The weight of competitive climbing

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Jake Scharfman says the feeling he gets when he goes climbing, it's a feeling of full body elation.

JAKE SCHARFMAN: I always feel like just really present in my body and, like, wow, I can't quite believe, like, this is where I am right now...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: This is it. Let's go big. Good, dude. Come on, Jake.

SCHARFMAN: ...That my body just did that.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yes, dude. Dude.

DETROW: He first felt that rush when he was 13 at a summer camp at his local climbing gym in the San Francisco Bay area.

SCHARFMAN: It really clicked as an outlet that was very kinesthetic and also satisfied problem solving and was something that I really always wanted to be doing in a way that hadn't really manifested with other sports.

DETROW: He was hooked. He joined the gym's climbing team, and by his late teens, he was qualifying to compete at the national level. But he started to feel like he stuck out.

SCHARFMAN: I was definitely one of the biggest, if not the biggest climbers, like, every time. In, like, the performance climbing world, I was big, just as someone who worked out a lot and ate a lot. I just became a big person, and I was surrounded by people who didn't match that.

DETROW: Sport climbing kicks off at the Olympics in Paris next week. It's a strength-to-weight-ratio sport, which means that aside from your technique and your mental game, the lighter you are relative to your strength, the easier it will be to get up the wall. And that has led some climbers to fall into the mindset that losing weight is the path to better performance.

One recent study of 50 elite climbers found that more than a third intentionally lost weight before a competition, primarily by fasting and skipping meals, but occasionally by using laxatives or vomiting. That mindset that lighter is better is what led one young climber, Jake Scharfman, to develop an unhealthy relationship with his weight. Reporter Laura Isaza takes it from here.

LAURA ISAZA, BYLINE: Jake says that everybody around him and all the people winning competitions were lighter than him, and he used to get all sorts of comments about his size.

SCHARFMAN: Oh, you've got such big muscles, that sort of thing.

ISAZA: These comments were meant as compliments, but...

SCHARFMAN: I think, in a sport where there's a lot of conversation about lightness as strong, that didn't always strike the right chord with me, I think, especially with years of repetition.

ISAZA: And so when he was about 17...

SCHARFMAN: After either regionals or divisions that year, I just, for the first time in my life, decided that I was going to try to be cognizant of what I was eating.

ISAZA: It resulted in a little bit of weight loss right before that year's USA Youth Nationals, and Jake did well enough that he qualified for the 2018 Youth World Championships in Russia.

SCHARFMAN: After that competition was a point where my quintessential relationship with the sport changed from one of joy and pushing myself to one where it was a necessity for me. And I felt like I needed to take it more seriously and kind of pursue performance to any extent that I could.

ISAZA: And to Jake, that meant paying even more attention to his weight and what he ate.

SCHARFMAN: It's step by step and very much led into a mantra of, like, the lighter I can be, the better my climbing performance is going to be because of it.

ISAZA: In the span of roughly six months, Jake lost 30% of his body weight.

SCHARFMAN: I remember, like, having days where I was so exhausted that I couldn't even stay standing in between, like, attempts on boulders. I was just, like, sitting on the bench and forcing myself to get up and do another climb or something like that, and was needing to, like, sit in the sauna for like a half hour before a session just to warm my body up because I was so cold all the time.

ISAZA: He competed at the Youth World Championships. He didn't make it past the qualification round. He says his whole memory of the competition is fuzzy because of the brain fog. But he didn't think he had a problem. This wasn't something that happened to guys. The narratives he'd seen around body dysmorphia had always centered someone feminine. And nobody at the climbing gym said anything.

SCHARFMAN: It took until I was quite far down the rabbit hole to be able to use words like eating disorder or anorexia or anything like that.

ISAZA: His parents and his girlfriend told him they were worried. And when acquaintances started asking him if he was OK, he knew he needed help.

