A breakup focused me like never before

My Dawn Wall is a climbing ledge in New Hampshire

The climber Tommy Caldwell spent seven years working to find a single new route up El Capitan’s “Dawn Wall.” It wasn’t clear if he would ever succeed. Even on the final 19-day push to send the route (climb each section without rests or falls), it wasn’t clear if he and his partner would be able to do it.

Brett Lowell, the cameraman who had been filming Caldwell’s journey for years, said he could never tell if he was wasting his time. Maybe Tommy would never send, and all those weeks and months hanging on a rope, pointing the camera, capturing footage, would all be for nought. Maybe Tommy was struggling against a void he would never overcome.

Many who aren’t climbers have seen the movie Free Solo, where Alex Honnold climbs a nearby route on El Cap without a rope. But what Honnold does is exceedingly rare in climbing. Less than 1% of climbers ever scale huge cliffs without a rope. And meanwhile, the Free Solo filmmakers make it clear that Honnold’s brain works differently from ours. That story is about the anxiety of the people around Honnold more than Honnold himself.

But Caldwell’s journey is supremely relatable. Especially because it’s not some unique area of the brain that made him beat his body against a 3,000-foot cliff for seven years, with little to no hope of success—it was something almost all of us can relate to. It was a breakup.

I.

The past five weeks, I’ve been visiting my old farmhouse in New Hampshire, which is just down the road from a major climbing area, Rumney Rocks.

I like to visit each fall and help my mom with the house (she’s been living here since I bought the property in 2019), and because Fall is prime climbing season. The leaves change color, the temperatures drop, and I think there is no better place to be.

But this year has been bittersweet. My mom wants to move (she’s in New Mexico at the moment), and so I’m thinking of selling the house. My life is in Spain now, and it doesn’t make sense to maintain this big property if no family is here, and I only visit a month or two out of the year.

More than that, however, is that I’m nursing my own breakup. I was supposed to be here with her, and now I’m here alone.

Which has thrown me into something of a Caldwell-like quest, with an amount of concentrated focus I’m not sure I’ve ever had before.

At 43 years old, I’ve never climbed this hard or this well in my life. Nor have I ever focused so intently on “projects,” i.e., hard climbs that can take weeks, months (or in Tommy’s case, years) to work out the moves before a send.

I say that Tommy beat his body against the wall, but projecting is much more than physical. It’s also a problem to be worked out, and the solution is both mental and technical. In Rumney, the climbs are often unusually “beta-intensive,” which means they require a lot of specific information about how to move through the route: which holds to grab and how, the specific body position at certain moments, the precise sequence of footwork.

For the past month, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time discussing beta with a rotating crew of climbers up on the Orange Crush ledge in Rumney. It’s a spot perched mid-way up on the side of Rattlesnake Mountain, with the entirety of the Baker River Valley spread below.

There are a handful of intimidating overhanging climbs that all start from the same spot on the ledge. There, we drink our tea, eat our sandwiches, and queue up one after the other for various routes—Flying Monkeys, Tin Man, Tin Monkeys, Dynosoar—watching each other’s approach to getting through the most difficult spots, or cruxes, discussing just how to rotate the torso so the back heel can lodge itself into the crack, or the exact finger and thumb position to be used on the affectionately called “baby ballsack” hold.

To a non-climber, these discussions would be practically unintelligible—it’s no wonder after two years of living in Spain I still can’t quite follow a discussion of the minutiae of beta on a particular climb: from the kneebar, lower onto the a-cup sloper, keeping the body tension, coming into the gaston with your right, to the finger slot with the heel-hook, and on and on, ad infinitum.

After three weeks of this, I sent a major project: Flying Monkeys, 12c (7b+ in the European grading system).

It’s an intimidating, acrobatic, steep endurance and power route. Basically, my anti-style. The crux is keeping it together while your forearms are so pumped out of your mind you can’t think straight. One friend even recommended skipping the last clip (i.e., not putting the rope through a carabiner for protection) because it would sap too much energy off the final moves.

The route took me 16 times tying into the rope over the course of three weeks. Counting “tie-ins” is a common measure of how long a project took, and thus how hard it was for each person individually.

