Climb Anyway

Facing death, not avoiding it.

I face death, rather than avoid it. I climb anyway. Somehow I manage to handle the comings and goings of partners and loved ones. I pay homage, but I also move on. I don't know about whatever might come with death. Little by little I understand what it is that comes before: the life we are all living through right now. I see how easy it is to die in those beautiful places. I have lost many friends to the loveliness and horror of ice and stone walls. I still cry for them, for myself. The beauty of the high places is tempered by threat and danger. I remember the struggles won and lost up there. Every situation in life has its black side. Every human being on this planet would love to make that side go away. Wishing it away, ignoring the danger and the consequences, they can make believe it no longer exists. I refuse this option.

- Mark Twight

How do I contend with the loveliness and horror of ice and stone and life? Much of what I know is borrowed from Mark Twight. So here are some answers from the man himself – climber/coach/writer/photographer/marksman/cyclist Mark Twight:

CD: I’d like to start with mountains. Any unfinished business? Is it exciting or haunting to reflect upon your biggest ascents or is that in the past?

MT: I am of those mountains so I never stop thinking about them, and I have put myself in a place, or places, where I can see them, drive and hike and ski among them. I want to be reminded of what’s important in a world where the demands for attention by the unimportant and unremarkable and commerce-driven are shockingly loud. What things I didn’t do up there during my climbing career were likely beyond reach at that time; these days the psychology and support, the technical development and “how to” knowledge have opened up terrain and objectives that couldn’t be addressed in good style back then. Or maybe we lacked the vision for them, being anchored to the idea that we had already pushed the boat out pretty far and couldn’t reorient to a new, more distant objective.

On that last question, I don’t reflect much on particular ascents unless drawn to it by a current event or conversation. The French route on the south face of Nuptse did that, and the second ascent of the “Reality Bath”. Otherwise, I keep my eyes and momentum aimed forward.

CD: Whenever I’ve been in danger, I’ve remembered “well it is safer than “Reality Bath”! Whenever I’ve been tired I’ve thought, “well I’m getting more sleep than a single push up Slovak Direct!”

MT: I never imagined in the time of doing or in the brief aftermath that some of those climbs or the writing about them would transfer outside of the climbing world. Once I started training military personnel I realized that many of the concepts we developed were transferable, and not simply in a technical or environmental capacity — the “Attitude and Character” chapter of Extreme Alpinism was required reading at one of those units.

CD: Is there even a possibility for as much awe and wonder as there was as recently as the 1980s and 1990s? You racked up a lot of firsts and there aren’t as many firsts left anymore.

MT: I believe that, for a modern visionary, there remain many firsts. How inspiring or moving those are to future generations is the interesting question for me. I don’t think the increases in pure technical ability inspire people in the way that a radical reorientation of acceptable risk (tolerance) or the tactical creativity born of the ideal that we should give the mountain a chance did. Two examples of this would be Messner and Habeler climbing a new route on Hidden speak in alpine style in 1975, the first 8000m peak done in alpine style, and later Kurtyka and Schauer on the west face of Gasherbrum 4 in 1985, which took the combination of commitment and technical difficulty on the highest mountains to an entirely new level, illuminating the way ahead. Those climbs were incredibly inspiring to the younger generations. Of course, not everyone who was moved by them could aim towards that light, and many rejected outright the higher level that had been demonstrated because they still wanted to reach the summit by any means, not by fair means.

CD: Technology has brought us together in the sense that we can easily follow others’ more easily and yet the stats and records are such a big part of it that it can seem less spiritual. My friends and I used to argue what was possible and what had been done; now we can just look it up. Did you hit a moment in history that seemed particularly meaningful and is now past or is such meaning possible today?

MT: It’s hard to understand how much influence that immediately available knowledge has on modern climbing and climbers. I love the memory of scouring old French Alpine Club journals for information, or Elizabeth Hawley’s notes and records of Himalayan ascents; reading of those ascents and seeing the old photographs was an adventure in and of itself. Sometimes it felt like we were discovering secret knowledge, and if it didn’t we knew to keep digging. The shallowness of the scan offered by current search strings and the expectation of immediate results means that (often) what doesn’t appear on the first page of results is treated as non-existent, which can lead to things like retro-bolting of routes that’d been previously climbed using traditional, impermanent means of protection, or second and third first ascents.

The tendency to look back and think of how much better climbing was back in the day is risky, easily turning one into a reactionary curmudgeon. But some rather experienced folks do hold this position. I mean, if it weren’t true the current resurgence of all things 80s — across a wide variety of activities — would not be happening. I think the period of taking alpine style to the Himalayas was an enormous leap forward and there are few of those along the trajectory and development of any human activity. Apart from those few huge progressions the others are incremental, letter grade improvements rather than number grades or wholesale rejection of what had been done by adhering to tradition.

CD: How important is beauty in inspiring your mountaineering? Is photography distinct from climbing or is finding and somehow capturing beauty part of both?

