Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  I wanted to be just as ripped, just as honed as all the top dogs I was meeting and to whom, in my bottomless insecurity, I felt I’d never measure up. Hell, I wanted to do them one better and be the skinniest and strongest myself. So many climbers move to Boulder with that very notion. Twenty years along, I see younger versions of myself at the gym, freakishly low body fat, shirts off, making “dig-me” grunts as they throw down on some 5.13. I miss that youthful yen to climb hard—in most of us it fades with age, especially as old war wounds creak and ossify. I miss that boundless sense of possibility that comes with athletic improvement at one’s physical prime, of feeling the near-godlike potency of “levitating” on microscopic grips out an overhang, the ground skewing away, swifts and pigeons darting past in the ether. I feel fortunate to have even tasted it, even if I was to pay a terrible price.

  Conveniently for my Climborexia, I loathed the starchy carnivore fare at the CU dorms, hated eating in the cafeteria with all the cliqueish dipshits, and often returned from climbing so late that I’d missed dinner anyway. Everyone says college is better than high school, but it’s not: It’s the same tired adolescent crap, only with the volume turned up to eleven because there’s no adult supervision. Campus, with some twenty-five thousand students, felt like a teeming mini-opolis that would swallow me whole, brimming with undifferentiated sexual tension, macho posturing, and alcohol-fueled hostility. I never clicked with its party-bro rhythms, and always hated the throngs on campus even though I ended up spending eight years there before I’d completed my master’s. Infelicitously, my first roommate was a hard-partier, and also an achondroplasic dwarf—he snored so loudly when he’d been drinking (he slept on his back because of his physiology, though he could vomit into trash cans while standing) that I’d try to sleep in the hall, where some drunken hooliganism was usually going on and the lights shone in my eyes. One night as a “prank,” one of the besotted morons on my floor soaked my roommate in lighter fluid and tried to ignite him; that was the caliber of behavior. I never fit in—I had no interest in drinking, football games, chasing girls, the Grateful Dead, weed, concerts, fraternities. I wanted only to climb and get on with my studies. Once, as I used the bathroom at Norlin Library, I saw that someone had penned “Hate weed, hate beer, hate parties, hate college” in the stall, which pretty much summed it up.

  I was also horribly self-conscious, locked, thanks to Climborexia, in a severe case of body dysmorphia. Attending a friend’s party with my dwarf roommate that fall semester, I felt the eyes of my friend’s housemates upon us as we approached. Surely they were looking at me, repulsed by my hideous, bloated form as I waddled up to the fence (I weighed only 135 pounds). Only twenty years later do I realize that the “spectacle” was my roommate, four feet tall and wearing a loud tie-dyed T-shirt that hung past his knees. And I could barely talk to girls, having spent so much time solely in the company of dirty, sweaty, gassy dudes—unlike today, which edges closer to a 50-50 split, women numbered about only one in ten climbers at the time.

  It was better to throw myself into climbing.

  Boulder is a magnet for top outdoor athletes, not only climbers but also cyclists, triathletes, runners, mountain bikers, skiers, and so on, who come to train at altitude (a mile high) and for the easy access to open space. It can be overwhelming, confirmed by a trip to the eternally clusterfucked Whole Foods at Pearl and 28th Street, where shoppers’ net average body fat hovers around 3 percent and where spandex and GORE-TEX are more prevalent than cotton. Just this morning, my wife and I were walking the dog when a kangaroo-legged runner couple passed by on the path. They trotted at an almost recreational pace, not cantering or sprinting, and Kristin and I turned to each other wondering the exact same thing: Why weren’t they running faster? That’s how it is in Boulder: You get so used to seeing exercise junkies engaging in constant, insane, high-octane workouts that you forget it could be otherwise. It was the perfect place for a fiend like me.

