Padma Lakshmi had a birthday this week. She posted a stunning portrait of her ageless, beautiful face with the caption, “This is 51.” I am not sure if this kind of trope is meant to be humble or vain, but somehow it has the effect of being both at once.
I turned 40 this month, and the comments that I’ve received really just look nothing like the ones Padma got on her post.
“You look pretty good,” one friend said. ”For your age.”
Wow. Not even a week into my fourth decade, and I’ve already gotten a “for your age.” ✅
“You look good,” another one said. “I can barely see your belly anymore.”
“That’s cause I’m wearing a baggy shirt,” I muttered glumly.
“Let’s go climbing sometime!” he said.
Are you kidding me? You just told me that you know about my belly, think about my belly, and openly talk about my belly right to my face … Do you really believe I’m ever wearing a harness around you ever again?!?
What is 40? Well, so far for me it’s been a nagging back injury and a week of having a mild cold, probably from stress and poor sleep. Meanwhile, Leo Houlding is dragging his 4 year old up technical ridge in the Wind Rivers with the hashtag #legendlifeafter40.
Unlike LegendLife Leo, I’m not a legend (yet) and I don’t have a hashtag, but I do approach this next stage of life with some optimism. My wife and I have become climbing partners once again now that our 5 year old is in kindergarten and the 2 year old is in day care. It’s game changing. Our older daughter proudly tells her class and teacher that her parents are going rock climbing today when asked. Damn right. It’s literally been 6 years since Jen and I have consistently climbed together but now we’re back on the old grind. The power couple is back, baby! … Only with a little less power. I’m mostly just embarrassed that I’m the one who has emerged from this phase looking 5 months pregnant in a harness, while Jen looks younger and hotter than ever.
What else is there in the news of the old? My buddy Maury Bridwell, who is only 37 but who I consider to be “spiritually 40” since he has lost more hair than me, just set a fastest known time on the Casual Route on the Diamond, going car-to-car in 3 hours 26 minutes and 12 seconds, not to mention free-soloing the route in the process. What a sick accomplishment!
Speaking of soloing, The Alpinist hits theaters this week. I saw a screener of this film recently, which is a profile of the late Marc-André LeClerc. It’s a great film, but also really sad since, spoiler alert, the main character dies. After watching The Alpinist, I recalled the fact that Marc-Andre initially reached out to me once, before we had ever met, and sent me a message that he liked this article I once wrote called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. This off-hand comment he sent seems to also capture his personality fairly well, which was interesting to revisit after seeing the film.
To give a high level summary of the film, if you liked the palm-sweating footage of Free Solo, The Alpinist dishes up all of that, only with ice tools. Marc André free solos these really technical mixed routes with ice tools, switching to bare hands, then placing picks in free hanging daggers of ice that you’re sure are just going to break. It either makes you sick to your stomach or leaves you feeling sheer awe at the skill these feats demand.
Perhaps, for the sake of this newsletter, it’s more interesting to consider how The Alpinist ties into the topic du jour: getting older. Marc-Andre was so young when he died. For those of us on the other side of that testosterone-fueled exuberance, why do we go from talking about risk in romantic, transcendental terms to seeing some of this behavior as irresponsible or frivolous?
David Smart, the editorial director at Gripped mag, wrote an interesting response on my Facebook page about this film:
“When a roomful of young people stand up and give a protracted ovation to a film in which one of their own dies doing what they love, what is going on? Shouldn’t there be silence and tears instead?”
It’s an interesting observation that really gets to the heart of a difficult question our climbing culture has never successfully answered. We love to laud and romanticize people who do objectively dangerous and impressive things. And when they die, we shed tears, of course, but then we just kind of shrug our shoulders and chalk it up to the fact that climbing is inherently risky, instead of asking the more difficult, salient questions of why even bother doing these things in the first place.
In a text exchange I recently had with Kelly Cordes on this topic, he put that tension between our older and younger selves perfectly:
“I also often try to remember how it was when I was younger, and, really, that stuff did feel transcendental to me and many of my partners, and I hated it when old farts critiqued it, as if they had the answers. More often than not, it felt like they were always doing a version of congratulating themselves for never leaving the couch in the first place. On the other hand, a lot of the folks I greatly admired, including way too many friends, died doing it. At the risk of oversimplification, I suppose that all comes down to perspective. I feel like I understand both sides better now that I’m older (of course). The big risk stuff? It was worth it then. And I’m happy now to be growing old.”
This week in The RunOut Podcast
The new episode of The RunOut podcast is up, featuring an interview with a personal hero and a guy who has touched us all: John Long. Largo’s new book is Icarus Syndrome and probes the aforementioned questions about risk. I think it’s got some of his best writing yet, and that’s saying something.
We’ve also release an AMA episode of The RunOut for our patrons. It’s a rolling hour-long episode of listener-submitted questions, from the ethics of using fans, to what Adam Ondra is up to, to parenthood.
This week in the department of WTF?
Here’s an article about how climbing sponsorship programs are broken because of something-something. Not actually sure what this article is about, to be honest, but I will say that the opening introduction, which implicitly suggests that David Lama, Hansjorg Auer, and Jess Roskelley were being pushed by The North Face to take risks that they might not have otherwise irked me. For one, David and Hansjorg were friends who grew up near each other, climbed together a ton, and went to Masherburm together when they had different sponsors, none of which is acknowledged. Anyway, I wouldn’t have used their story as the intro example to a story about … whatever this is about.
Here’s an article in GQ claiming that rock climbing has become a fashion movement called “gorpcore.” They use this image of some Instagram influencer named Spencer Phipps as “the perfect example of this new climbing guy.” Honestly, this is almost too easy for me to make fun of, and I’m trying to be a better person so …
What can I possibly say that this ring of keys to locks that don’t even exist doesn’t say better?
I didn’t know about Marc, which I just missed the boat on somehow. After avoiding any and all previews for the film I made the mistake of listening to the runout with Mortimer which obviously gave away his death (which should be common knowledge, and was my fault completely). My 3 friends watching the movie also knew nothing about Marc, so while they got to enjoy the movie I become more unsettled knowing his end was coming.
It is crazy how much you can feel for or relate to a person over a 2 hour window.
Our theater was silent and I sat there letting the tears drip down my cheek, no applause necessary for a fantastic film.
His mother is really special, having recognized and helped push him to do what he loved.