Sometimes, technology can almost seem like magic. That’s how I think sometimes about cell phones.
I mean, you can just pull a little device out of your pocket, tap a couple of things on the screen, and suddenly you’re talking in real time to some other person, who can be anywhere in the world? I know we take this for granted now, but it’s pretty amazing.
There was a little trick I used to do sometimes, with Skype. Remember Skype? Back in the day, it was pretty cool to be able to use your computer to actually make a phone call. Of course, now we do it all the time with Google Voice. But Skype used to be pretty cutting edge.
Anyway, one of the features of having a Skype account was 3-way calling. You could have a 3-way conversation really easily.
So what I would do is pull up the Skype app on my computer, and have my list of contacts on the screen. I would click on my dad’s name, so it would start dialing his phone number. Then I would click my brother’s name, and it would start dialing HIS phone number. They would both answer the phone, like “Hello?” and I would just stay silent and enjoy the confusion. They each knew their phone rang, and of course they recognized each other’s voices, but neither of them had made the call so they had no idea why their phones rang. It was always good for a laugh.
But sometimes, a phone call can be traumatic.
My guest today is Adam. He was enjoying some solo rock-climbing one day, and was on the phone with his roommate, Rachel. That phone call became one that neither of them will ever forget.
Adam is on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/aaiaiaaoui/
This is Adam’s band, Birdnest – https://www.instagram.com/birdnest.music/
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/248
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
Want to discuss this episode and other things with thousands of other WWTL listeners? Join our podcast Facebook group at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook (many of the podcast guests are there as well)
Quince - Go to Quince.com/whatwas for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns!
AG1 - For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkAG1.com/whatwas
Find the best deals on what you need at Dupe.com
Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
Sometimes, technology can almost seem like magic. That’s how I think sometimes about cell phones.
I mean, you can just pull a little device out of your pocket, tap a couple of things on the screen, and suddenly you’re talking in real time to some other person, who can be anywhere in the world? I know we take this for granted now, but it’s pretty amazing.
There was a little trick I used to do sometimes, with Skype. Remember Skype? Back in the day, it was pretty cool to be able to use your computer to actually make a phone call. Of course, now we do it all the time with Google Voice. But Skype used to be pretty cutting edge.
Anyway, one of the features of having a Skype account was 3-way calling. You could have a 3-way conversation really easily.
So what I would do is pull up the Skype app on my computer, and have my list of contacts on the screen. I would click on my dad’s name, so it would start dialing his phone number. Then I would click my brother’s name, and it would start dialing HIS phone number. They would both answer the phone, like “Hello?” and I would just stay silent and enjoy the confusion. They each knew their phone rang, and of course they recognized each other’s voices, but neither of them had made the call so they had no idea why their phones rang. It was always good for a laugh.
But sometimes, a phone call can be traumatic.
My guest today is Adam. He was enjoying some solo rock-climbing one day, and was on the phone with his roommate, Rachel. That phone call became one that neither of them will ever forget.
Scott
You climb up rock walls, but can you describe this process in really simple terms? Especially if you’re climbing without a partner, because I’m picturing you standing on the ground next to this wall and you’re holding your rope and all your gear. How do you start when the rope isn’t yet attached to anything above you?
Adam
Yeah, that’s a good question. Rope soloing isn’t a super popular form of climbing, I’d say. So, there’s maybe some more mystery around some of stuff like this. Essentially, what you need is you need a person on the ground and they have a belay device that is used to catch the rope if you fall and, as you climb up, you put your rope through some rings. If you fall, then that ring acts as a pivot and the person at the ground acts like an anchor to hold you up.
When you start rope soloing, you just tie the rope off to the ground somehow, whether you attach some gear into the wall that you later retrieve, or you tie an anchor around a tree – that kind of acts as your person on the ground who is your counterweight – and then you, just on your person, carry that device that is usually used to catch the rope. It’s actually not that complicated in principle, but I agree. The first time I heard about it, I had similar questions.
Scott
You’re climbing without a rope for the very first bit of it then, so you can attach something a little bit higher.
Adam
Correct. But in almost all versions of climbing, that’s going to be the case when you first go up the wall if you have a partner. You haven’t clipped anything into the wall, so you’re kind of – I’m going to do air quotes here – “free soloing” the first section of the route, but it’s usually like 5 or 10 feet or maybe up to 20 feet. Like, it’s low stakes if you were to fall. When there are high stakes, people will put these little pads down, or there’s special tools you can buy that will allow you to clip the rope before you even start climbing.
Scott
Okay. Before we get into your actual climbing accident, there was something that happened a few months earlier that was relevant. What was that?
Adam
2023 was the worst year of my life and it started in February. When I was just at a pretty big park in Denver where I lived with my dogs and we were just sitting on a blanket watching the sunset – like normal dog stuff – I can’t remember these days if it was three or four guys, but a few people kind of rushed me and started kicking me and kind of beating me pretty bad and yelling racial slurs at me. I kind of ambiguously look like any race, to be honest, so I’ll often get different racial slurs depending on whatever the person’s personality is, but it usually doesn’t become violent like this did. I think I spent like a day or two in the hospital and they broke my eye socket and I was pretty concussed, to be honest.
My job at the time involved – and still does – a lot of thinking and it made my job very difficult to do and maybe even impossible. So between being targeted kind of just for really no rational reason and then feeling like I was falling behind in my job – which was actually grad school, so it was kind of two things at once – I did get, like, very depressed. I’m kind of a person who’s always doing something. I like to be busy. I have hobbies. I play music. I was in grad school. I have friends. I like to be doing something. For the next couple months, I was depressed enough that I was just laying on the couch watching TV, which is something I don’t do. In some ways, it was nice. I watched Breaking Bad and that turned out to be a really good show which– I know, like, late to the party.
Scott
I love that show.
Adam
Yeah, I did find out. And then I watched Better Call Saul. So, it wasn’t a hundred percent bad, but it was almost 99% bad. During this time, I was, like, very concussed, very depressed. I was climbing very hard 3-6 days a week, I would say, even before this. When I was trying to pull myself out of the depression not just with medications and therapy and stuff, but I did find that going to this outlet of getting good exercise and doing something I was kind of good at and I had, like, a goal in mind that didn’t just take, like, really heavy thinking was a way that was kind of pulling me out of this depression in a very functional way.
Scott
So you doing a lot of climbing helped you not just mentally, but also physically to stay in shape and doing something you loved.
Adam
Yeah. I won’t be the first person to say this. It’s obvious, I think, but a big part of good mental health is good physical health. That’s definitely true for me. When the winters come and there’s no snow to go skiing or whatever and I’m just kind of, like, becoming a homebody, I can tell my mental health is going poorly too.
Scott
Yeah. I think a lot of people can identify with that. That kind of sets the scene. The day before your accident, you went out climbing with your roommate, Rachel. Is she commonly a climbing partner with you?