  By the end of freshman year I’d starved myself down to 125 pounds. Climbers had just begun developing Rifle in autumn 1991, and I’d gotten on board from the get-go, driving out with friends all autumn, even venturing out in the dead of winter to “stake a claim” on the primo lines by bolting them while it was still too cold to climb. We’d tie red string through the first bolt to mark each “red-tagged project,” warning other climbers off. By spring I had bolted and climbed my first 5.13c, a radical sixty-foot climb out a pendulous overhang I named Fluff Boy. So clueless was I to just how much my weight loss had made climbing easier that I graded the climb 5.12d, three notches below its true difficulty: a “sandbag rating.” Meanwhile, my climbing partners had taken to calling me “Auschwitz Boy,” a nickname I embraced.

  I don’t track what I weigh today—I avoid scales, and will shut my eyes and ask them not to read my weight out loud at the doctor’s office—but at last check I was a buck sixty. I’m five foot six and a half, bowlegged, Slavic-stocky with dense slabs of muscle. I don’t have the typical lithe “climber’s build,” but I don’t care. I can still climb 5.13, even onsight, which might put me in the top 5 percent of climbers. Good enough. I eat three meals a day, snack when I’m hungry, and eat dessert, every night. If my harness gets too tight or I have a project in mind, I’ll drop the dessert for a week—this is as far as the dieting goes. I do not deprive myself of food anymore. I can’t afford to.

  Here’s a typical day from freshman and sophomore year: black coffee for breakfast (10 calories), an apple (100 calories) for lunch, and then Big Red chewing gum for afternoon appetite suppression, a carrot or two for a late-afternoon snack (50-100 calories), and for dinner one strip of fat-free Saltines (20 crackers; 200 calories), rice cakes with salsa (400 calories), and a diet hot-cocoa bonanza (100 calories for, say, four servings) to fleece my stomach into feeling full. A measly 910 fat-free calories, nowhere near even Jerry Moffatt’s spartan regimen of 1,500 calories a day. Every fifth or sixth day, I would break down and binge—I would have to, to build up fuel reserves and to stop from obsessing over food—then feel guilty and go back to starvation and exercise. On climbing days, I’d be out all day, come back to my dorm room, do one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups, and perhaps visit the weight room. On rest days, I took solo hikes in the Flatirons, combing through gullies, thrashing through fern groves and poison ivy thickets in search of boulders, a one-liter Nalgene bottle clasped in one hand and not a lick of trail food on me. More than once I found myself dizzy, near passing out high on some hillside as I cast around for errant, early season raspberries.

  Never once did I consider that this extreme dieting was not sustainable.

  CHAPTER 6

  “You’ve had a panic attack,” the nurse told me. A stern, middle-aged woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, she held my file in front of her, frowned, looked at me, looked down at the file again. We were at Boulder Community Hospital’s emergency room. “Go home,” she said. “There’s nothing more we can do for you.” I sat atop crinkly hospital-bed paper in a little gown, my ass freezing, an IV jammed into my arm, quivering with the chill fluids that infused my veins. The nurse had drawn the green loop of curtain that enclosed the bed, separating it from the others so she could deliver her diagnosis.

  A what, now? A “panic attack”? I’d never heard those two words strung together before. The phrase sounded somehow clinical yet Victorian—whitewashed doctor-speak that also connoted a hysterical fit, a swooning away or case of the vapors. It conveyed no hint of the emotional trauma, the raw nerves of the sufferer. A panic attack: an attack of panic. I had no idea that I’d experienced a relatively common anxiety event, and that all of us might at least once, due to some life stressor (lack of sleep, grief, job stress) experience one: the body reacting, writes Foxman, as if “there is a life-threatening situation when in reality no danger exists”1—the fight-or-flight reaction pumping adrenaline through your system absent any tangible threat. Hell, even my wife, a sunny blonde, has had one. One night in 2009, she
called me from a South Boulder gas station, terror in her voice as she chattered over herself, near-screaming into her cell phone that she was dizzy, couldn’t breathe, and had felt herself blacking out on the highway. It turned out she’d visited a chiropractor’s office earlier that day, and he’d manipulated her neck too aggressively. Hours of post-visit pain had triggered the attack: the fit arisen seemingly “out of the blue,” reaching its full intensity within ten minutes and arousing in “[its] victims fears of impending death,” as Restak puts it.2 With panic attacks, common complaints are a too-fast or erratic heartbeat, sensations of suffocation and the throat closing up, numb extremities, and fear of “freaking out” or “losing control.” But a symptoms list will never capture the helplessness and horror. You truly feel like you’re going to die.

