June 16, 2025 • 37 mins
Tommy Caldwell’s experience being held captive in Kyrgyzstan unlocks a new state of mind that propels him to become the greatest big wall climber of all time.
This conversation first aired in 2021. It is a companion episode to the one we ran last week about Beth Rodden’s experience of the same trip: “A Climber Loses Her Grip.” Same “Slight Change of Plans”, but wildly different reactions.
You can check out Tommy’s memoir here, and Beth’s memoir here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin hay Slight Changer is Maya here. Last week we
brought you the story of Beth Rawdon, the professional climber
(00:35):
who endured years of post traumatic stress after an international
climbing expedition went horribly awry. Tommy Caldwell, that's boyfriend at
the time, was also on that trip. I interviewed him
on the show a few years ago, and it's been
amazing to reflect back on how differently he processed that experience.
(00:56):
It's the same change of plans, but these two people
took very different paths forward. So today we're sharing that
episode with you again. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
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 (01:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
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
(01:57):
like the clarity comes.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
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
(02:42):
to just hear a bit more about how it is
that you got into climbing.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I mean I got into climbing because of my father.
He was a mountain god, pretty extraordinary human being. He
was a bodybuilder in the 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 kind of
(03:08):
as 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 dout. He's like, we got to figure
out ways to like toughen this kid up so that
he can deal with the world. And he might have
(03:30):
overcompensated a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
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 (03:39):
I mean, to a lot of people, my childhood seemed
pretty insane, especially back then. I Mean, one example is
we height to the Lost Arrow Spire, which is the
spire that sits two thousand feet above the valley floor
you seventy National Park, and we repelled down four hundred
feet off the rim of USEMENTI valley with you know,
two thousand feet of exposure below us.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I did this as like maybe six or seven years old.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Were you scared? Like did this stuff come naturally to
you or was it really hard?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
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
(04:30):
my life where I wonder if it's unhealthy, Like I
don't get scared when I.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Should m But can you say a little more about that.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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 rock fall 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
(05:00):
kind 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 (05:08):
Was this just a natural trait that you had, or
did you feel like you were building it over time
as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
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
(05:35):
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 (05:44):
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 (05:58):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably more healthy your ways.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
When Tommy's twenty two, 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.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
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 (06:27):
So this was during the like still wooing her stage.
Is that why you were so excited to go?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, okay, got it. So can you paint a little
bit of a scene for me about when you first
arrived in Kyrgusan, Like, what is it like and what
climbing lies ahead of you?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
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
(07:05):
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 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
(07:27):
you know, yak milk and butter and fresh baked bread,
and it was like, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was
pretty idealistic, like they hadn't they had they had encountered
climbing teams like us in the past, because this is
a 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
(07:47):
kids and bits of candy and stuff. Yeah, it was.
It was absolutely beautiful, certainly sort of a dream trip.
Everything I kind of expected and hoped for at first.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Can you describe the moment when you realized that you
were in danger?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, So it was very distinct. We had been in
the valley for five or six days. We had sort
of walked around and scope the rocks and decided that
we're 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 feet up. We
(08:28):
know the style of climbing we're 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 this candle
(08:48):
we see, 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. And so we go to beds
(09:10):
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 they were
actually shooting at us. They were close by. We had
(09:33):
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 (09:54):
Wow. So in that moment, are you thinking, Okay, they
might have missed slightly the first with the first few shots,
but you know we're going to die.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, that's exactly what we're worried about. There's no way
to run away. I mean, it's just complete. It's like
somebody's shooting at you and you can't hide behind anything.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
See, you're literally a fix to a vertical wall in
a tent, right, there's literally no escape route.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
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 (10:28):
Okay. So then so you hear these gun shots.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
What happens next 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 that they're
good shots with these guns, and so we're like we
have to go down. So we have a discussion and
(10:52):
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 them
probably nearly an hour, and he gets down there, and
we have these two way radios and he had taken
(11:13):
one of them. When he gets down there, he just
sounds very serious. He radios back to us and he's 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
(11:38):
like 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 they and then they
just kind of wave us on to follow them back
to base camp.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
A conflict had broken out in the country between the
Kregeese army and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Up on
the mountain, a small group of the militants had captured
a Keregee soldier, and when Tommy and the rest of
his climbing crew were forced down the mountain, they were
to get a closer look at the soldier.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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 that 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 (12:27):
The militants waste no time. They lead Tommy and Beth
and the other climbers into the mountain side at gunpoint,
and as they start to cross the river, a group
of Kirky soldiers appear at the top of the hill
and start shooting at them.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
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
(13:01):
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 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
(13:22):
the boulder. We were behind it, sitting on the dead
body of this other Kurgey soldier, and they were shooting
these these mortars across at us. I mean, we were
kind of certain that we were going to die at
any moment.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm just imagining the juxtaposition of going from these immensely
peaceful climbs in this expansive valley to absolute life or
death insanity. Would do you remember feeling.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Definitely running 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 was just way different.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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 Scherapov. During
the day, the militants lead them around in what ultimately
(14:33):
ends up being a big circle looking for hiding places.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
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
(14:57):
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 day life we would hide in usually just
absolutely miserable hiding spots, like you know, by rivers under boulders.