Adam
Yeah. She and I went back pretty far. We went to the same undergrad in Ohio. Then, we ended up at the same grad school in Denver, funny enough, so we actually became very good friends and very close climbing partners too. So, she was probably one of my two most common climbing partners. We’d gone out the last five days in a row, and this was probably the sixth day in a row. So we went out to do some climbing and, at the very end when it was getting dark, we decided to do one more climb. It was a two-pitch climb, meaning you’d take the rope up – the distance of the rope – you’d bring your partner up, and then you’d need to reset and start from halfway up the wall to be able to go far enough. We just did the first pitch.
We took a 60-meter rope. It was just barely long enough to allow us to have the rope go all the way up and then all the way back down. It was not long enough to do any more than that. In a way, we had effectively measured the distance of this climb to be about 30 meters, which I think is, like, 90 or 100 feet for imperial units.
Scott
So you guys had a nice climb. You came back home and, the next day, you went back to the same place, which is Staunton State Park, but you went alone this time.
Adam
Correct. I had been training for this so-called first ascent, which is just– you’re the first person who had ever done it. I really wanted to do it on rope solo by myself, which was my favorite form of climbing, so I’d been training. I was the strongest I’d ever been in my life by a long shot. I was climbing really hard – sport climbing route and trad climbing route – and I thought I was ready for this one. I actually didn’t plan on doing it that day, but I woke up my roommate at 5.30 or 6.00 AM and I was like, “Hey, you want to go climbing?” And she’s like, “It’s been too many days in a row. I need a day off.” I was hoping you would say that because I really want to go do this climb. So I left knowing that I had a good weather forecast from about 6.00 AM to about 11.00 AM. I don’t know if I had just said the timeline correctly about waking Rachel up, but I probably left around 5.00 or 5.30 in the morning to get to Staunton around 6.00 or 6.30.
Scott
You’re a climber who is really detailed about gear and safety and it starts right there in the parking lot.
Adam
Yeah, totally. I think certain climbers would almost. like. look down on me or make fun of me for the level of safety that I will go through, especially rope soloing when I’m by myself, but yeah. I get to the parking lot and my methods are– I have just, like, a trunk of gear and I pull it out and I check everything. I check the slings on my devices that you put into the wall to protect yourself with called cams. I check one by one and I check my harness. As I accept it, I put it onto my harness and then I check my helmet, make sure it’s all good, even though I had used it the day before. Make sure all the straps are good. I put it on, and that means that it’s ready to go.
More parts of my safety would’ve been– I called three people to tell them where I was going to be, when I should be done, this type of thing just like you’re supposed to do even though I was in a State Park with lots of patrol and lots of people – very safe. I even go as far as– I had, at some point, driven 4-6 hours to go climbing and forgot my helmet and I did not climb. I think, if you talk to most climbers, they would look at me and call me a gumby or some other, semi-jokingly derogatory term that’s like, “Come on buddy. We don’t wear helmets unless we know there’s a serious risk.” But I just did take safety and still do take safety that seriously.
I walked maybe three miles from the parking lot to where I was going to climb with my rope and I put it down – that’s the last thing I check before I go up every time when I’m rope soloing. There’s a way that you can kind of check the rope to make sure that the core is safe and to make sure the sheath of the rope is all intact. I go inch by inch on this 60 meter rope to make sure everything looks good before I tie in to begin my climbing.
Scott
Yeah, because your life depends on the integrity of that rope.
Adam
Yeah, totally. And my job basically revolves around me thinking a lot, so I want to protect my head, and I’m a musician, so I want to protect my hands. I don’t want to lose one of my other things for this hobby, so I try to be as safe as I possibly can be when I’m going climbing. It’s just the type of person I am.
Scott
You said that the rope that you were using that day was not treated for rain. But you were expecting rain later though, right? How were you going to work that out?
Adam
Correct. My rope that was treated for rain was 10 meters longer and, thus, 10 meters heavier that you have to carry yourself. So my plan was to– I think I got there to the wall around 6-7 and I knew I had good weather at least until 11, being conservative. I think really I probably had till 11.30 or noon. So my plan was to just push and I didn’t think it would take me that long because–
I think I did the route in, like, 2 or 5 pitches, but it really could have been 2 or 3. I just didn’t know what was going to be ahead of me, so I was conservative about where I would stop, where I knew I had, like, a good spot to switch my rope over. My whole plan was like, “If I realized it was taking longer than I thought, I was just going to repel down. If I had to leave behind a piece of gear to do that, I would do that.” But to me, it was on the limit of the difficulty that I thought I could rope solo, so I wanted to be as light as I possibly could while still staying safe.
Scott
You told me, if it started raining, you were just going to bail. But how do you do that if you’re halfway up the wall? You still have to get down.
Adam
Yeah, good question. In trad climbing, for those who know what that means– it basically means you take your own pretty expensive gear and you put it into cracks in the wall and it expands and it holds you if you were to fall or something. The way you would bail is you’d put one of these things into the wall and you’d repel down as far as you could, then you would take your rope out, you’d put a new one of these pieces of gear into the wall, and you’d take your rope out and you’d just leave behind these pieces of gear. So I would’ve had to leave behind maybe up to four in the very worst case scenario, which would be about, at that time– cams are more expensive now with tariffs and stuff but, at the time, that probably would’ve been $70 a piece. I was willing to do it, but I wasn’t expecting to. As it turns out, even with the exception of the accident, I would not have been caught in the rain – really even close to being caught in the rain.
Scott
Around 7 AM you start climbing.
Adam
Yeah. I climbed the first few pitches and the first few pitches were pretty tough. For me, it was pretty demanding on a rope solo. It’s the type of thing that would be easy if you had a partner and you weren’t trying to rig everything yourself but, in this context, it was hard. The climb went great. Like, I wish I had more to say about the climb. There was one point where I had to, like, repel down and free the rope because it got stuck at some point. But, essentially, when you rope solo, you climb the pitch, you set up an anchor, you repel down, you retrieve your gear, and then you kind of climb up the rope or do the climb again just to get back to your place and to retrieve all your gear.
The only tiny mishap that happened during this was, at some point, the rope kind of got stuck between two rocks, but this is a very normal thing, at least for me when rope soloing. You just have to free the rope sometimes. I did it and I got it out and there was never a whole lot of pressure put on it. It just got stuck between a crack. But other than that, it went kind of better than most rope solos go where everything seemed to go directly as planned. I got to the top and felt good about myself and took it in like, “I just did this climb that I’d been excited about.” I’m not the type of person who usually does first ascents, so it also felt good just to do a first ascent on rope solo.
Scott
Right. When you say first ascent, just so everyone understands, you’re saying this is the route that you took to go up. It wasn’t documented. Someone else hadn’t already done this.