  Physical fear without origin. The first time you feel it, it’s a terror like no other, a sourceless and inexplicable wave breaking over you. I’d called the ambulance, this December 1992, from the condominium I shared with two friends, Scott and Amit, east of campus because I was certain I was dying. Returning salt-lipped and thirsty from the complex’s health club where I’d flogged myself on the StairMaster, I’d gone into the kitchen for a drink and succumbed to a sudden vertigo as I reached for a glass. Last time I reached in this cabinet, I started to pass out, I remembered. Just like this. Reaching for a glass. Then I almost died. Really died. Just two months ago. Home alone, my heart slamming, gut high and sick, I felt as if death itself had invaded the building. I backed out of the kitchen and fumbled for the telephone, hands shaking violently.

  “I’m passing out—I-I think I’m dehydrated,” I told the 911 operator, whimpering like some scared old crone. “I’m dying. Please … help, send help!” The woman told me to stay calm, that emergency services would be right there. I wrapped myself in a comforter and sat on the couch, Richtering with interior ice, my hands and feet unfeeling. We had a dark, north-facing living room that was swollen with shadows.

  A panic attack?

  Even though an EKG and a blood test at the hospital had found nothing amiss, I still wasn’t ready to leave. I felt so fragile, like I might just walk out the door and spontaneously die. I asked the nurse to clarify “panic attack” and received only a brusque, “It’s when you feel anxiety for no reason,” by way of an answer.

  “But are they dangerous?”

  She gave me a look, this harried ER nurse, one that said I have real patients to attend to.

  “No. It only feels like it. You might want to see a psychologist.”

  A psychologist? Shit. Really? I hadn’t almost died again?

  That October, I had nearly snuffed it after Scott and I drove to Rifle for the weekend. Over the summer, he and another friend, Ryan, had sunk bolts in a wild, thirty-foot blue-gray overhang, a feature we named the Crystal Cave for the white quartz littering the scree below the cliff. Overhanging 30 degrees, the wall offered features typical of Rifle’s Leadville limestone: square ribs of rock, hanging blocks, and strange, almost polygonal facets. Scott and Ryan had made little progress, so Scott suggested I try this difficult climb. That year, a now-defunct British climbing publication, On the Edge, had run an article about the country’s young guns, one of whom, Malcolm Smith, had trained and dieted monkishly to repeat a 5.14c named Hubble. In his interview, Smith copped to eating only greens for months, and the piece was adorned with clip art of broccoli. If veggies had worked for Smith, then they would work for me, too. I took to eating cold green beans from the can, Progresso vegetable soup, fields’ worth of celery and carrots, and Pace Picante salsa, which came in gallon jugs, poured over rice cakes.

  In late September, I’d started to put the climb together, dialing in its crux leap for a small, square-cut “cigarette pack,” karate-chop slaps for blocky sideways holds (“sidepulls”), brutal “underclings” (in which your hand turns upside-down, like a waiter bearing a tray), and a technical “pinch” move, in which the thumb has to oppose the fingers just so. The line had only one real rest—a one-handed shakeout, in which you take an arm off and flick your hand to flush trapped blood from your forearm—so I had to climb quickly, almost at a sprint. Climbs like these are known as “power-endurance” routes, hold-to-hold races in which each move recruits at least 50 percent of your power yet you never encounter a two-handed resting “jug”—a friendly, incut handhold on which to pause, hang straight-armed (off your bones), and recover both arms. On my first real redpoint attempt, I’d made it to the third bolt about twenty feet off the ground powered down but with only five hard moves left. I pulled up rope to make the clip even as my arms “chicken-winged,” elbows lifting sideways and out as my muscles failed. Just as I was poised to drop the rope into the carabiner, my hand opened and I whipped off, coils of loose rope falling beside me. As the ground rushed up, Scott sucked slack through his belay device and I came to a halt only six inches above the scree.

  It had been worth it, however. I’d tried my hardest.

