The RunOut Podcast

Author: Andrew

  • RunOut #9: Mikey Schaefer and the Fourth Wall

    RunOut #9: Mikey Schaefer and the Fourth Wall

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    To free solo or not to free solo, is not the question of today’s podcast—but whether it is ethical to film it.

    Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary film Free Solo remains just about the biggest thing happening in climbing right now. It’s something that has haunted me and co-host Chris Kalous since we saw it a few weeks ago. To be honest, we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

    And you can hear our initial discussion in episode 7. That episode is merely an attempt to dry out our sweaty palms in the aftermath of watching this film.

    However, now, with clearer heads, we wanted to dig in and go a little deeper. Free Solo is not just a spectacle of Alex Honnold’s obscene tolerance for risk, it also dances dangerously close to discussing the ethics of filming a guy risking his life.

    This film breaks the fourth wall—the behind the scenes story of struggling to shoot Honnold is as much a part of the story as Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan.

    We invited our friend Mikey Schaeffer to speak to us for today’s episode. Mikey is a longtime climber and just one of the true, authentic energies of our sport. He was also a DP, a director of photography, on Free Solo. Honnold selected him as one of the few guys he could trust to be hanging on a rope beside him and have confidence that Mikey wouldn’t drop a lens on him or cause some other horrific outcome.

    Mikey also has one of the more interesting roles in Free Solo. Of all the camera operators, he was the one who seemed to be most genuinely distraught by what he was witnessing. If you’ve seen the film, Mikey is the one whose face they cut to repeatedly during the climactic montage of Honnold’s big climb.

    He’s grimacing. He literally can’t bring himself to watch—and yet, like we in the audience, he also can’t look away.

    I recognized this as a device often utilized in horror and suspense films—Hitchcock was perhaps the original master of this technique. In this regard, Free Solo isn’t just a documentary; it fully fits in the genre of suspense and thriller.

    And yet, the thrills aren’t moot or for mere casual entertainment. The consequences are horrifyingly real.

    We spoke to Mikey to hear more about what it was really like to have worked on this film for the past two years. I personally really enjoyed this interview. Mikey shared some really surprising details and insights into his own experience. He also gave some really fascinating insights into the black box that is Alex Honnold’s mind.

  • RunOut #8: Caves, Plato, and the future of adventure

    RunOut #8: Caves, Plato, and the future of adventure

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    In the Republic, Plato presents an allegory of a cave in which prisoners have been shackled their whole lives, and their only understanding of reality derives from the shadows that are cast on the bleak cavern wall before them. It’s a way to tackle the philosophical problem of how our own subjective experiences limit our understanding of reality, keeping us imprisoned in our own heads.

    I don’t need to ever become a caver to know that the idea of plunging into the bowels of the earth sounds like an absolutely dreadful idea. I’m a climber. I like being out in the open, not closed in. I like to go up, not down. Is there anything worse than rappelling?

    In my job as a full-time writer, part-time journalist, I’ve been covering various caving expeditions for National Geographic. I started out knowing nothing about caving, and while my understanding of the sport still places me very much at a gumby level, I’ve been fascinated, dare I say, impressed, by the commitment and adventure of some of the today’s leading caving explorers.

    I’ve always viewed caving as a low-grade cousin to our sacred sport of rock climbing. There are similarities to be sure. We both use ropes and harness and we both love to indiscriminately place bolts in virgin rock. And yet, caving just seems so dreadful, so claustrophobic. Do they even need to train?

    And yet, cavers seem to be just scratching the surface of exploration of the world’s biggest, deepest and most impressive caves. The state of caving right now seems to be where climbing was in the 1800s—a blank map ripe for the pickin’. And as I scroll through the latest news feeds of climbing as a sport, filled with the latest spray about the newest climber to do some route or mountain that was actually first done before they were even born, I can’t help but find myself drawn in, wondering what is real, or if everything I know about climbing is just a bunch of shadows on the wall.

    Before I do something crazy like trade in my Scarpa Dragos and kneepads for a waterproof onesie and an 12mm static line, I wanted to talk to my show co-host Chris Kalous, who actually has some experience plundering the depths of the earth, to talk me out of it.

    Here’s my story about the Rainier fumarole ice caves.

    And here’s my story about the Veryovkina flood survival epic.

    Kalous in Groaning Cave, Colorado. c. 1991
    Climber Larry Coats in Groaning Cave, CO. c. 1991
    Kalous inside Groaning Cave, Colorado. c. 1991
    The mouth of Groaning Cave, Colorado. c. 1991
    Searching for Fixin to Die Cave, Colorado. c. 1991
    Magic Mushrooms, Groaning Cave, Colorado.
    Climber Jim Erickson reads the map of Groaning Cave. c. 1991
    Scott Fitzgerald and Kalous, Honkers Cave, Colorado. c. 1991
  • RunOut #6: Olympic Dreaming

    RunOut #6: Olympic Dreaming

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    The old adage “sport climbing is neither” is now a sad relic of atavistic time in climbing—a time before there were gyms, before there were World Cups, and before there were climbers capable of onsighting 9a+ but who instead choose to spend 30 hours a week training indoors, six to eight months a year, all in preparation for a single event when they are finally released by their coaches onto a competition stage, like animals out of a cage.

    It was a time that most climbers today will not even remember.

    Climbing is making its big debut in the 2020 Olympics. When this news was jointly announced by the International Federation of Sport Climbing and the International Olympic Committee two years ago, no one, it seemed, was very happy about it. Grizzled old chuckleheads read the news as yet another omen that climbing had been utterly yuppified, while the most hardcore competition climbers were seemingly united in their disappointment with the proposed format of combing lead, bouldering, and speed.

    This September, during the biennial World Championships, the IFSC got its first chance to show the climbing world not only why this combined format would be great, fair and just and even exciting to watch—but also that this format would translate to a successful event in the forthcoming Olympics.

    So, did the IFSC win over the naysayers? Was the World Championships everything world-class comp climbers had hoped for and deserve? And what does this all mean for our sport, the outdoor industry, and the future of climbing?

    Since neither Chris nor I know squat about comp climbing, we invited our mutual friend and colleague Chris Parker to be our guest for this episode. Chris is a former editor at Rock and Ice magazine and now he works as a content creator for Black Diamond. He got to travel to Innsbruck to witness and report on the entire World Championships. You can check out Black Diamond’s website for his report. It explains the format, what works, and where some serious and legitimate concerns remain.

    One quick show note. I referenced an Iranian speed climber, whose name I didn’t know at the time. His name is Reza Alipour, and he is a total major beast.