Transcript
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Welcome to the Ageless athlete podcast, where we talk to elite adventure, sports icons who inspire and educate us to keep pushing on.
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Thank you for tuning in, and I promise this one will leave your riveted.
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It will challenge your perspective on what it means to be an elite athlete.
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And leave you feeling so inspired.
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What drives someone to achieve the seemingly impossible?
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Meet Wayne, Wayne Willoughby, an adaptive rock climber, who defied incredible odds and has climbed El Capitan in Yosemite.
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Not once or twice, but a mind boggling 26 times.
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From battling polio and disabilities since infancy.
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To suffering, terrible injuries.
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Wayne overcame.
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Obstacle after obstacle.
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He also became the first adaptive climber to reach the summit of famous grueling climbs, like El Cap and the diamond.
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And under 24 hours.
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In this wondrous conversation and with his infectious yet humble demeanor.
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Wayne opened up about how he developed the grit.
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Creative problem solving.
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And deep gratitude for lives, simply gifts.
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That empowered him to defy limitations.
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His stoke for the outdoors and sheer refusal to be held back.
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Despite the punishing toll on his body is straight up inspiring.
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Whether you are a crusty trad head or just someone looking for an awesome story of perseverance to get pumped on buckle up.
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This convo with a real life superhero still define the odds well into his seventies is going to blow your mind.
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And if you like the show.
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Leave a review on Spotify or an apple podcast now.
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I mean it.
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Pause do it now.
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And then come back over here.
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It helps others find the show.
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I thank you from the bottom of my.
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ageless heart.
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Wayne, good to have you on the show.
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To start off with, can you tell us where you are and what did you for breakfast today?
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I had a ham sandwich for breakfast at my, sitting at my computer desk here at the home that I share with my wife and our little kitty, Kaya, in Portland, Oregon.
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Beautiful Portland.
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Love this place so much.
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you sent me some lovely pictures from a hike yesterday.
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Where were you Wayne?
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And, and why is even going on a hike in your beautiful backyard challenging for you?
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well, I have to wear braces, um, as a result of both paralytic polio when I was nine months old, post polio syndrome, which I started dealing with when I was nine years old, unbeknownst to me until I was, I diagnosed myself with it.
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When I was in my thirties and I've also had a lot of other injuries, sadly, I have been hit by cars on my motorcycles and bicycle.
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I have been assaulted many, many, many times, including just two years ago, which have led to really, really, really major, major injuries.
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And then I've had lots of surgeries related to the polio going back to I had two major surgeries before I was two.
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Um, which I had to then learn how to walk using a big, what's called a CAFO, a big metal leg brace on my right leg and a set of parallel bars, throwing my right leg in front of me and holding myself up with the parallel bars.
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So That was my first time learning how to walk again post contracting paralytic polio.
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I walked for three or four days when I was nine months old.
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I was pretty precocious and was able to walk for a few days before I contracted paralytic polio, but then I didn't walk again until I was two in the manner that I just described.
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And then I've had all these other times where I've had major surgeries.
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Learn how to walk again, major injuries, learn how to walk again, you know, trying to continue to be as close to the best that I can be with limitations that have been imposed upon me.
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And so that is why it's just such an incredible blessing to be able to walk again.
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And, It's timely.
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It's very timely, this question, because it's just been in the last three weeks that since the injuries from June of 2022, after those injuries, I could only walk assisted with a pair of hiking poles or one hiking pole, like say in the house, but anytime I would go out.
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And I've just, just started to be able to walk again without a hiking pole, just a few steps here and there.
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And I did take a fall and I got a little too ambitious.
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So now I'm starting to appreciate walking anew in ways that I wouldn't have, had I not been through that.
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Now, there's no way I'm glad that I had to endure what I did, but at the same time, it helps me to keep a perspective of gratitude for what I do have.
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Rather than taking for granted what I have or being upset because I don't have more.