Adam
Yeah. If somebody had done it, they did not document it, but climber’s usually pretty good about documenting what they do. But yeah, it wasn’t a particularly difficult thing. It’s just something I’d been looking at a lot that I thought looked like it could be fun, and I think I was correct about that.
Scott
Yeah. You’re like Lewis and Clark chartering new territory.
Adam
Yeah, that’s right. It’s just like, “20 feet to the right, somebody had gone up.”
Scott
How high was it at the top?
Adam
That’s a good question. I think it was probably about 380 feet or so at the very top.
Scott
Alright, so you’re enjoying your time after you made the summit there and you called Rachel.
Adam
Yeah, I called Rachel. She was watching my dog at the time and I was kind of calling her to say, “Hey, I don’t know what you have planned today, but if you need to go, I’ll be home in about an hour and a half” because I figured it’d take me about an hour to find a place to repel, get to my car, and then half an hour or so to drive home. She can’t be home alone for that long. That dog was like a princess. She was never home alone. Even an hour and a half was like, “Yeah, I guess that’s fine.” So I called her. I was talking to her on the phone. I was like– more on safety stuff. There’s a better way to be safe, which is don’t do this at all, but I had headphones on that are bone conducting and do not go into my ears at all, so I could still hear everything just fine.
Eventually, I walked along the side of this cliff just looking for a way down and, eventually, I found some, like, fixed anchor. Basically, somebody has screwed this, like, metal gear into the wall that is meant to be used to anchor your rope. I thought, “Okay, I’m just going to set up my rope here and I’m going to repel down this particular route.” I started setting up my rope and I looked down at the end of the route and I realized it’s actually the route that me and Rachel had climbed the day before. The climb that we had done the day before was technically two pitches, like I said – I think I said that – but we had only climbed the first pitch. So, I was just one pitch above that.
I looked later on one of these, like, aggregate sites that– like, people share the statistics about the climbs later and I found that the second pitch that I was repelling from – the first one that I would’ve been repelling from – was maybe in the universe of 20 meters or 25 meters. And then of course, as we measured the day before, the second pitch I would’ve been repelling from was about 30 meters. Cool. I know where I am. That’s kind of nice. I know where I’m in the park, so I kind of know how to get home or back to the parking lot. So, I thought this was a good place for me to repel. I set up my repel and I’m still on the phone with my roommate and I repel down to the next anchor, which is where I would basically directly connect myself to that anchor, pull my rope through, and then set up the next repel just like before – something I’ve done a hundred times before. Just something you do.
Scott
Let me ask you this. You’re repelling down, but you’re on the phone with Rachel. Is there any correlation here like talking on the phone, being distracted while you’re driving? Was that a safety issue at all?
Adam
I could see it being– yes. If later events didn’t tell me that it wasn’t a user error, that’s probably something I would point to as being the cause of the accident. So, yeah, totally. I think you’re right. That is like a safety measure that could have been done better, that I did skip over totally, and I do own that,
Scott
But in this case, it’s not what made the difference.
Adam
In this case, I think that’s right. So I got to this point that’s maybe 20 or 25 meters from the top of where I started repelling and much further than that from where I had climbed up to because, essentially, when I was walking along the cliff, I was also descending. Next thing I know, I’m just falling. I’m about 90 or 100 feet above the ground.
Scott
You were still on the phone when you started falling, right?
Adam
Correct. She just heard me getting further and further away from the phone and she said, “Right before that, we were literally laughing.” I couldn’t tell you about what. I don’t remember what we were talking about at this point, but she constantly reminds me that we were laughing about something before this happened.
Rachel
We had actually been on the phone for about a half an hour or so at that point.
Scott
Adam’s roommate, Rachel.
Rachel
I can’t really tell you what we were talking about, but I remember he had called me as he was starting the fourth and final pitch of this climb and interspersed the conversation with like, “Okay, just finished up. I’m going to start this repel, whatever.” Each pitch down, he would kind of throw in like, “This is where I am, whatever.” So I knew about where he was when he fell. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I remember that he had been laughing and then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t laughing anymore. He just sounded scared. I think I heard him say, like, oh shit or something. Then, in retrospect, I think I heard his phone, scraping against the rock as it fell. He just told me that he was just about to start his final repel down a climb that we had been next to the evening before because we had been climbing in roughly the same spot.
He was just laughing and then all of a sudden it sounded very chaotic. We had been friends for long enough and we had climbed together enough that I know what it sounds like when he’s like, oh, shit, that’s really sketchy or something, but I never heard him really sound scared before like I did as he was falling.
Adam
From my perspective, I was like, “Okay, I’m falling.” It really was like the movie’s slow motion kind of thing where I looked down and I thought, “I am definitely going to die now.” When I looked down, there were basically just rocks down there – as if you could survive a 90 foot fall without rocks, right? I was just, “There’s no way that’s going to happen.”
Then, the next thoughts that went through my head were very, like– first, I was like, “Oh, I’m not afraid to die.” That’s not something I really knew about myself because I always thought I maybe was very afraid to die, but what I did realize is that I felt extreme guilt about leaving people behind. I thought about my mom who’s been sick for a very long time, like, “How could I do this to her? She’s already sick. She’s already had a pretty bad life. Now, she’s going to have to deal with this.” And my dog, who I mentioned before – Charlotte was her name. I was like, “I’ve had her for 10 years. I can’t go. She needs me.” kind of thing.
I did have, like, one small woe which was like, “I’d been working on my PhD for a while and I was supposed to graduate in like six months. I can’t believe I’m going to not get to do that after, like–” the PhD was like the worst times of my life, so it was like, “Wow, that was for nothing.”
Scott
It’s amazing. You could have all of those thoughts .
Adam
And it’s probably within a couple feet of falling. Yeah.
Scott
So you didn’t even think those things all the way down. It was, like, concurrent.
Adam
Yeah, that’s the weird thing. I think back on it and like– you have to wonder, like, did my brain rewrite the memories? I can’t tell you the answer to that but, from the beginning, same day, I guess I was telling the same story. So if it did rewrite the memories, it would’ve had to be within hours.
The next thought I had, and this one makes people laugh– some people just think it’s sad, but I think it’s funny. I grew up in Ohio in an area where there’s a lot of tornadoes. We had tornadoes destroy parks and schools and this type of thing. I remember as a child watching the Discovery Channel a lot, and there was this one episode of– I don’t know what show I was watching, but they talk about this guy who was picked up by a tornado and thrown, like, 50 feet and he survived and it was because he was knocked unconscious and was, like, limp when he hit the ground or whatever, kind of like this drunk driver sort of aspect. So the next thought I had – and I’m still probably just feet below where I had initially fallen – was like, “I need to try to be as limp as possible,” which, of course, I have no control over. Then, the thought that came to my head, for some reason, was like, “I need to be like an uncooked hot dog. I need to mimic a hot dog. That is a limp fleshy thing. I need to be a hot dog right now,” which is like a crazy last thought, if that was going to be my last thought.
