Death Grip (10 page)

In my junior year, when I earned my driver's license, our crew started frequenting one of America's first sport areas, Cochiti Mesa, in the Jemez Mountains. Cochiti's welded tuff is dead vertical and apparently blank, the only holds air pockets you can just floss your fingers or toe tips into. The mesa crowns a vast, ponderosa-studded rift on the east flank of the range, the slopes uncoiling precipitously below, leaving you feeling hundreds of feet higher than you actually are. The climbing style is elegant, connect-the-dots movement on which distinctions such as which two fingers you plug into a pocket or at which angle you articulate your ankle dictate success. Contrary to popular belief, rock climbing is not primarily a strength sport. Even physically gifted phenoms—the types who can do one-armed, one-pinkie pull-ups—must move fluidly and with their weight distributed over their feet, as the leg muscles are slower to tire than the forearms. You “crank” upward on the handholds all while pushing off the feet and using your core, or abdominal muscles, and hips to stay parallel to the rock. The permutations of movement are infinite: Every climb might introduce you to some nuanced new move, and only through years of incorporating motor (muscular and neural) programming into your repertoire do you attain mastery. My friends and I loved visiting the Mesa and, safely protected by the bolts, pushing the grades. It was here that I succeeded on my first 5.12, a rounded rib of stone called
La Espina
. With every notch in difficulty, first 5.12a, then 5.12b, then 5.12c, I could feel new horizons opening. It's addictive to chase numbers, to add notches to your belt, but the central advantage is that you get to attempt ever more spectacular climbs—the wild and sequentially intricate 5.13s and 5.14s (and now 5.15s) where the rock is most sheer. I wouldn't do my first 5.14 until 1997, after a long, bumpy, anxiety-filled journey, all totally avoidable had I not been so hell-bent on starvation.

 

PART TWO

PANIC ATTACK

 

CHAPTER 5

You really shouldn't starve yourself. Limiting calories and depriving myself of certain foods came to have consequences beyond mere hunger pangs; it did long-term physiological and psychological damage. This is because, like the rest of your body, your brain needs proper nutrition in order to function. There are no shortcuts. It all goes down to the neuronal level. Here, starvation can torpedo your neurotransmitters, altering neuron-to-neuron communication and hence how you perceive the world. (Around seventy-five different neurotransmitters have been identified, though the exact number remains unknown.
1
) Our brain's main fuel is glucose converted from carbohydrates, but it also uses amino acids and fatty acids, from protein and fats, to maintain and grow neuronal connections. Eat a diet void of fat, protein, and fresh vegetables, as I did up through my mid-twenties, and you will start to lack the precursors—key vitamins, amino acids, and other molecular building blocks—that neurons use to synthesize neurotransmitters. At which point everything goes wonky.

Published in 1950, one famous—or perhaps infamous—study, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, tracked a selection of thirty-six young, healthy, emotionally stable men over six months of severely restricted caloric intake. (The men were picked from a pool of one hundred who volunteered in lieu of military service; they ate a prescribed average of 1,570 calories per day.) Among the many findings of starvation's curious effects was the revelation that it provoked profound emotional distress. “Almost 20 percent [of subjects] had extreme emotional deterioration that markedly interfered with their functioning,” writes David M. Garner, Ph.D., in “The Effects of Starvation on Behavior; Implications for Dieting and Eating Disorders.”
2
In fact, according to Garner, most subjects “experienced periods during which their emotional distress was quite severe.”
3
To escape the experiment (and hence his anguish), one participant, Sam Legg, weighing only 113 pounds at the time, had a car drop onto his fingers in an “accident” and then amputated three fingers from the same hand with a hatchet while chopping wood several days later.
4
Evident among the men was a depression that worsened over the months, as well as irritability mixed with frequent irascible outbursts. Most subjects also became anxious, smoking and nail biting to calm their agitated nerves. And they excessively consumed coffee and tea, as well as chewing gum (forty packs a day with one subject, until he developed a sore mouth).
5
Meanwhile, one subgroup developed a tendency to binge-eat, in some cases for months after the study had ended. Overall, the men had grown obsessed with food in a dark and unhealthy way.

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

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

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

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

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

A host of bizarre, fucked-up behaviors.

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

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

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

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

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