tribout at Smith Rock, Oregon.) At six-foot-one, Karn, today an avid mountain biker, weighs a healthy 175 pounds, but at the first World Cup on American soil—in Snowbird, Utah, in 1988—he weighed 142 pounds and was sub-3 percent body fat. Most of the other competitors, who volunteered to be measured, were similarly emaciated. It was almost a point of pride.

  “There was a big period of time where people approached the strength-to-weight equation more by reducing their weight,” says Karn. “There was a huge culture of that, and like any other trend, you copy it.” Everyone knew who was thinnest—you could see it at the cliffs, our shirts off and ribs poking through, giving each other nicknames like “Skeletor” and “The Human Tendon” and “Stick Insect.” At the grades of 5.13 and higher, it was hard to escape. Once, watching a competition in Torino, Italy, I noticed a woman competitor so thin that her elastic-banded running socks bagged around her ankles; brittle with starvation, she sat sobbing beside the wall upon being knocked out of the semifinals. Apocryphal tales abounded of self-induced vomiting, of laxative abuse, of a European at the Smith Rock campground downing a packet of crème-filled cookies then showing other climbers how to puke them up in the bushes. Of one climber, who you’d see surviving on chewing gum and cigarettes at the crag, eating then regurgitating his food, pushing the cud around his plate before re-swallowing it. Of a European woman who taped glucose tablets to a hold halfway up a 5.13 at Smith Rock so she’d have the energy to reach the top.

  A host of bizarre, fucked-up behaviors.

  Karn, living and training much of the year in less Calvinistic Europe, says that he missed the worst of it. Yet he recalls subsisting for a time on a diet heavy in steamed vegetables, without meat or eggs, and that, like so many climbers, he avoided fat altogether for a while. “I started getting wicked flappers [skin tears],” says Karn, “and I figured out that it was because there was no fat in my diet.” As soon as Karn added fat back in, his skin issues cleared up. Climbers similarly fell prey to the delusion that having pencil legs was the key to overhanging routes—that leg muscle was undesirable. (While you don’t want power-lifter quads, having strong legs and a good aerobic capacity trump having a prepubescent’s thigh diameter.) Some climbers thus refused to run or ride bicycles for cross-training, or visit cliffs with long, uphill approaches. Meanwhile, many of us overtrained into chronic exhaustion, with the top Europeans putting in twelve-hour days at the cliffs and then coming home to climb more on a home-wall plywood “woodie,” running circuits until 2:00 A.M. to up their “volume.” Karn recalls pushing himself like a “circus monkey” to his physical and mental limit for three, four, five days in a row, taking one rest day, then going right back to it.

  “If you weren’t completely exhausted, then you weren’t trying,” he says. That’s just how it was. Karn has since experienced ongoing chronic-fatigue issues, and concedes that undereating and overtraining probably hammered his immune system. “I’m absolutely convinced that I did some type of long-term harm,” he’s told me.

  A byproduct of or at least analogue to 1980s and 1990s Climborexia was a collective dark cloud of rage (see the Minnesota Starvation Experiment). So many of us labored to project a bleak, detached, sarcastic outlook, punctuated only by tantrums—throwing fits, pitching “wobblers”—when we didn’t succeed. It was punk-rock nihilism, a natural outgrowth of sport climbing’s “rad-boy” schism from the traditional-climbing world. As the logic went, if you didn’t get psychotically enraged when you fell, you just didn’t care. By the same token, hanging on the rope screaming, “Fuck, I was fucking robbed! I fucking hate this route!” also telegraphed to nearby climbers exactly how “rad” you were: that by all rights you, an amazing talent who of course climbs 5.14-whatever, should have redpointed said route. And that only some exterior factor—the air was too warm; the rope got in your way; your belayer didn’t feed slack quickly enough—provoked this undeserved failure. One friend and 1990s survivor, Will Gadd, e-mailed me an unpublished essay he wrote called “The Kids Are Alright” examining the foibles of our miserable generation. He, too, attributes much of our blackness to starvation, what I jokingly referred to as desperate, erratic “concentration-camp” behavior in an e-mail exchange. “A lot of our anger was probably dietary in origin,” writes Gadd. “In our attempts to climb harder we decided that every ounce of weight on our bodies was just one more ounce for gravity to act upon.” Gadd recalls the omnipresent rice-cake-and-mustard diets, and that “only those who weren’t committed to climbing hard used jam or butter, and pretty much nobody with any talent ate anything with fat in it.”

  No fat equals angry, anxious brain equals raging, psycho fits.