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Instead, now I'm like, Oh, if I could only get back to where I was before those injuries, life would be pretty darn good.
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So it's really all a matter of perspective.
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And for me, it's really a matter of trying to steal myself.
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Make it through each day the best day that I can.
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Keep as much positive energy in my heart as I can and try to make good things come from all of this in terms of I'm also a painter, an oil painter, and I really find myself being challenged just to be able to paint when I have these major injuries.
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So then when I get to the point where I'm recovering a bit, And I can actually paint again, then I appreciated all the new, all the more.
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And maybe before those injuries, I was like, Oh, why do I have to wear this wrist brace just to be able to paint this kind of sucks, it gets in the way.
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And now it's like, wow, how, what a blessing that I'm able to paint.
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Um, so it's really how you frame it.
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It's really how you see it.
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And that is, um, a beautiful thing.
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Thank you, Wayne, uh, remarkable, and, uh, there's so many questions that spring to mind, but just for edification, would you mind just talking Just a little bit on what does, what, how has post polio and, uh, subsequent trauma, how does that physically impact you?
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Which makes, uh, makes doing everyday small things, including other things such as painting, walking and all the other incredible things.
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what are fundamentally your, uh, limitations?
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Well, I have to prioritize my time and my energy because I don't have an abundant, you know, amount that I can just utilize without, you know, You know, thinking about, Oh, what are the obligations that I have?
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Like, I can only paint for so long.
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I can only train so hard.
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I can only, you know, I want to try to be the best that I can be, but I also want to be the best to myself that I can be.
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And as I'm aging and I am 71 now.
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I think a lot about longevity and my wife is a lot younger than me.
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Most of my friends are younger than her, even a lot of, a lot of them, in fact.
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Um, and, and I don't mean to sound that, you know, I, I, I do have friends my age and even older, I'm not trying to say that.
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I am an ageist type of person.
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That wasn't what I was trying to imply.
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I was just saying that I have a lot of motivation and a lot of reason to want to be here as long as I can be functioning at as high of a level as I can be.
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And I think that's true of all of us.
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And if you look at America today, 43.
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7 percent of Americans are obese.
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So this concept is lost on a lot of people.
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And sadly, those people are all going to pay the price.
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you know, you start becoming obese and you start having, I don't need to educate your audience on this topic.
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I'm sure they know it's, you know, you're, you're, you're going to become pre diabetic and you'll eventually become diabetic.
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You're going to have heart problems.
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You're going to have.
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Back problems, you're going to have other joint problems from care, you know, try carrying around.
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I mean, depending on how much over their ideal weight people are, just think what it would do to you if you carried a, let's say, a 50 pound backpack around with you all day long.
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At the end of the day, you would be wiped out.
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Now try doing that in every day with all this fat around your internal organs.
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Anyway, I don't need to go.
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absolutely.
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I think, uh, I think a lot of us take, uh, everyday health for granted.
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you know, that, that adage, youth is wasted on the young.
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and there is maybe a parallel good health is wasted on the healthy.
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But, uh, coming back to you So what I gleaned from that is, you have limited supplies of vitality and you have to be careful how you ration that.
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But outside of that, I believe you also have difficulty using all your limbs.
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oh yeah, no, I wear a ankle support on my left foot, an AFO, which is short for an acronym for assistive foot orthotic.
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Say that 10 times fast.
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I wear a cage type brace on my left knee.
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I wear a wrap brace on my right leg and I wear wrist braces on both wrists and also use elbow supports, tendonitis type, you know, wraps around my forearms when I'm training and, I feel pretty lucky that, you know, I'm able to do all of the things I'm able to do by using those.
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Um, I, and I also walk with hiking poles as I alluded to earlier, and I wish I had discovered those when I was like in grade school, how much easier my life would have been because crutches just ruin your elbows, your shoulders, canes are so hard on your wrists, but hiking poles, and especially if you're using the ones, you know, the modern hiking poles that have the grips below the handle, I'm constantly You know, grabbing that, changing my grip and then I have all these issues of my wrists and arthritis in my wrists.