Then I had the thought– I was looking down still. I was like, “Okay, there’s one patch of dirt. I should try to land in that.” And at this point, I had no agency over that, but I don’t think you have a rational mind when you’re convinced you’re dying. So within probably a second or two, I had these thoughts and I had, like, gone through some of the levels of grief where it’s like I had accepted it and now maybe there is a chance for hope. I don’t remember anything between that and hitting the ground, but I do remember hitting the ground and just, like, having the wind knocked out of me like crazy, and then I don’t remember– I don’t know how long that lasted – probably less than a second – but that is my last memory of the actual fall.
Scott
The fall itself broke your helmet, so your head must have hit something.
Adam
Yeah, so my theories from later injuries – some of the more major ones – was that I probably knocked myself out on the way down, or I was in shock enough that my body shut down. I’m not a medicine person. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but it was just a sheer cliff. Usually, when you climb, it’s a little less than vertical, like a really steep hill, but this one was like just a sheer drop. But looking at the pictures and looking at my injuries, I think I probably landed with both my knees on some ledge, like, 20 feet down. That probably slowed my descent.
Scott
There were some people there right where you fell and they, of course, just knew you were dead, and they immediately bailed off their climb and left the park.
Adam
Yeah. I ran into these people over a year and a half or two years later when I was walking and I was trying to, like– I was trying to convince myself I would still climb, so I’d done some light climbing in the gym and this type of thing, but I wanted to convince myself I was still willing to climb, like, a hundred foot climb, even if it wasn’t a hard one.
Me and one of my good friends, Sabrina, went to climb in Boulder where I lived at the time and it was really busy where we were climbing, so we were kind of chatting with these people and we were like, “Hey, when are you going to be done with this climb?” Because it was like an easy climb that was around the same height as the one I had fallen off of when I was repelling. I think Sabrina kind of said, like, “This is his first climb after this thing happened.” And the one guy was, like, in awe. He’s like, “Wait, you are the guy?!?!” We came to find out that he and these people that we were waiting on for climbing– they were climbing where I fell, just around the corner. They didn’t see anything happen, but they heard something hit the ground really hard and they heard some people start screaming and they’re just like, “We can’t handle this.” And they bailed off the climb, left their gear behind, and just left and I guess went and got drunk and had pizza.
They said, like, every time they went out climbing as a group, they would talk about me. They were like, “We’re so glad that we ran into you because we were just convinced you had died.” This makes our lives a little better knowing that we didn’t kind of partially witness somebody die climbing.
Scott
Right. But did they feel guilty at all though? I mean, I’m thinking, “Fellow climbers. A climber has a problem. We need to help.”
Adam
We didn’t talk that much. They let us use their gear to climb so we didn’t have to set ours up, and we just kept talking. I couldn’t tell you if they were guilty or not, but they definitely were kind of softly apologetic where they’re like, “Sorry we didn’t stick around, but we don’t have any medical knowledge and we were kind of emotionally traumatized by that, and I was like, “Dude, it’s okay” kind of thing. So I don’t know if they felt guilty or if they felt bad confronting me about it, but there are no hard feelings from me or anything.
Scott
That’s fair enough. Not everyone can handle something like that.
Adam
Oh, totally, yeah. I would not have expected them to be there. They wouldn’t have been any help anyhow. They did say that they made sure there was somebody else there to help first. They saw that there were other people.
Scott
Yeah. And it turns out that kind of one of the lucky aspects of this whole thing is that there were some medical professionals who were climbing nearby.
Adam
Where I fell, it turns out there were two nurses climbing, like, maybe 10 or 20 feet away. So when I hit the ground, they were able to get down and immediately begin treatment on me and checking me and making sure– whatever. I don’t know how nursing works, but I trust them. They were doing their thing.
Scott
Once again, Rachel.
Rachel
I called the state park and I was like, “Hey, I think my friend fell. Here’s where he is. Can you go check and make sure everything’s okay?” And they were like, “Oh, that’s a dead zone there. It’s probably nothing.” And I was like, “Yeah, maybe, but I really need you to go.” I was getting in my car. I had been in bed while we were on the phone and I just got up and went directly to my car and I started driving out there, but it was still, like, a 45 minute drive alone, just wondering like, “Is everything okay? What am I going to find when I get there?” And just sort of trying to prepare myself for the worst. After about 15 minutes, the state park had called me back and they were like, “Hey, we found him. He’s not in great shape. We can’t even tell you if he’s conscious or anything right now. It’s not going to be good, essentially.”
I just remember like the rest of the drive, I was just trying to really focus in and remember the sound of his laughing instead of the sound of him being scared. I didn’t want this last sound of one of my best friends to be the sound of him scared and falling alone. I really wanted to just focus in and remember him laughing.
Adam
The other lucky thing that happened was whilst I was on the phone with my roommate, Rachel, when I fell, she tried to call me back a few times and I guess it went straight to voicemail, and she’s like, “He definitely had an accident.” So she called Staunton State Park Rangers and said, “Hey, this happened.” I guess, at first, they didn’t quite believe her. I guess they get calls like this all the time, like, “Oh, just wait half an hour.” Then, eventually, she convinced them like, “You need to go right now.” So they sent their rescue team. Within, I believe, 20 minutes or 30 minutes, I had two rescue teams and two nurses helping me. I woke up four times before I got to the hospital – that I remember. The very first time I woke up, one of these nurses was doing something to my head, probably supporting my spine or something, and one of them was either taking off my boots or touching my feet or something like this, and I remember one of them saying, “He’s paralyzed.”
Scott
That blows me away.
Adam
Yes.
Scott
Aren’t they supposed to assume that, even if you’re unconscious, you might be able to hear what’s being said? And they don’t even know that yet. They don’t know if you’re paralyzed.
Adam
I don’t know the rules. I’m not a nurse. I mean, this is a traumatic thing. Maybe they’re just like, “Damn, this is crazy.” I don’t know. I could imagine myself making that type of slip. Yeah, I have no hard feelings. In fact, I’ve talked to some of them since then and they’re really kind. I went unconscious after that.
Then, I remember waking up another time and they were cutting my clothes off and my harness off with scissors and there were more people there at this point. I remember just being really cold. You might remember that I only had a certain window to climb without weather adversities. When I had fallen, it was getting kind of cloudy, but there was no rain or anything. But by that time, it was hailing and raining and it was really cold by now. I found out later from one of the park rangers that there was literally lightning striking the cliff that I had just come off of, so it sounds like it was very dramatic for these rescue teams. Of course, I don’t remember it. Then, I went unconscious again.