(15:18):
It was always super cold. You know, our teeth were
chattering all day long, every day, to the point where
our jaws and our mouths got really sot. We'd be
sitting there hiding for fourteen hours of daylight or whatever,
and it would feel like a week.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
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 (15:41):
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
(16:04):
you are almost more alive than ever. As you're starving
to death, your body is sort of starts to kick
into this like survival mode, and so you sort of
alternate alternate between that and then other times just feeling
really lethargic and really slow and you know, really hungry.
So We just traveled around like that for six nights,
(16:25):
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 Shapov 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
(16:45):
you would stop. You would just continue falling until you
got you know, bouncing down the mountain until you got
to the bottom. And and shrif 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
(17:07):
spot him in case he stumbled, 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 (17:18):
So I'm curious. I mean, 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
(17:40):
a person who might ultimately lead to your death, if
you have that kind of empathy towards their circumstance and
their situation.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
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, of these rebels, I didn't see them
as super evil people, especially Cherpov who were with Like
he was just a 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. He was obviously super frightened himself, you know.
(18:11):
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 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. Yeah, So as we
(18:31):
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 or one hundred feet below the top
(18:51):
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.
(19:12):
He is 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 and he started to fly off the
(19:34):
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 (19:46):
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 Scherapov did not actually die
from the fall, but at the time Tommy assumes he's
(20:08):
killed Cherapov, and for Tommy, the reality of what he
just did comes crashing down on him.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
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 in a way that I've never experienced. You know.
(20:37):
Beth was really comforting me. I mean she like I
like I said, I was deeply in love with this woman,
and she was and I didn't know. She 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 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 (20:58):
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 (21:20):
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 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.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
What aspect of the experience made you most uncomfortable talking
about with your dad.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
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 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
(22:13):
experiences like that. Everybody sort of wonders, and I now
knew that when 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 to
(22:34):
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 (22:42):
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 (22:54):
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
the incredibly meditative like flow state that I felt like
I had experienced it at times in Kyrgyzstan. I think
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
that adversity to fuel my life in a lot of
ways and sort of my pursuit of my craft, which
continues to be climbing to this day.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah. Man, you are such a climber at heart. Like
the fact that you're describing Kurgason 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 2 (24:09):
Yeah. Well, I didn't go there first. I probably went
a lot of places that year.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, and 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 and be like, this
is what brings us to life. So that was built
(24:36):
into me from a really young age.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
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 will be curious
what you mean by this flow state that you experienced
in Kyrgyzstan, Like, what what does it feel like? What
(24:59):
were you what were you trying to reach psychologically? When
you came back and started climbing again.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
To me, that flow stayed 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 it happens.
(25:30):
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 like
(25:51):
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 (26:05):
Okay, I'm pausing only because it 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 battony.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
That's all.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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's something about engaging
with art, and I guess I see climbing as an
(26:48):
art form too, that can put you in a certain
mental state that's really hard to You 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 at least that's how it's been
in my own experience.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
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 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 life
(27:23):
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 that
incredible flow state.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
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 (27:48):
And one day I was working on the house. I
was trying to use the tools and not knowing how
to use them properly. I end 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 (28:03):
Can you describe the moment where you realize that your
index finger is no longer on your hand.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
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 and she came over and we found it like
laying on the ground, ran into the house, put it
(28:29):
on ice, and drove to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
What is going through your head on the drive to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
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 all this curiosity about where I could
take it. It was sort of my coping mechanism for
Krgyzstan in some ways, like this was the thing that
I could focus on that could both distract me and
(28:56):
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
(29:17):
surgery is usually relatively successful thing, at least it was
in my mind. The doctor came into the room and
he you know, sat bethed 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
our doctor ended up being a climber as well, and
(29:39):
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 you're not going to be able to like be
a professional climber anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
And when you first heard that, do you agree with him?