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And so it's really important for me to be able to have a solid base, which is not me just standing on my feet, but me standing on my feet and having those poles.
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And I really feel so blessed to have figured all of this out and to be able to do the things that I'm doing.
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And you were asking me about my hike and why my hikes mean so much to me.
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And it's because there's been times when I haven't been able to be at as high of a level when I still, I really believe that if you can work through injuries and issues, and maintain some level of fitness without harming yourself further.
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That is really the way to go because it's so hard to get back in shape at any age.
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And especially as you start getting up above, you know, into your fifties, sixties, seventies.
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But with that said, I also think that there are so many people now Who are doing the types of things that I'm doing, following the protocols I'm following, eating a relatively healthy diet, eating smaller portions, always trying to maintain their fitness level to the degree that they're able to, meditating, thinking positive thoughts, surrounding yourself.
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With positive people, which is huge, which I've learned again and again and again, how important that is, you know, those strategies will allow you as you age to Much healthier way and give you the potential to do so much more as you age.
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Wayne, Let me ask you about some of your, uh, early climbing days.
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And as we get into that, what I am intrigued and fascinated by is, growing up, uh, in the 60s, 70s of the last century, I think just being, just being differently abled must have been challenging enough.
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Just measuring up and doing everyday things would have been hard enough.
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What motivated you?
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What pushed you into embracing rock climbing?
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Something that was, something that is difficult and niche, even today for able bodied people, you were out there pushing the frontiers, learning how to climb, being differently abled.
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what gave rise to that passion?
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Well, I've always been drawn to adventure sports.
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even though I was blessed to be able to live in Hawaii when I was a kid.
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for a few years and had some pretty major surgeries done during that time, but still tried to surf to the degree that I was able to as I look back on it now, I realize I should have been knee boarding or even, you know, belly boarding.
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but what did I know?
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I was a kid anyway, but I did get to surf a bit.
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I did have some great rides.
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I did have some great times with friends.
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unfortunately when I was 19, when I was 12, one of the surgeries I had in Hawaii, they took out the growth.
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My right leg was three inches shorter than my left leg because of the paralytic polio.
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And they took out the growth centers, the doctors, At a military hospital in Hawaii, took out the growth centers in my left knee, thinking my legs would grow even, but instead my right leg ended up growing two and a quarter inches longer, so when I was 19, they took out two and a quarter inches of femur from my right leg and put an inch long rod through my hip for a year and a half, I was 10 years into the post polio syndrome, unbeknownst to me, I had no idea what it was at that time, and that certainly didn't make the post polio syndrome any better, certainly didn't make my physical circumstances any better, but it did teach me that I was going to have to work really hard again to get back to where I was before that event.
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And that led me, I had been an age group swimmer, as well as had done the surfing, so I was in the water a lot.
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That led me to get back into a pool and start swimming again.
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And that led me to join the swim team in college and start playing water polo.
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And I was pretty fit.
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and I knew guys.
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That were climbers and I was like, let's yeah, I'd love to try this Let's and I'm and I started out as a boulderer Which is ironic because these days boulderer, you know bouldering is so popular and there's lots of people who are Purely boulderers.
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They don't that's all they do.
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You know,
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So hang on.
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Me understand this.
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So you had post-polio and you had these other issues going on, and you were bouldering in an era before bouldering pads were invented.
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it sounds like you were comfortable taking risks
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Try not to fall.
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Ha ha ha ha.
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Try not How
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supportive was your family, your friends, your community.
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And the reason I ask is.
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I am aware that sometimes when you have differently abled kids born into families who are not accustomed to that, they can be overly protective of those kids and keep them from maybe flourishing into things.
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But here you are.
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You're surfing.
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You are in swim teams.