The next time I remember waking up, I was very cold now and I had, like, field IVs in and there were a lot of people around me. I remember I was just able to speak, and I was like, “I’m really cold. Do you have a blanket for me?” I don’t even remember if it was a man or a woman or who it was in front of me– they’re like, “You don’t have anything like that on you. You don’t have a blanket.” I could, like, see in my periphery without moving my head. I was like, “I see that there’s a sleeping bag over there. Can I have that?” I just remember a few people laughing probably out of relief, and they brought me this sleeping bag and put it on me. I think I was probably conscious for a few more seconds and then I was unconscious again.
Scott
Were you feeling pain at that point?
Adam
No, not at all. I think, even in the reports, they say like they were probing me for pain and I didn’t have any. I knew I was really out of it. Like I said, I’d just come out of a– I don’t even know if I was done having my last concussion. I had, like, a pretty bad concussion and I played sports and was kind of like a problematic child. So I had a lot of concussions younger for different reasons. I’m not like that anymore, but kids will be kids, I guess. So I was in no pain, but I was already having serious memory problems. I couldn’t remember my name. I kept asking, “Do I have a partner?” I was trying to find out if somebody else was hurt. I couldn’t even remember if I was climbing by myself or if I was climbing– I couldn’t remember at the time any of that stuff, but I was not in any pain.
Scott
They load you in the ambulance. Do you remember that ride?
Adam
Yeah, I don’t remember the ride to the ambulance. I guess what they do – and I didn’t know this – is they put you in, kind of, those baskets that the ski patrol will put you in if you’re injured.
Scott
Yeah. They’re called a litter, I think, right?
Adam
Yeah, but there’s just a single wheel on it so they can take you down single track. They took me down single track and I guess like there’s so much hail that the litter was covering me in hail, so I was, like, on ice. Whether that helped me medically, I don’t know. Probably not.
Scott
Could the day get any worse for you?
Adam
I don’t remember any of that and I don’t remember getting in the ambulance, but I do remember waking up in the ambulance and there was this very kind man– although, maybe, when you’re in this type of situation, everybody seems kind, I don’t know. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember we talked about something and I remember having this thought, “I need to start remembering every single thing that happens.” And I did not, but I remember having that thought in the ambulance.
Scott
Why do you think you had that thought? Are you the type that likes to document everything? Because there’s all these details, you’d think, “Oh, I’m going to forget some of this. I better try to remember.”
Adam
I think it’s in my nature. I’d been training to be a physicist for a long time. I was working on my PhD. So just having information is important. But there is just a level of documentation where I think, when you’re an outdoors person, you want to know what happened because you do want to share these stories and tell people here’s what happened and here’s what didn’t happen and here’s how you could do better, and here’s the mistakes I made. I don’t know if it was a sense of like, “I just needed some sort of control in a time in my life for the last six months where I felt like I had no control over my whole life.” I looked back at texts I sent and things that I did and decisions I made and it’s like I didn’t feel like I had agency over myself at all during those times. So, I don’t know the answer to that, but I can postulate on a few different things that could lead into that.
Scott
You get to the hospital and they start checking you out.
Adam
They take me straight to imaging after, like, establishing an ICU room for me. But what I do know is, filling in some blanks, that Rachel had– after she made this call, she didn’t know what to do, so she just drove straight to the park I was at and called all of our friends to see if anybody was available to help. Maybe a kind of a funny side note is one of the people she called turned out to be in Florida and she’s just like, “Adam fell. Can you be at the hospital?” And she’s like, “I’m in Florida with my fiance. So no, I can’t.” So Rachel hung up and called other people. This person, Sabrina, who’s the one that I said I ended up climbing later with and met those people who kind of almost witnessed me die. Nobody ever informed her that I was alive for days later, so she was in this, like, family vacation with her fiance’s family thinking I had died and having a horrible time.
She was eventually allowed by the park rangers to leave and follow the ambulance to the hospital, and she went to the ICU room, but got there after I had left. She goes in and she just sees a bunch of bloody clothes and bloody bandages, and I guess gets sick and she leaves the room because she doesn’t know what’s going on. I got all these CT scans and X-rays, and then I went back to the ICU room. At this point, I felt kind of fine. I could move my arms – not really my fingers, but I could move my arms – and I was, like, asking for a phone to call my mom and convincing a nurse to let me use their personal phone because there was no hospital phone.
Rachel described it– one of her friends came too named Gabrielle, and they both described it as like, I was fine and I was convinced I was going home that day, but the hospital was like, “No, you can’t go home.”
They said their imaging showed nothing broken, but there might’ve been some internal bleeding they wanted to keep me for. Also, I got put on suicide watch, which meant that they had to keep me. The reason I got put on suicide watch is, like I said, I’d been having, like, these depressive episodes.
They sutured my knees and my elbow. My elbow was skinned to the bone and they ended up suturing all of that. After they did that, the woman jokingly was like, “Hey, you just paid for this suture kit. Do you want to keep it?” And I said, “No, of course.” But at that point, one of my friends showed up who was a PhD candidate in neuroscience and did surgery on mice all the time and she was like, “I’ll take it.” So she wrapped it up in a glove and let her have it, which I did not know was legal – maybe it’s not. I don’t know.
Scott
That’s weird. I’ve never heard of a surgeon or any medical professional offering a suture kit. I guess because they’d already used it on you, they couldn’t use it on someone else, right?
Adam
Yeah. Maybe you can use it on mice. I don’t know. So she took it. A combination of them knowing I was coming in with kind of some mental health problems from the months before and then the suture kit was missing but it wasn’t documented where it was, they decided I had somehow taken this instrument to hurt myself and they had to keep me to watch me for suicide which, as we’ll see later, ended up being beneficial for me for different reasons.
Scott
And you had a pretty good crowd of friends showing up to see you.
Adam
At the time, yes. I had some really good friends who showed up to help out. One of the hardest parts of this whole experience– like, the physical aspect was really hard, but you also find that– I have no ill will towards anybody or think their decisions were wrong but, some of these people, almost directly after this, I never spoke to again because it was just too heavy for them. So, kind of, these friendships that were really important to me did die off directly as a result of this, but other ones became much stronger. At the moment, I had a lot of people there but, over time, that number would dwindle quite a lot.
Scott
That night – overnight in the hospital – you started to decline. Were you in a lot of pain at that point?
Adam
Yeah, I started to get into a lot of pain. I was on one of these heavy pain killers. They’re pumping a lot of fluid into me and it turned out– in their CT scans, what they did find – even though they didn’t find any breaks or ligament damage or anything – is that I had quite a bit of internal bleeding. So, I overnight and the next day, I think I received six bags of blood products and they were checking my blood constantly.
