I first published this Profile Dossier three years ago, so I wanted to re-surface it as a refresher. There are a lot of practical tidbits that you can apply to your own life immediately. I hope you enjoy.

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Tommy Caldwell, a legendary rock climber, has been called one of the world’s greatest athletes for good reason. Nearly everything in his life has been extreme. 

He grew up with an adventure-loving father who began taking him on rock-climbing expeditions — many of them precarious — when he was only three years old. 

“The things we were doing at that time made a lot of my dad’s peers think he was insane,” Caldwell says. “He honestly almost killed me off on many occasions. He was very bold with me.” 

Those early experiences prepared him for even more extreme situations he would encounter in early adulthood. When he was 21 years old, he accompanied his then-girlfriend Beth and two other climbers on an expedition to Central Asian Kyrgyzstan. Sleeping in hanging tents tethered 1,000 feet up a wall, they woke up to gunshots from the bottom of the mountain.

Islamist militants took the four climbers hostage in a harrowing six-day ordeal. They survived a firefight, witnessed another hostage get shot in the head, and hiked day after day with little food and water. On the sixth day, everything changed.

Starving and cold, Caldwell’s survival instinct kicked in, and he did what he never thought he was capable of — murder. He ran up behind his captor, grabbed his gun strap, and pushed him off a cliff.

“That was such a life-changing moment for me,” Caldwell says. “Killing somebody was the farthest thing that I, or anyone who knew me, could imagine me doing.”

Assuming their captor was dead, Caldwell and the other three climbers ran eight miles down the mountain to a military outpost where they were rescued. They later found out that the captor survived and went to prison, but the trauma of the act haunts Caldwell to this day.

Soon after his return, he lost his left index finger in a sawing accident. (“That’s a pretty crucial finger for a climber.”)

Later, his wife Beth (who was with him in Kyrgyzstan) left him, saying she fell in love with someone else. “Once the divorce was finalized, I was just crushed,” he says. “I was hurting so badly, I had to figure out a distraction in life.” 

Caldwell fell into a deep depression that served as the motivating factor for free climbing the Dawn Wall, which is El Capitan’s biggest, steepest, and blankest face. Scaling it would become one of his life’s greatest achievements. 

“We as human beings are capable of so much more than we could ever realize in a normal day-to-day circumstance,” he says.

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