MT: Superimposing who I thought I was or could become onto pictures of mountains or historical ascents was the gateway to climbing for me. That said even though I was born in Yosemite I didn’t find those walls inspiring but was instead attracted to the highest peaks, the steep red granite of the Mont Blanc Massif, the pale blue strips of ice stuck to impossibly steep rock faces … those I found beautiful. And once I began climbing the risk sensitized me to even greater beauty. Among those mountains however, I learned there were teeth; the danger that heightened the beauty killed quite a number of friends and climbing partners so it is impossible for me to see only postcard images when I look up there.

I started making photographs because I lacked the ability to describe experiences and locations with the written word. And without images, my accounts of some experiences would be dismissed as “creative writing”, which sometimes happened anyway, I suppose. REFUGE is all about coming down from the mountains and searching for beauty in the valley, in the mundane. Once things are sorted out with my old business I should be able to recover the book inventory and that will be available again.

CD: One of my favorite moments of fatherhood was climbing with my youngest son. It was just the two of us and he was doing fine but it was the highest he’d been. He looked down, looked back at me and with a huge smile said, “hey Dad – if we fall from here we’d definitely die”. He didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. But he somehow knew that it was consequential and that changes everything. When you forge friendships with people who have risked everything together, is it hard to relate to people who haven’t risked anything? Can you care? Having dealt with mountain survival and rescues, does contending with death make it easier to relate to the military people you’ve trained?

MT: This is a deep rabbit hole. Real consequences change the experience, wholly. Perception is heightened, stimulus leaves a deeper and longer lasting impression, relationships take on greater weight and meaning when exposed to the tempering fire of risk. Where I first began training military personnel we did a lot of climbing because it was one of the few peacetime activities where the consequences of decisions and actions were genuinely threatening and that compelled greater attention, and ability. And climbing happens slowly enough to assess and assimilate all of the inputs and outcomes in the moment of the doing, as they are happening. Many other high-risk activities must be reviewed after the fact because they happen so fast, and the lessons that may be are affected by inaccurate recollection. The point of view is about, “What I did right, what I did wrong, and I’ll do things differently next time,” while climbing allows one to affect the outcome (and learning) in real time.

Safety, safe circumstances never taught anyone anything. Safety first as a child produces fearful, incompetent adults.

Life experiences can unite or separate. For years I had expectations regarding personal relationships that were based on my tightly knit group and the assumption that others outside the group were accessing and learning from similar experiences. When that proved untrue I usually cut off the contact because, even when accurately described, the outcome of a poorly managed risk assessment, the tragedy of terrible loss, the grief can’t be understood or assimilated by anyone who has not experienced something similar. The experience of death offers those who have it a shorthand for communication, we may share without saying, we may sit quietly together without the need for words, we understand what is important and what is trivia, and ideally, we live accordingly. My sense, after years of friendship with climbers and military, is that when a friend dies in the mountains there is deep loss, grief, and sadness but rarely anger (and that only briefly when it does occur) but when an enemy kills a friend first comes anger and retribution, then the loss, grief, and sadness. Still, this is a uniting or unifying experience, and it shows on those who have had it.

CD: When I ask “or what?” I find it easier to pay attention when the alternative is dying or at least getting beat up. You’ve done a lot with the military and MMA fighters who have some of the best reasons to want to give themselves every possible advantage with fitness. But what about actors? Can you and can they bring that level of intensity? Lots of money and fame at stake and the ego of looking good fully or partially naked on screen, but it still matters less. I love the non-fiction nature of mountains. How can you get people motivated for something fictional?

MT: As humans we easily assign importance to a task (arbitrarily) in order to give it meaning when it has none inherently or to get ourselves to do it. The most fiercely devoted of the actors I trained understood that physical transformation was coincident with psychological growth and change. When we could accurately communicate to someone who had the temperament for that work and had their ears set to “Receive” it was easy to guide them on a transformative journey. They had to be open to it though, and persistent because those changes take time and if the condition achieved must be maintained it has to be done slowly; whatever is achieved in 4-6 weeks may be effective for a one-day shirtless scene but it won’t last long at all. If that condition must be maintained for an entire 120 day shoot then it takes 5-6 months to get there (this was the case for “Man of Steel”).

Some actors simply can’t get motivated by the fiction or perhaps by anything difficult at all and this is humans being true to human nature; wanting the results without doing the work, or believing the shortcut reaches the same destination. Sometimes that belief occurs because people lie about their behavior … let’s just say that no one ever admits to using PEDs unless they get caught. As a trainer my position was that hard work changes us, and honesty is a righteous policy.

CD: A lot of the current era’s fastest climbers can trace their lineage back to you in terms of taking big bites out of records. Switching gears to the gym, the lineage of functional fitness that is everywhere in CrossFit and Hyrox came from ideas that came from you at Gym Jones. What do you think about how that evolved? Is that a part of your legacy that is on track?