Pro climbers will tie in to the rope dozens or even hundreds of times as they work their hardest projects. For me, 16 was the most I’ve ever done—the longest I’d ever focused on a single climb my entire life.

This signifies two things. One, I’m not choosing hard enough projects. And two, I’ve never given even a fraction of the focus to my climbing projects that stronger climbers do to theirs.

Which is why I’m writing here that I’m having something of a Caldwell moment.

On Flying Monkeys, 12c (7b+)

II.

I’m not usually like this.

My time in Rumney is usually spent reconnecting with friends, climbing a lot but more casually. I’m generally a flexible partner, all-too-willing to alter my plans for another’s goals, but more often I simply don’t have plans to which I’m particularly attached.

This is different.

The other day, a semi-frequent climbing partner texted me to ask if I could do a day of high-volume, “moderate” climbing at some of the other crags. I texted back a friendly no—I was unusually focused on my project.

Two days ago, a partner from Boston regretfully texted that she couldn’t make it for a planned day up on the ledge. I trekked up there anyway, alone, against all my instincts as an introvert, in the hopes of asking someone for a belay (Of course, it was no problem; several climbers I knew were there working the same routes).

After sending Flying Monkeys, I briefly considered relaxing the rest of my time here. Perhaps I would do some out-of-the-way climbs, go to some other crags, or even visit another climbing area.

But no. Literally the next day out at the cliffs, I asked for a belay on an even harder climb up on the ledge, a 13a that shared some of the same moves. The crux is a boulder problem involving the aforementioned baby ballsack hold. On my fourth tie-in, I managed to do it. On my fifth and sixth tie-ins, I repeated the move, and started work on the other parts of the climb.

There is still a long way to go: putting it all together in one go, without a rest, is always harder than it feels like it should be, when you’re doing each of the moves individually.

But if I’m able to send, this would be the hardest climb of my life. Climbing 13a (7c+ in Europe) is a life goal for me, but it’s always felt pretty out of reach. Not because I don’t think I’m physically capable, but because I’ve always questioned whether I would ever have the time and focus for it.

My life has often felt so scattered. Parenting, moving countries, learning another language, the renovation, travel, writing, work, clients.

Leave it to heartbreak I suppose. Nothing to do but go.

III.

I do think about Caldwell up there on the Dawn Wall.

For months after the movie came out about his journey to finish the route, climbing gyms where I was living in Washington D.C. had gigantic, wall-covering posters up asking, What’s your Dawn Wall?

The push to complete the climb famously generated enormous media attention, with TV trucks parked in Yosemite Valley for weeks. Between tries, Tommy and his climbing partner were giving interviews to national media outlets from their portaledge thousands of feet off the ground.

Yet those in-the-moment TV appearances were curiously devoid of the heartbreak at the center of the story—his divorce from Beth Rodden after 10 years. Caldwell was there essentially because he’d just lost his marriage, his first love, his best friend, and his climbing partner.

Yet Caldwell has spoken openly about his motivations, both in the film and in other forums:

When my mind was going a million miles an hour and I was in this really crazy state, I needed a distraction from the pain of that. That’s when I really took this project on full force, because being up there in this place that I love and working hard was kind of the only time I could feel normal for a while.

Reading that makes my heart clench, and I have to take a moment. The feelings are so familiar.

My Dawn Wall, at least for now, is the Orange Crush Ledge. Up there with the rest of the crew.

It’s nowhere near the difficulty of Caldwell’s route (to my fellow climbers: please forgive even the hint of a comparison). And I don’t anticipate I’ll be there for seven years. Caldwell climbed a 3,000-foot stretch of wall no one thought could be climbed. I’m trying to do a few short routes on which thousands have come before.

What is the same is my grasp for control after a failure I didn’t see coming—and my need for focus when the mind wants to go a million miles an hour somewhere else.

To all the climbers who have joined me up on that ledge over the past several weeks: I am so grateful for your company, the belays, the beta, and the friendship. Sending season is here— let’s keep it rolling a while longer 🙏 💪 🤗.