vice/virtue

Say you’ve engineered the perfect climbing season. Your job, domestic status and location - everything organized to maximize your quality time at the crag. It’s maybe your third or fourth trip out when something goes wrong. Your protection zippers. You take a bad lead fall. Or, like Eric Kramak, you bail from a fifteen foot bouldering attempt.

This is Eric:

This is Eric’s cast:

While I get a huge kick outta pro climber news, I’ve been wanting to profile unsponsored and/or amateur climbers for weeks now. These are the guys and gals I see up close (almost) every day. They were my first inspiration and continue to challenge me in new ways. When I don’t think a big, twisted move on a roof is possible, they lean back like they’re in a Laz-E-Boy and stick it on the first attempt. You know, the climbers who are always a grade or two above you, warming up on the project you’ve been working for weeks. They’re also the climbers who are at your level. They sit and stare at the wall with you, sharing real or imagined beta.

I’ve seen Eric, uninjured, climbing at Stone Gardens for months now. Never really had the occasion to talk. But when I saw him hopping up a 5.10 in a cast, I knew he had to be my first victim.

So I took him out for a beer to hear his story.

Turns out it kinda fit with a theme I’ve had stuck in my head since reading and writing about the Alpinist interview with Alex Hannold. Hannold is a free soloist, sometimes, with an interesting take on risk. Personally, I named this blog after the weird human motivation to push limits, whether you’re exercising a vice or a virtue. If you’re living intensely, with everything you have, then even bad is good and you’re prepared for any price. Losing a job, losing friends, breaking a foot. And then new opportunities open up.

Eric injured himself by attempting to free solo a trad route he’d sent sans fall, in the dark, the night before. Luckily, he landed on his feet (not his head) and had friends to carry him out and drive him to the hospital.

Since then, he’s been through at least two casts and I hear there may be more bad news on the way. But Eric is a trooper. (Literally, he was in the armed forces.) Since he arranged his life around climbing this year, climbing is what he’s going to do. Having to take special care and precaution due to his foot, he’s learning to read climbs more accurately from the ground and also while he’s mid-route. He says the injury has actually made him a better climber.

That’s what I find most interesting.

The way each of us can or can’t move our bodies teaches us about the rock. Example: I know it’s hard for me to open palm a sloper with my right hand while my weight is situated directly below or slightly right of the hold. (Old wrist injury - tall bike jousting in a drunken haze.) Hurts like hell, so you best believe I keep my eyes open for moves like that. I could pick em out from 50 feet. (Exaggeration.) And since I don’t avoid them (just prepare mentally) this makes me a smarter climber.

Anyhoos, I’d like to congratulate Eric for his badass climber ways. And all the injured folk doggedly hobbling around the crags. You’re an inspiration. *Sniff* Hope you’re learning, and I hope for the swiftest healing!