  In that epoch, I had so many wobblers that I stopped counting. It didn’t help that I didn’t lose my virginity until age twenty-two, after five
loser years without so much as a date. Though sexual frustration can be a great motivator to achievement in other nonsexual areas of life, I was too callow to see how counterproductive was my anger, how it held me back. Even top climbers might see only one good day in four—it’s a difficult sport and climbers are notorious for not resting enough, which leaves your muscles shredded and consigns you to further failure. On routes at your limit you might spend days figuring out the most efficient sequences, then weeks more pushing a new “high point,” falling higher on each redpoint attempt. Climbers have, in some cases, spent months mastering a single move, and years mastering a single route. All that failure for a moment of success: It’s an idiot’s game, and if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ll become toxic with frustration.

  I developed a reputation as an enfant terrible during my formative years in New Mexico and beyond. I once ripped the sole off an expensive rock shoe after failing on a climb my friend Randal had fired as he taunted me with, “Ooh, hardman takes the whipper!” Later I winged a quickdraw (a bartacked nylon runner with a carabiner on each end, used to clip the rope to protection) so hard that it ricocheted off the rock and hit my belayer Scott in the head. I kicked, punched, and chased a two-liter soda bottle through a tangle of ferns, nettles, and deadfall below a Rifle cliff while screaming, “Fuck, fuck, fucking FUCK!” until I’d driven the other climbers away. And most hilariously, I tried to throw my rock shoes into the highway from the hillside bouldering area above Morrison, Colorado, but lacked the pitcher’s arm to do so; I had to search for the shoes in a filthy snowbank while my friends mocked me from above. Apparently, I cared a lot. So many of us acted this way, a cadre of irate knuckleheads roiling in our own self-made pressure cooker. Karn, at Rifle, once became so angry upon falling off the last move of a 5.13c that we could hear him screaming a half mile up canyon. Karn’s equally talented brother, Jason, broke his toe kicking a wall after he fared poorly in a competition. One friend—name withheld—had a fit that’s become lore, becoming so testy with his wife/belayer that she tied the rope off and walked away, leaving him hanging like a piñata until he calmed down. We were all so hungry—for greatness, but also for food.

  After high school, I spent a year based out of Albuquerque, applying to colleges—a requirement for living at my father’s house—and working as a mover, interspersed with one- to three-month road trips. Basic economics made it easy to stay thin: Paying only nominal rent ($150/month) at my pop’s, I’d save up what I could and then once on the road put every last penny toward gas, campground fees, and then, at the bottom of the pyramid, food.

  In some strange way, this gypsy lifestyle felt ennobling, from buying canned-goods seconds at dollar stores, to camping down back roads, to taking $2 showers at the KOA. For accommodations, I had a beater REI tent with a busted rainfly I was too cheap to replace, spending stormy nights sloshing in its smelly, wet cocoon. My sleeping pads were just as ghetto, one a thin strip of Ensolite, the other a leaky half-length Therm-a-Rest that I was, again, too miserly to repair. Finally, to combat the cold, I broke down and bought a $10 thrift-store sleeping bag, a cotton bedroll with little deer on the lining. This I wrapped over my synthetic bag for “double protection,” or added an itchy red smallpox blanket ($3 at the Las Vegas Salvation Army store) for triple layering. On nights when the tent became unbearable due to wind or driving rain, we might sleep in my Toyota Tercel wagon, my travel partner and I each dozing upright in the front seats. During a two-day windstorm that drove red sand into my eyes, teeth, and throat at Red Rock Canyon, west of Las Vegas, I finally grokked that I could fold down the Tercel’s hatchback seats and stretch out away from the elements. I now had a fine “dirtbag RV,” replete with pine-tree air freshener. I crisscrossed the American West with various friends, from New Mexico, to Colorado, to Arizona, to Nevada, to Utah, to California, slumming and climbing five, six days a week, as much as my fingers could handle.

  Dirtbag life was good.

  “Dirtbag” is a term climbers love: It implies self-inflicted poverty and career avoidance in the name of screwing off to climb full-time. The term has its romantic connotations, evoking images of self-sufficient outlanders with no need for society or its trappings, but instead only the company of “the tribe” and the rocks. In the 1980s and ’90s, before America’s current explosion of outdoor recreation, before swelling climber numbers put us on land-managers’ radar, you could dirtbag more easily. All you needed was some Forest Service or BLM land and you could squat for months. For years at Rifle the favored free doss was the “Dirt Pile,” a pullout behind a scary yellow-white tailings heap. I met a consummate dirtbag down at the bouldering area Hueco Tanks, near El Paso, Texas, who survived by resoling fellow climbers’ rock shoes out of his van, and another ubiquitous character who squeaked by selling customized climbing T-Shirts and hardware out of the trunk of his car. In Yosemite, the historical heart of American rock climbing, climbers have long survived by “scarfing”: risking arrest as they steal half-finished food off tourists’ trays at the Lodge cafeteria.