Because I was getting all this blood and all these fluids, I had to pee constantly, but I could not stand up or do anything by myself and they did not give me a catheter. What they were able to do is– this is why I was lucky. I had somebody on suicide watch. Some nurses were able to kind of maneuver me to lean up against the bed and then they gave me a bottle, which they call a urinal, but it’s just a bottle. Then, they would pour it into the toilet and flush it.
My schedule for the next few days was I’d get my blood drawn, they take a blood sample, I would rest a little bit, I’d have to get up and pee, and that was probably like a 30 or 40 minute process. I’d lay back down for a little bit and the blood would come again. Like, the labs would come again. So I kind of had uninterrupted sleep for two days whereas– because standing up was extremely painful.
I kept complaining constantly. I was like, “My hand is definitely broken.” I guess I asked every person that. My friends in the hospital, Rachel, and another really good friend Rebecca, who spent almost her entire time, including her birthday with me in the hospital with her sister who was visiting Denver from California. They said that I probably asked 40 times to different people, like, “I’m positive that my hand is broken.” And they kept saying, “Our reports say that it’s not.” Eventually, somebody got annoyed with me enough that they checked the same X-rays they took, and I had a very bad fracture on my third metacarpal, which is like the bone that’s below your middle finger, below the last knuckle. So they decided they needed to do surgery on it, and they scheduled it for, like, a couple days later.
Then, with this new sense of, like, confidence in my thoughts, I was like, my wrist is all– actually, I thought it was my pinky and my thumb on my other hand. I was like, “It’s got to be broken because, if I even move my hand a little bit or if it brushes against a blanket – I have a huge amount of pain.” It turned out I had a split fracture in my wrist that they went back and looked at the same images and they’re like, “Oh, actually, you do have that.” How they didn’t catch this stuff, I have no idea. They went back a few times and they saw that those fractures were there.
Scott
Somebody just wasn’t paying attention.
Adam
I have friends, very close friends now who are physicians who have looked through my files with my permission and they have consistently said that it is egregiously bad medicine. I don’t have very much positive to say about this hospital and all the medical professionals between my friends and people I would later work with all say the same thing. So I had my surgery and I was still on suicide watch. I had not seen a psychiatrist, which you’re supposed to see within 24 hours or something, and this was only three days later.
I had just had my surgery. I got out of surgery and I was just kind of coming off the anesthesia, and they’re like, “All right, we’re going to process you to be sent home.” And I was like, “What?” My roommate was really confused too. I was like, “I can’t stand. I can’t move my fingers. I’m in an absurd amount of pain.” My elbow was so skinned that when they closed it with the suture, the bone was exposed. There wasn’t enough skin to close it, so they were like, “You might need a skin graft or you might get lucky.” They were changing my bandage – it was Xeroform – like four times a day, which I didn’t know how I was going to do by myself. Luckily, one of my climbing friends was showing up for the first time and she was able to help escort me out there and get into the car. I asked, “What if I didn’t have a roommate that could do anything for me?” And they’re like, “We’d send you to a nursing home.” I was like, “Oh, okay.”
So I was discharged. All of a sudden, the psychiatric evaluation that they had to do came, like, an hour before they released me because, probably, they realized they had to do it to get rid of me. It literally just involved calling my friend who had that suture kit, and it’s like, “Do you have the suture kit?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I have the suture kit. I took it home. He did not hide this thing to hurt himself with.” And then they let me go home. So I got in the car with Rachel, who I lived with, and we drove home and I was in, like– the pain that I was in just going over any sort of bump was unreal, I would say.
Scott
And Rachel was driving.
Adam
Yeah.
Scott
So every time she hits a bump and she hears you scream, it’s like, “Oh, man, sorry about that.”
Adam
Yeah. She felt bad. She did learn to inflict a lot of pain onto me for my own good, but it was definitely tough for her.
Scott
During your recovery, you discovered what your actual injuries were.
Adam
Yeah. Over time, I started going to physical therapy and my own PCP and things were way worse than we thought. When I was released, they’re like, “There’s nothing wrong with your legs. You might not be able to move them, but there’s no physical stuff.” They told me I could start practicing walking if I wanted to or if it was possible. So I would try. Somebody would hold me up or I’d try to stand up from my transport chair or whatever. When they released– and in the document – I should find it to show you – it says that I was released in– I don’t know what the technical term is, but it was, like, good health. Like, I was not just stable, but I was good. I remember thinking, I am not good. I was taking 15 to 20 pills a day for pain and for– I couldn’t really pee on my own. I needed medicine to help me go pee.
The long and the short of it is through my PCP, who almost exclusively just used their images, she didn’t really take any more images. I was sent to a doctor for my knees and a doctor for my elbow. All in all, I think I had, like, 10 surgeries and only one of them was done in the hospital, and it was determined that I had 26 broken bones.
Scott
26. And they didn’t even believe you at first about your hand being broken.
Adam
Correct.
Scott
You had to convince them of that.
Adam
Here’s one of the crazy things. On one of my knees, I had my meniscus, my quad tendon, my MCL and my ACL all repaired and my kneecap was broken straight in half.
Scott
The degree of incompetence here is amazing.
Adam
And I was practicing. I couldn’t walk, not really, but I was practicing trying to walk on it and probably making it worse for probably months.
Scott
Also, some of your ribs were broken and your back.
Adam
Yeah, I broke a bone in my back called my sacrum. I broke both my kneecaps, I broke some ribs, I broke a lot of small bones in my wrists and hands. I had three surgeries just on my left hand. I broke four or three teeth. It’s hard for me to remember off the top of my head right now. I did try to pursue legal stuff, but it turns out it’s in Colorado. It’s very hard to sue a hospital as long as they didn’t kill you, but I did try and I talked to several people and they’re all like, “We agree. This is super egregious, but we don’t think we can win that case.”
One of the crazy things was there’s a doctor who I first met who ended up recommending me to a different doctor who’d be better for these surgeries he sought. I met him and he was like, “Oh, you’re the guy.” And I was like, “I guess so.” Because at this point, I was popular at these places. Everybody seemed to know who I was. I was like the boy who lived– like, doctors I didn’t even have would pop in and be like, “I just wanted to meet you and see where are you, really?” I do wonder. I had some serious, and I still do have some serious medical bills and I wonder if they could have been way lower, if I would’ve just had a better hospital experience.
Scott
It’s interesting you mentioned earlier that what you considered to be close friends, you never heard from again. I’ve seen this happen in other people, other guests on the podcast that I’ve talked to. It’s just too much for them, they can’t stand it, so they just leave, you never hear from them again, but it kind of filtered out who your true friends really are. Right?