I mean, did you believe that that was going to
be the case?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
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
(30:16):
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 overca him, but also
driven a lot by the fear that I've that I
just lost this thing that was incredibly important to me,
and I wanted to do everything I could, like I
(30:37):
might as well do everything I can at that point
to try and prove him wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
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 (30:53):
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, 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
(31:17):
drive that you can feel only in those moments is
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 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, A big change can do that. Wow, what
were those early first few climbing days, Like, so.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I went straight to the climbing gym, I think from
the hospital, Like I don't only think we went home inane.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I love that though you're so passionate about it, you
couldn't wait to get back on.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah. I mean I've been laying in a hospital bed
for two weeks, so I was pretty excited to move.
And then the doctor 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 gonna work. And we went straight
to the gym and it was. It was really hard
at first, and I was like, Okay, this is a
(32:12):
starting point. 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.
(32:33):
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. 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,
(32:56):
and you know, in some ways it was like a
super magical time for me.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
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 (33:19):
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 this specific finger strength like
weightlifting machine just for your fingers though, and so I
started using that a bunch and I got more and
(33:41):
more scientific about building finger strength.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
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 (34:02):
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 and
harder roots, and I became the person that knew more
about big wall free climbing on El Capitan than you know.
I'd spent more time up there. I'd done more roots
than anybody. The down wall it is by far the
(34:23):
hardest big wall free climb in the world to anybody
except for me at the time, just look 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 this is just
it was such a big scale that piecing it together
(34:45):
was this incredible puzzle, which ended up taking me a
year just to figure out the root, 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 world where I
could really explore something that nobody else.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Had At any point, did you expl aerience the intensity
of the Kyrgyzstan flow state when you were climbing the
down wall.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
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
(35:38):
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,
(36:00):
very magical.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like to
hear more about Tommy and Beth's experience in Kyrgyzstan. In
the aftermath, they both wrote books that will link to
you in the show notes. We'll be back in a
week with a new episode of A slight Change of Plans.
See you then, A Slight Change of Plans is created
(36:50):
and executive produced 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 Holliday and Jason Gambrel. Thanks also
(37:12):
to Luis Gara 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 Lee.
You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
at doctor Maya Schunker.
Pushkin hay Slight Changer is Maya here. Last week we
brought you the story of Beth Rawdon, the professional climber
(00:35):
who endured years of post traumatic stress after an international
climbing expedition went horribly awry. Tommy Caldwell, that's boyfriend at
the time, was also on that trip. I interviewed him
on the show a few years ago, and it's been
amazing to reflect back on how differently he processed that experience.
(00:56):
It's the same change of plans, but these two people
took very different paths forward. So today we're sharing that
episode with you again. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
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 (01:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
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
(01:57):
like the clarity comes.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
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
(02:42):
to just hear a bit more about how it is
that you got into climbing.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I mean I got into climbing because of my father.
He was a mountain god, pretty extraordinary human being. He
was a bodybuilder in the 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 kind of
(03:08):
as 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 dout. He's like, we got to figure
out ways to like toughen this kid up so that
he can deal with the world. And he might have
(03:30):
overcompensated a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
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 (03:39):
I mean, to a lot of people, my childhood seemed
pretty insane, especially back then. I Mean, one example is
we height to the Lost Arrow Spire, which is the
spire that sits two thousand feet above the valley floor
you seventy National Park, and we repelled down four hundred
feet off the rim of USEMENTI valley with you know,
two thousand feet of exposure below us.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I did this as like maybe six or seven years old.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Were you scared? Like did this stuff come naturally to
you or was it really hard?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
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
(04:30):
my life where I wonder if it's unhealthy, Like I
don't get scared when I.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Should m But can you say a little more about that.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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 rock fall 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
(05:00):
kind 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 (05:08):
Was this just a natural trait that you had, or
did you feel like you were building it over time
as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
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
(05:35):
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 (05:44):
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 (05:58):
Yeah, yeah, it's probably more healthy your ways.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
When Tommy's twenty two, 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.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
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 (06:27):
So this was during the like still wooing her stage.