SCHARFMAN: Tons of time and therapy and doing tons of blood work each week. I had by that time developed, like, some heart arrhythmia stuff. So there was, like, a lot of concern around, like, a cardio event.

VOLKER SCHOEFFL: The body can take it for a long time, but then it deteriorates, and it deteriorates to a point where there is no return.

ISAZA: Dr. Volker Schoeffl is an orthopedic surgeon and a climber in Germany. He also sat for 16 years on the medical commission for the International Federation of Sport Climbing, the IFSC, the governing body that oversees competitive climbing.

SCHOEFFL: That problem was always on our mind in climbing. We just saw an increase in the numbers of people being affected.

ISAZA: He says eating disorders can lead to chronic gastrointestinal problems, fatigue, depression, sleep disorders, Osteoporosis. Over the years, Schoeffl and other doctors and climbers have pushed the IFSC to do more to address eating disorders in climbing. But those efforts didn't amount to any effective change, in his view. And so a year ago, he resigned.

SCHOEFFL: I could not take the responsibility anymore to be part of a body who willingly and knowingly ignores that problem.

ISAZA: The International Federation of Sport Climbing says it's committed to the health of its athletes, and earlier this year, they released a new policy requiring each country to submit baseline health data from each athlete, along with the results of surveys that scan for symptoms of disordered eating and low energy.

KYRA CONDIE: I do think that the new policy is going to help encourage healthier behaviors in our sport.

ISAZA: Pro climber Kyra Condie competed for the U.S. in Tokyo and sits on the IFSC's Athletes' Commission. She says the climbing world has needed regulations like this for a long time, but says the new policy is weaker than she'd like. That's because it still relies on national federations to examine athlete health.

CONDIE: There are federations who are great at this and put their athletes' health first above medals, for example. But that's not always a given. And so if you're able to use your own doctors and find your own people to do different tests, it just takes a lot of honesty on everybody's part.

ISAZA: IFSC President Marco Scolaris told me in an interview that his group has always been built on a foundation of trust with the national federations. And the IFSC can now also subject climbers to random health tests on competition days. Those tests can flag athletes with extremely low heart rates or blood pressure for additional review. The group says the regulations are now in place for climbers competing at the Paris Olympic Games. Four months ago, I met up with Jake in Squamish, where he lives now. It's about an hour from Vancouver.

Hi.

SCHARFMAN: How's it going?

ISAZA: Good. Thank you.

It's a world-class area for all styles of climbing. The forest there looks straight out of a storybook, teeming with evergreens, springy moss underfoot, and boulders are everywhere. This is Jake's playground.

SCHARFMAN: I'd love to give just a couple of tries on one of the things that I'm projecting, which is, like, just behind this big rock.

ISAZA: Let's do it.

He throws his crash pads down below a massive boulder nestled between two bigger, apartment-building-sized rocks. It's like a little room in here.

SCHARFMAN: Yeah. I don't know. There's nothing quite like it. It, like, takes you very much out of the forested surroundings and just into, like, this little rock chamber that - I don't know - feel kind of like I'm in a little geode.

ISAZA: He's clinging to tiny holds from just the skin on his fingers...

You got it. Come on.

...Hanging almost upside down with his back to the ground. By now, Jake has recovered from his eating disorder. He's been able to build back all that strength that he lost, which means now he can try some of the hardest climbs he's ever tried, like this one.

SCHARFMAN: I can hear people shaking their head and be, like, this person's about to fall into, like, the same pit hole. But what it really feels like it boils down to is that I feel more connected to my experience in a way that allows me to get what I want out of it and pursue it because I want to and not because it's a necessity for me. That's the crux of it for me. Yeah.

ISAZA: Jake's also coaching kids now at a local gym in Canada. Talking about resting enough and eating enough are a normal part of practice. He says he wants to be part of promoting a new culture in climbing, one with a healthier, more sustainable relationship with food and lots of snack breaks.

DETROW: That's reporter Laura Isaza. This piece was originally produced in the audio program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.