Adam
Yeah, maybe something like that. It’s one of those things where you look for the silver lining, like, “Oh, at least I’ve got these really good friends.” But it also never stops kind of stinging because I think I’m the type of person who tries to be there when things are really bad and you hope that everybody’s like that and they’re not. It did take me months to realize, like, “That’s okay.” One is not better than the other. It’s just so dependent on the person, and that’s okay. I’m at the point where not only do I forgive them, but I don’t even think they have anything to be sorry about in my opinion. It was too much. There was a lot going on in my life in those last six months. I probably did hurt them in a way that I might not even remember, to be honest. That’s life and that’s okay. I wish them well and I’m sorry it happened kind of thing.
Scott
Do you climb now?
Adam
I have tried to, a little bit. I am in a lot of pain all of the time, still. Specifically, my elbow and my knee never ever stop hurting, and it ranges from almost like a headache in your elbow, like that level of aching pain. It ranges from like that pretty low level pain to so bad that I need to take the day off work kind of pain. So, I would like to if I can get past some of this pain but, right now, it’s very seldom that I’m able to do such a thing.
Scott
I’m thinking back to when you first fell and then one person said to the other, “He’s paralyzed.” Did you ever actually feel paralyzed in any way or how did your movement progress?
Adam
Yeah, I totally, for months, thought that I was functionally paralyzed in my legs and my fingers. I could kind of stand up if somebody helped me and supported me, but I could not stand up by myself. If I was laying down, I could not lean myself up. So my legs really didn’t work and I thought, “Okay, maybe that’s it. I’m done hiking. I’m done skiing. I’m done climbing. That’s it.” But also, my fingers did not move and I’m a musician. I played for a long time. I play in a local band in Denver.
Scott
What band do you play in and what do you play?
Adam
I play guitar in this band still to this day and we’re called– it’s just a local band for fun. We’re called BirdNest, B-I-R-D-N-E-S-T, one word. We’re on all of the major streaming platforms, so check them out if you get the chance. But I’d convinced myself that I was never playing guitar again at that point. I’d been playing for like 20 years.
I spent a lot of time in the basement where I was staying. My bedroom was in the basement and I would literally just stare at my fingers for sometimes hours at a time and just see, “Can I move one finger at all?” Over time, I started to be able to make my finger flinch a little bit. Once that happened, I was able to go to hand therapy because they thought maybe there is something there. Then, I could eventually pinch very softly. I remember spending hours and hours. All I was eating at the time were granola bars and prepackaged applesauce, and I would spend hours trying to open a granola bar and I’d eventually give up and ask one of my roommates to open it for me. I finished my PhD in October, 2023 somehow and, when I was typing that, I couldn’t move my hands, but my thumbs were far enough away from my fingers that I could just use my thumbs to type and I typed, like, 180 pages for my dissertation with just my thumbs. But I would do all the exercises and I would try really hard and I eventually– I remember the day I had a piece of strawberry flavored Laffy Taffy, and I was able to break the seal, like, just open it by counter propagating my two fingers. That was a moment where I was like, “This is possible.” Now, I can play music again, not to the same level I used to be able to, but maybe 80% of the way there.
In terms of my legs. I practiced walking a lot and made some progress. Then, when they finally realized I had problems with my knees and I had surgery, that set me back a lot. Basically, from the fall to being able to walk at all again took about six months. Maybe a year and a half later, I could walk on uneven terrain. Today, I can do, like, class three hiking, probably, but I certainly can’t run – that’s too much impact. I’ll probably never be able to run again. I can cycle and that’s like my main outlet for exercise these days – just riding a bike a lot – because it’s low impact on my knee, but it still uses my legs
Scott
And it’s exercise and you’re getting fresh air. That’s my favorite way to exercise now too.
Adam
Nice. Yeah.
Scott
Okay. Final question. What actually happened that caused you to fall?
Adam
It’s a really good question. In the hospital, for days, all my friends and everybody including me, we all thought that I repelled off the end of the rope. This is a pretty normal thing to happen when there’s climbing injuries where the rope is only so long and if you forget to tie a knot at the bottom to stop you, then you fall and that’s it. Right? You’re not attached to the rope anymore. This is very unlike me – but like you said, I was on the phone – because, usually, I always tie my stopper knots and I double check, but I was on the phone and whatever. It’s unlike me, but it happened. So I thought I’d repelled off the end of the rope. Everybody thought I’d repel off the rope. If you look at the initial reports, it says I repelled off the end of the rope.
Several days later, the rope was brought to me and the stopper knot was still at the end of the rope. It was impossible that I would’ve repelled off the end of the rope. So what it turns out is that maybe, 15 feet or 20 feet above me, which is not a point that, at that moment, has been on anything hard or been around the anchor, the rope had just broken and it had fallen through. It’s just such a freak thing to happen in climbing because, I think for the most part, unless there’s something like a sharp rock, you trust that the rope is extremely safe. Saying that out loud, I know climbers – and I did too and my friends did too – will doubt that. They’re like, “The rope didn’t break. You’re missing something.” But we’ve gone through every way we can. We’ve looked at the rope. We’ve had professional people look at the rope and everybody says, “It just looks like it broke.”
Probably every six months, I convinced myself that’s not true. I had to have repelled off the end of the rope and I had to go talk to my friends and look at the pictures to convince myself that that’s not the case. In a lot of ways, I wish I did repel off the end of the rope. Like, the user error is actually a lot more comforting than just really bad luck in some ways.
Scott
Yeah. Because when you want to climb again, how do you develop a trust for your rope if the other one just happened to break after you had checked it? You said you checked it inch by inch?
Adam
Yeah. This is a rope that I basically only used for rope soloing because I tried to make sure– when you’re sport climbing with partners, you do take risks and you fall a lot. The rope was maybe a year and a half old. I think people say to switch it every three to five years. I’m friends with really strong climbers, and all of the questions that you might be asking, like we have asked too and it’s the only thing we can come up with – the rope broke in a freak accident.
Scott
Freak accidents happen sometimes.
Adam
Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if I would ever be able to rope solo again. I would love to say I could, but even when I’m like sport climbing in the gym, I get pretty scared at the idea of falling or letting go, and I really hope to work on that. This happened in May, 2023 and I got jumped in February, 2023. I have almost no memories. If I do, they’re very vague from November, 2022 to like January, 2025. I can tell, as my brain becomes stronger and my memory gets better and all of this, I actually get more scared of the idea of climbing. When I was climbing, like, 6-7 months after the accident or like a year after the accident, I was feeling scared but okay. But when I go more recently, the fear is pretty tough to overcome right now when new people start climbing and they ask like, “How are you not afraid of falling on the rope?” The way you kind of teach them is, like, you just take small falls and work your way up, and maybe that will be my path forward – I’ll just start from the beginning.
Scott
Thanks for sharing your story.
Adam
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m glad I finally get to talk about it, actually.
Scott
Hopefully, eventually, Adam will be completely pain-free. I’d love to think that he and Rachel could get back into climbing together like they used to.
Rachel did tell me that she is working on getting back into climbing. And – she’s also working on her anxiety about getting phone calls.