Is that why you were so excited to go?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, okay, got it. So can you paint a little
bit of a scene for me about when you first
arrived in Kyrgusan, Like, what is it like and what
climbing lies ahead of you?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
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
(07:05):
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 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
(07:27):
you know, yak milk and butter and fresh baked bread,
and it was like, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was
pretty idealistic, like they hadn't they had they had encountered
climbing teams like us in the past, because this is
a 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
(07:47):
kids and bits of candy and stuff. Yeah, it was.
It was absolutely beautiful, certainly sort of a dream trip.
Everything I kind of expected and hoped for at first.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Can you describe the moment when you realized that you
were in danger?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, So it was very distinct. We had been in
the valley for five or six days. We had sort
of walked around and scope the rocks and decided that
we're 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 feet up. We
(08:28):
know the style of climbing we're 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 this candle
(08:48):
we see, 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. And so we go to beds
(09:10):
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 they were
actually shooting at us. They were close by. We had
(09:33):
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 (09:54):
Wow. So in that moment, are you thinking, Okay, they
might have missed slightly the first with the first few shots,
but you know we're going to die.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, that's exactly what we're worried about. There's no way
to run away. I mean, it's just complete. It's like
somebody's shooting at you and you can't hide behind anything.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
See, you're literally a fix to a vertical wall in
a tent, right, there's literally no escape route.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
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 (10:28):
Okay. So then so you hear these gun shots.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
What happens next 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 that they're
good shots with these guns, and so we're like we
have to go down. So we have a discussion and
(10:52):
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 them
probably nearly an hour, and he gets down there, and
we have these two way radios and he had taken
(11:13):
one of them. When he gets down there, he just
sounds very serious. He radios back to us and he's 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
(11:38):
like 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 they and then they
just kind of wave us on to follow them back
to base camp.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
A conflict had broken out in the country between the
Kregeese army and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Up on
the mountain, a small group of the militants had captured
a Keregee soldier, and when Tommy and the rest of
his climbing crew were forced down the mountain, they were
to get a closer look at the soldier.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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 that 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 (12:27):
The militants waste no time. They lead Tommy and Beth
and the other climbers into the mountain side at gunpoint,
and as they start to cross the river, a group
of Kirky soldiers appear at the top of the hill
and start shooting at them.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
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
(13:01):
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 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
(13:22):
the boulder. We were behind it, sitting on the dead
body of this other Kurgey soldier, and they were shooting
these these mortars across at us. I mean, we were
kind of certain that we were going to die at
any moment.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm just imagining the juxtaposition of going from these immensely
peaceful climbs in this expansive valley to absolute life or
death insanity. Would do you remember feeling.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Definitely running 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 was just way different.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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 Scherapov. During
the day, the militants lead them around in what ultimately
(14:33):
ends up being a big circle looking for hiding places.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
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
(14:57):
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 day life we would hide in usually just
absolutely miserable hiding spots, like you know, by rivers under boulders.
(15:18):
It was always super cold. You know, our teeth were
chattering all day long, every day, to the point where
our jaws and our mouths got really sot. We'd be
sitting there hiding for fourteen hours of daylight or whatever,
and it would feel like a week.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
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 (15:41):
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
(16:04):
you are almost more alive than ever. As you're starving
to death, your body is sort of starts to kick
into this like survival mode, and so you sort of
alternate alternate between that and then other times just feeling
really lethargic and really slow and you know, really hungry.
So We just traveled around like that for six nights,
(16:25):
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 Shapov 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
(16:45):
you would stop. You would just continue falling until you
got you know, bouncing down the mountain until you got
to the bottom. And and shrif 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
(17:07):
spot him in case he stumbled, 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 (17:18):
So I'm curious. I mean, 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
(17:40):
a person who might ultimately lead to your death, if
you have that kind of empathy towards their circumstance and
their situation.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
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, of these rebels, I didn't see them
as super evil people, especially Cherpov who were with Like
he was just a 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. He was obviously super frightened himself, you know.
(18:11):
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 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. Yeah, So as we
(18:31):
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 or one hundred feet below the top
(18:51):
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.
(19:12):
He is 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 and he started to fly off the
(19:34):
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 (19:46):
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 Scherapov did not actually die
from the fall, but at the time Tommy assumes he's
(20:08):
killed Cherapov, and for Tommy, the reality of what he
just did comes crashing down on him.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
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 in a way that I've never experienced. You know.