MT: I was certainly part of the whole “functional fitness” movement but not responsible. Of course, Greg Glassman and I shouted the loudest about it and had the technological means of doing so, but we were standing on the shoulders of giants. This takes me back to the shallowness of those page one search results, no one digs deeper and very little of the origins of circuit training, interval weight training, strength training for endurance, gymnastics, and wrestling conditioning are available digitally. My bookshelf on those topics is deep and wide because I wanted to know, and — once my eyes were opened by some folks who did know — I sure as hell accepted that I wasn’t inventing anything new. Pat O’Shea published his first paper on Interval Weight Training in 1987, and the origins of Crossfit are in that paper, as well as in John Jesse’s remarkable book, “Wrestling Physical Conditioning Encyclopedia” (1974). Percy Cerutty was a huge influence on my work and he was actively training and coaching in the 1950s and ‘60s. So yes, I was part of that but not an OG. My means and style of communicating about it however, may well have been groundbreaking.

Today, this style of training is ubiquitous partially because it makes sense. There are plenty of lies and snake oil salesmen (yes, it’s mostly the dudes who lie about it) but generally, the evolution and marketing of functional training has improved fitness and changed our attitudes about same, and certainly opened eyes to the importance of nutrition for difficult physical activity, body composition, and, as a follow-on, for life. There is still a misunderstanding, unintentional and otherwise, about the importance of technical proficiency in a sport like climbing vs. the fitness that supports it. Many who offer physical training services contend that you can “fitness” your way to success and it is, of course, an aspect of sport performance but the fittest fighter in the world can be knocked out by the better pugilist whose fitness might not allow him to get through more than two rounds. I’d be more interested in whatever my legacy in this context may be if people understood (generally, and by that I mean common knowledge) that fitness is a fine foundation and to push against it, it must be solid but that fitness alone won’t get them up the climb, down the descent, across the line first in a road race, etc. The technical practice is paramount and better fitness allows more practice. Pretty simple.

CD: If you’ve been competitive in something, is there a threshold beneath which it is no longer meaningful, or are activities such as shooting or cycling still a part of your life today? When I think of you as a teacher and coach I think of the gym, but do you teach family and friends the other things you’ve done through the years?

MT: I think the threshold exists in terms of transformative experiences — the better one is, the more experience s/he has, the greater the difficulty must be in order to cause meaningful transformation. And if that isn’t possible one is merely repeating oneself without gaining any new knowledge. If it remains personally satisfying to do that thing by all means keep at it. I mean, I still go to the rock gym because it’s fun and I love sharing that activity with Blair, but it’s not transforming me unless I measure it by how much I care about and love her.

Lately, I’ve been giving talks and putting myself in front of young climbers, military folks, entrepreneurs, and students, and it has been fascinating to hear their questions, to understand the directions they are headed, what stories they find interesting and how well connected to history (beyond the first page search results) they are. In these circumstances I end up teaching things I might not have realized would be interesting to younger generations, and these topics are very rarely related to fitness.

CD: Who is better at suffering – alpinists, cyclists, or CrossFit athletes? Are you done suffering? Can you replicate the feeling of overcoming after climbing nonstop, seeing your second sunrise in a row without sleep? Is there some sort of cumulative wisdom that lets you get back to the euphoric feeling of overcoming without the work to get there?

MT: My first thought is, does it matter? And then, how are we defining the term? So I’ll leave that question (about suffering better) alone.

However, the idea of replication is real and relevant. A friend of mine who is a mountain athlete, of and often among them, and also runs a gym, and I have an ongoing discussion on this topic. Both of us imagined that by opening a facility and offering a certain kind of training, perhaps imposing punishments and consequences, or demanding thoughtful after-action assessments, or sprinting 100m on the ski erg before making each move on an actual chess board, or running 100m before shooting targets 100m away, etc., [you replicate the feeling of overcoming] but we are in agreement now that the artificial means will only ever produce artificial lessons and partial or shallow psychological change. We have paused our conversation until we can record it for a podcast. Consequences must be meaningful to enforce presence and learning and change, and while we can hypothesize that social or financial consequences are just as dire or compelling as the threat to one’s very existence, it isn’t true. In this regard the replication project failed.

If you replace “euphoric feeling” in the last question with “satisfaction”, and I limit my reply to my own personal experience, the answer is, yes, and wholeheartedly. When someone asks a question at one of my public speaking gigs and I can draw on real experience — the hubris of imagining an objective, the humility of actually attempting it, the lessons learned by surviving it, the application of those lessons across the entirety of life after having learned them — and that life experience allows me to offer a genuine, deep, and applicable answer, especially if the person asking is a seeker, a searcher, that gives me a feeling of satisfaction like no other. It assures me that I survived for a reason, and I am living out that reason by sharing the cumulative wisdom with those who are already here and those who will come after.

CD: What’s next for you?

MT: I ask myself this question every day. For now my next is being here and sticking around so I can share as much of life with Blair as is possible, and to keep making not taking, to keep shining a light on what has been and what may and could be, to write more and better, to create things that move and provoke. And to stand back and watch the waves made by those stones tossed into that water crash on the distant shores of human potential. It is always incredibly moving to learn that something I did or wrote or said stuck with someone and affected them in a positive way. Some days I sit back and let that wash over me, and accept that I’ve lived a good and meaningful life.