  Climbers hate paying for anything. I have friends who’ve lived for years in tents, caves, or vans rather than deign to work a proper job. I suppose I was only a “half-dirtbag” in the sense that I had my father’s house as a home base, though I still embraced the parsimony. Poverty also gave me a handy excuse to do the bare minimum to fuel myself, and I became notorious for my execrable nutrition. Even while friends had tidy food boxes and Igloo coolers full of produce, cheese, and yogurt, I skitched by with a couple grocery bags stashed behind the driver’s seat filled with whatever crap was on sale. Usually ramen noodles, Parmesan cheese, store-baked French bread, Cheez-Its, off-brand Dijon mustard, vanilla-crème cookies, red vines or Twizzlers, tortillas, refried beans, moldering cheese, diet hot cocoa (for appetite suppression), and powdered Café Vienna. When I couldn’t take the hunger anymore, I’d power down a “Cheez-It hoagie”: half a loaf of French bread slathered in mustard and stuffed with crackers. But most nights, too lethargic from climbing to fuss with my cranky camp stove and boil water for Ramen, I’d slump in my lawn chair and silo cold beans from the can, staring at the dirt, saying little. About once a week, we might hit up an all-you-can-eat salad bar or buffet, shoving rolls into our pockets to eat back at camp.

  I organized my road trips to scope the climbing around prospective Southwest university towns. I had to be near climbing. I’d passed through Boulder the summer before my senior year in high school and fallen in love with it. As you near town on US-36, the Boulder Turnpike from Denver, you crest Davidson Mesa and the city fans out below, framed by the Boulder Mountains with their iconic Flatirons, the summits of the Indian Peaks looming behind, and then Longs Peak, a dark, diamond-tipped hulk to the north. On the Boulder Mountains’ south end, a deep cataract named Eldorado Canyon teems with sandstone cliffs up to eight hundred feet, while on the north, past the bouldering haunt of Flagstaff Mountain, you’ll find Boulder Canyon, a winding defile full of ancient gray granite. North again stretches gentle Mount Sanitas, its spiny southern ridges comprised of beetling backbones of maroon and orange Dakota sandstone. Everywhere you look: fields and meadows, cottonwood-lined ditches and streams, rocks, and mountains. It was late June and Boulder’s many beauties were out in force, wearing clingy T-shirts and high-cut summer shorts, strolling the sidewalks, riding bicycles. A young man could be happy here, so I was delighted to learn, in spring 1991, that I’d been accepted into the University of Colorado–Boulder. Like so many climbers drawn by Boulder’s reputation as ground zero for American climbing, I emigrated both to pursue my passion and, with the brashness of youth, make a name for myself.

  At first blush, Boulder was intense. Even as a college freshman, consigned to the dorms by night but out at the rocks every free hour, I quickly found myself rolled into the fray, bouldering up at Flagstaff and trading belays with famous climbers I’d seen before only in magazine photos. (Boulder had only one gym—today it has five—so you’d see everyone either
there or at Flagstaff or Eldo after work.) I met personal heroes like Christian Griffith, whose slideshow I’d attended in Albuquerque, and Derek Hersey, a British wild man known for his free-solo (unroped free-climbing) exploits in Eldorado Canyon. Derek, whose mane of dark hair blew upward in Eldorado’s drafts as he trusted life to fingers and toes, his wool socks pulled up to his calves, his rock shoes two sizes too big so he could leave them on throughout his all-day climbing binges. And Bobbi Bensman, aka Madame Muscles, a woman so enviably buff and talented that most guys were scared to rope up with her. Or Colin Lantz, tall, wiry, with finger tendons like steel cables who could do Flagstaff’s hardest boulder problems in Tevas with a cigarette in his mouth, pulling on holds the size of lima beans. I’d scored a shoe sponsorship in New Mexico to the tune of a few free pairs a year, but my connection at the bootmaker La Sportiva said I might lose it in Boulder, since “there were so many other good climbers.” And he’d been right: Whereas in New Mexico in the early 1990s maybe ten people could climb 5.13, in Boulder I stopped counting after my twentieth “honemaster.” If I wanted to keep getting free shoes, which cost $150 at the shops, I needed to step up my game, which meant no more food, preferably ever.