(20:37):
Beth was really comforting me. I mean she like I
like I said, I was deeply in love with this woman,
and she was and I didn't know. She 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 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 (20:58):
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 (21:20):
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 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.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
What aspect of the experience made you most uncomfortable talking
about with your dad.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
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 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
(22:13):
experiences like that. Everybody sort of wonders, and I now
knew that when 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 to
(22:34):
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 (22:42):
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 (22:54):
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
the incredibly meditative like flow state that I felt like
I had experienced it at times in Kyrgyzstan. I think
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
that adversity to fuel my life in a lot of
ways and sort of my pursuit of my craft, which
continues to be climbing to this day.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah. Man, you are such a climber at heart. Like
the fact that you're describing Kurgason 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 2 (24:09):
Yeah. Well, I didn't go there first. I probably went
a lot of places that year.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, and 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 and be like, this
is what brings us to life. So that was built
(24:36):
into me from a really young age.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
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 will be curious
what you mean by this flow state that you experienced
in Kyrgyzstan, Like, what what does it feel like? What
(24:59):
were you what were you trying to reach psychologically? When
you came back and started climbing again.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
To me, that flow stayed 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 it happens.
(25:30):
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 like
(25:51):
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 (26:05):
Okay, I'm pausing only because it 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 battony.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
That's all.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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's something about engaging
with art, and I guess I see climbing as an
(26:48):
art form too, that can put you in a certain
mental state that's really hard to You 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 at least that's how it's been
in my own experience.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
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 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 life
(27:23):
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 that
incredible flow state.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
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 (27:48):
And one day I was working on the house. I
was trying to use the tools and not knowing how
to use them properly. I end 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 (28:03):
Can you describe the moment where you realize that your
index finger is no longer on your hand.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
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 and she came over and we found it like
laying on the ground, ran into the house, put it
(28:29):
on ice, and drove to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
What is going through your head on the drive to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
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 all this curiosity about where I could
take it. It was sort of my coping mechanism for
Krgyzstan in some ways, like this was the thing that
I could focus on that could both distract me and
(28:56):
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
(29:17):
surgery is usually relatively successful thing, at least it was
in my mind. The doctor came into the room and
he you know, sat bethed 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
our doctor ended up being a climber as well, and
(29:39):
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 you're not going to be able to like be
a professional climber anymore.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
And when you first heard that, do you agree with him?
I mean, did you believe that that was going to
be the case?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
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
(30:16):
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 overca him, but also
driven a lot by the fear that I've that I
just lost this thing that was incredibly important to me,
and I wanted to do everything I could, like I
(30:37):
might as well do everything I can at that point
to try and prove him wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
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 (30:53):
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, 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
(31:17):
drive that you can feel only in those moments is
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 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, A big change can do that. Wow, what
were those early first few climbing days, Like, so.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I went straight to the climbing gym, I think from
the hospital, Like I don't only think we went home inane.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I love that though you're so passionate about it, you
couldn't wait to get back on.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah. I mean I've been laying in a hospital bed
for two weeks, so I was pretty excited to move.
And then the doctor 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 gonna work. And we went straight
to the gym and it was. It was really hard
at first, and I was like, Okay, this is a
(32:12):
starting point. 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.
(32:33):
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. 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,
(32:56):
and you know, in some ways it was like a
super magical time for me.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
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 (33:19):
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 this specific finger strength like
weightlifting machine just for your fingers though, and so I
started using that a bunch and I got more and
(33:41):
more scientific about building finger strength.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
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 (34:02):
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 and
harder roots, and I became the person that knew more
about big wall free climbing on El Capitan than you know.
I'd spent more time up there. I'd done more roots
than anybody. The down wall it is by far the
(34:23):
hardest big wall free climb in the world to anybody
except for me at the time, just look 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 this is just
it was such a big scale that piecing it together
(34:45):
was this incredible puzzle, which ended up taking me a
year just to figure out the root, 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 world where I
could really explore something that nobody else.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Had At any point, did you expl aerience the intensity
of the Kyrgyzstan flow state when you were climbing the
down wall.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
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
(35:38):
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,
(36:00):
very magical.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like to
hear more about Tommy and Beth's experience in Kyrgyzstan. In
the aftermath, they both wrote books that will link to
you in the show notes. We'll be back in a
week with a new episode of A slight Change of Plans.
See you then, A Slight Change of Plans is created
(36:50):
and executive produced 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 Holliday and Jason Gambrel. Thanks also
(37:12):
to Luis Gara 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 Lee.
You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
at doctor Maya Schunker.
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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