Rachel
When I first started climbing, I’m very afraid of heights. And when I first started climbing, I would get a few feet off the ground and I would start crying, which is embarrassing. But it took a long time for me initially to be able to top rope, and then to lead, and then to start climbing outside and to be leading outside, to start trad climbing, to start multi pitching. They were all really exciting milestones just because of how everything started for me and, now, getting back into it, it is difficult, sometimes, to tell if I just stop climbing for so long that all of that initial fear has come back and it’s something I have to get over now, or if it’s like a direct result of his accident. It is honestly, probably, a little bit of both. Sometimes, I will find myself thinking about the phone call and hearing him fall and stuff. Usually, when that happens, I have a hard time controlling my breathing and I just sort of start panicking on the wall.
I’ve been super lucky. I found really kind, patient, and understanding climbing partners that have been really wonderful, very patient with me as I have, like, a meltdown on a very easy climb on top rope in the gym. So, it’s probably a little bit of both of those things. I’ll find myself just obsessively checking the rope while tying in and things like that. And weirdly, I now have anxiety with phone calls. If I know somebody’s calling me and I can’t answer it, I start kind of panicking. If I’m in the middle of something, it’s not super unusual for me to answer the phone and say, “Hey, are you actively dying right now?” Just to hear them say like, “No. What’s wrong with you? Everything’s kind of fine.” I’ll be like, “Great. I’m going to call you back then.” Also kind of embarrassing and I never know when it’s going to hit. I haven’t figured that out yet. But yeah, phone calls and climbing both kind of get me now.
Scott
If you have a question for Adam that I didn’t think to ask, he’s in the podcast Facebook group – just go to
WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
And here’s what I’m excited about right now – I’m going to be in Austin, Texas next week! And I want to meet YOU. We’re having an in-person meetup in Austin on Wednesday, March 11. I love doing these things and I pretty much do a meetup whenever I’m traveling. We’ve done meetups in Seattle, Dallas, Orlando, maybe another one or two I’m not thinking of – but this one is for anyone who’s in or near Austin, Texas. We’ll have some drinks, take some pictures, just have fun and hang out. All the details for the meetup are in the Facebook group and it’s listed as an event pinned right at the top of the group, so that’s where you get the details. I hope I get to meet you there!
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And now we’re going to hear this week’s Listener Story. It’s from my friend Cozette, and every time I talk about having a listener meetup, she says “Hey, why don’t you ever come to Georgia?” Well, Cozy, one of these days – I just might surprise you.
In her story, you’ll hear about a terrifying phone alert, and achieving the goal of a lifetime.
Stay safe, and if you’re in Austin – see you next week.
(Listener story)
Hi Scott. This is Cozette. My listener story is about my unforgettable first time visiting Hawaii. I am a runner. Although I’ve run distances from the 5K (which is 3.1 miles) to that marathon (which is 26.2 miles), my favorite distance to run is the half marathon (13.1 miles). In or around 2014, I decided to run a half marathon in all 50 states – plus DC. Simultaneously, I also wanted to run a hundred half-marathons anywhere in the world.
So, fast forward to January 2018, I completed a half marathon in 49 states and a total of 99 half marathons. My 50th state and my 100th half marathon was scheduled to take place on Sunday, January 14th in Maui, Hawaii. The following day, January 15th, I would turn 50 years old. So, in essence, I was celebrating 3 milestones – running a half marathon in all 50 states, running a hundred half marathons, and turning 50 years old. I had about 11 of my non-running friends and family join me in Hawaii to celebrate these milestones in addition to a bunch of running buddies who also needed to check off Hawaii.
I arrived in Maui on Friday, January 12th. On the morning of Saturday, January 13th, at around 4 AM, a group of us drove up to the Haleakalā – a dormant volcano of Maui, Hawaii – so that we could catch the amazing sunrise above the clouds in the unpolluted skies. To this day, it’s one of the most spectacular starry views I’ve witnessed.
After enjoying the morning on top of the volcano, we started the slow descent back down. I was driving and there were three friends in my car. A few calls behind were four of my other friends. When we were about halfway down, everyone’s phone started buzzing with the emergency broadcast signal tone. It was 8.07 AM. Everyone received the same message, “Ballistic missile threat is inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
In my car, one friend started praying. Two friends started calling home to see if they heard about this and to see if it was real. Since I was driving, there was not much I could do except to keep driving. But I did say out loud, “Well, I guess I’ll only be a 49-state finisher.” I said it as a joke to relieve the tension but, inside, I was scared and I felt guilty that I had invited people to Hawaii and now we would likely die.
Well, thankfully, 38 minutes later, we were still driving down. We received another text message that we read, “There is no missile threat or danger to the state of Hawaii. Repeat, false alarm.” Wow. We couldn’t believe it. After reading updates and talking with family and friends, we were relieved and able to laugh about it. We all went to breakfast where, of course, this experience was our main topic of conversation. So, now, I was ready to finish the celebration I had planned in Hawaii.
We went to pick up my race number, which was number 50, and enjoyed the rest of the day. Race day, January 14th was here. It was hot, and I had a slight knee injury, so it wasn’t my fastest race by any means – actually, it was one of my slowest – but the views and race energy were magnificent. When I crossed the finish line, my crew was there with sashes, balloons, signs, pictures, video, everything. It was the perfect ending for my race journey. The race director had a cake and a finisher’s platform and special medals for all runners who were completing the 50th state. A perfect day right?
It was time to go whale-watching and do all the other activities I had planned for my four remaining days in Hawaii. Well, a few hours later, I started feeling bad – stuffy head, coughing, fever. By about 3 PM that afternoon, there was no doubt that I had a cold at best and the flu at worst. My temperature had shot up to a hundred degrees. The next day, 15th January, was my 50th birthday, and yes, I was still sick. I had no appetite. I still had a fever – 101 degrees this time – and I didn’t want to do anything but lay in bed. My crew asked if they should stay behind instead of enjoying the day but, of course, I said no. They paid good money for this trip and there was no need for them to waste their days or money. I’d be okay.
That night, I mustered up the strength to at least go to the Luau. I don’t remember much except that I had no appetite and I was still pretty much in a fog. Once I got back to my room, I stayed in bed until I started feeling better. Well, the day I started feeling better just happened to be the day my plane was scheduled to leave. So, I was able to grab a few souvenirs before heading to the airport. Other than that, I didn’t get to experience anything else in Hawaii.
While my first trip to Hawaii was not what I imagined, I did complete both running a half marathon in all 50 states and 100 half marathons before turning 50 the next day. So my mission was accomplished. Oh, and I didn’t die. As a side note, I did go back to Hawaii – Kauai this time – in 2023 when a friend was finishing her 50th state. This time, I was with my husband, who was my boyfriend in 2018, and I got to do many of the cool things I didn’t get to do on my first trip.