  Scott and I would name the route Dumpster BBQ, a nod both to its violent sequences as well as to an incident at the Rifle rest stop along I-70 down in town: Here, a psychopath had “Dumpster barbecued” the bodies of an elderly couple he’d slain in Las Vegas, where he’d commandeered their RV and lit out for Denver. We would listen to the dark, pounding, industrial rhythms of Ministry as we drove out to the canyon, making jokes about the Dumpster barbecue, and the name had stuck. Even if I felt safer in Colorado than in New Mexico, I still fixated on random, psycho violence this way, as if it posed some personal threat. Rifle wasn’t Albuquerque—the violence was tangential to us climbers—but I remember dwelling on this heinous crime all autumn as my mind took a turn toward darkness. In general, climbing areas are out in the boonies where weird things happen, where rednecks, drifters, and other fringe elements go to shoot guns, burn old cars, four-wheel, and drink rotgut. You’re out there, out in the Wild, Wild West, and you always need to be aware of who is around you.

  That October morning, a Saturday, Scott oozed from his sleeping bag in the “Ghetto Meadow,” a big, open campsite above the canyon in which we climbers would jam as many cars as possible. A cesspool of mud, horseflies, and unwashed dirtbags, the Ghetto Meadow also caught good morning sun and had a stream below it, for washing your cooking gear, hands, and face after a long day of climbing.

  “Dude, I was up all night puking,” Scott said, half-draped out of his bag. An ex–ski racer, he’d shaved off his dreadlocks aka “Rasta pasta” by then, and his curly hair lay matted to his scalp. Scott pointed to a few motley piles near his bedroll. “I don’t think I can climb today, but I’ll try to belay. Man, I need some water.”

  “Did you pick up a virus or something?” I asked. Scott took a slug of water from one of the orange-juice jugs he used, and then made a face. He set the jug back beside him. I felt okay, but worried I might succumb myself, before trying Dumpster BBQ.

  “Not sure,” he croaked. Scott pointed at a Pace salsa jug we’d left out on the picnic table. “Maybe I had too much salsa, or maybe it went bad.”

  Shit. I recalled the four salsa-topped rice cakes I’d had for dinner and began to feel queasy—surely just a psychological reflex. But by the time we’d hiked up to the Crystal Cave and I put in one doomed-from-the-start, watery-muscled attempt on Dumpster BBQ, it was clear that I’d also fallen ill. I’d been in ultra-starvation mode for weeks, my morning coffee had left me desiccated, and any remaining water in my body had been sucked into my intestines. Scott and I retreated for Boulder, feeling pallid and febrile, and with black rings encircling our eyes. A marcid Matt-ghost glared back from the rearview mirror every time I checked on him. I felt too nauseous to drink, and had a splitting headache that increased with my thirst. By the time we pulled in to the condo parking lot, I was unsteady on my feet and bathed in cold sweat. Scott and I stumbled inside, leaving our gear in the car. I beelined for the bathroom, where my bowels voided in a hot, stinking torrent; as I perched sweaty and ignoble on the pot, the screen
of my vision went black.

  I moaned for Scott, but he’d already retreated to his bedroom. Then, slowly, my vision returned and I wiped myself, flushed, and pushed off the toilet. They couldn’t find me this way, dead in the bathroom, awash in my own filth. I needed to get to the kitchen and fetch some water. I weltered in that direction, pushing off the walls, and reached into the cupboard for a glass just as my sight dimmed again. Something had broken inside me, and badly. Fumbling, I set the glass on the counter and staggered into the dining area, where I collapsed to the carpet.

  THUD.

  “Scott, ermmm, hmmmm, Scott, man, I—” I groaned as I fell. “Help me, help…”

  The room had gone dark, stars beetling, uncoupling, then recoupling in internal nebulae like when you squint too hard. I needed to shout, to rouse Scott, but I was too weak! By some turn of fate, Scott came out just then to fetch his own glass of water and saw me prone on the floor.

  “Dude, should I call 911?” he asked. I could only groan incoherencies, and then managed, “Yes … yes. Scott, man, I can’t see. I can’t fucking see.”