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You're out there riding motorcycles.
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So, how did your parents deal with that?
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How did your community support It
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My mother had been a ballerina in England, and my father, Mike, I told you a little bit about some of my experience when I was 19, when my dad was 19, he was a side gunner in a B 17 during World War II in the 8th Air Force, which took the highest casualty and injury rate of any branch of the American Armed Forces during World War II.
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extraordinary people And so there was a side of, you know, like they were happy for me.
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I think my dad, it wasn't like he was like, yeah, go climb El Cap, at the same time, he wasn't like, you can't do that, you know, like, and so I think that there, you know, I was really, really, really lucky to have friends who said, one of, one of my early climbing friends who really believed in me was John Backer.
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And when I would talk to John about, because I had wanted to climb, even though I was mainly bouldering, I was bouldering, you know, I was doing okay.
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I knew that with my athletic background, with my drive, and I really wanted to climb El Cap I had seen the first ascent of El Capitan when I was five years old.
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those guys were up there for a long time.
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We lived not terribly far from Yosemite.
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There was, you know, things in the news and the media about it.
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And we went up and, and I can remember standing in El Cap Meadow as a little kid with this metal leg brace on and just thinking, man, these guys are the shit.
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This is it! Come on! And I always carried that memory with me, and so when I did start climbing, my big goal right away, as audacious as it may have sounded, was to climb El Cap.
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And I found out about another adaptive climber who had also had polio, Roger Breedlove, um, we've actually become friends now, and he He had a lesser degree of disability than I did, but he was affected by polio, and still hasn't been affected by the post polio syndrome, luckily for him.
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so when I found out about him, I Bridwelt was the first one who told me about Roger Breedlove.
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And You know, it was like, alright, John Backer thinks I can climb El Cap, Jim Bridwell thinks I can climb El Cap, maybe I can do it.
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And then I had more injuries and I had more setbacks, but eventually I did.
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And I had more injuries and more setbacks, but eventually I got past those and kept going.
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And I'm in a place now where I am taking time off to recover from major injuries.
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But I still have the goal of getting back up there and doing more climbing and I'm really incredibly blessed to have many, many, many partners who are also great friends who are highly interested in getting up there with me again, which is pretty extraordinary for somebody who's 71 with or without my medical history.
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it is so badass.
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Can you describe to us what is climbing El Cap for you?
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And just for everybody's reference also, what is the difference in a normal person Climbing El Cap versus you climbing El Cap.
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You have climbed El Cap a record number of times.
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well, for, let's say for, for an adaptive climber,
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accept it, accept it.
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What I'm getting to is, most climbers out there, 99.
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X percent of all climbers regular or different, they will never climb El Cap.
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Most of us will never climb El Cap.
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Not only have you climbed El Cap, you have climbed El Cap also other walls many, many times.
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would love to hear in your words, what is the experience of climbing El Cap?
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what does it involve?
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How is it like there?
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how is it like being up on the wall?
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and accomplishing that kind of goal.
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for me, you know, my life has been broken up into all these different chapters of, after these injuries, after this car hit me, after this person assaulted me.
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And so, there's different layers, now, when I climbed El Cap the first time, I hadn't had these major injuries in 91, that really, like I couldn't even walk for a long time after that.
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I was able to do a lot more.
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And then as time went on, I had various different things.
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So it's really all been different through the years.
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And I actually had a pretty good run up until I had some pretty serious injuries in 2017.
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Where I was climbing quite a bit and doing quite a few walls and was at a point where maybe I was starting to get a little blase about it and taking it for granted a little bit.
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a short period of time, I set a record on El Cap with my friends, Hans Florain and Brian McRae on the route Bad Seed for my first one day ascent of El Cap.
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And that was extraordinary.
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And then after that I, you know, went through this, went through that.
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And got to a point where we set a record on, a route in Zion, and then had more injuries.
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And even after those injuries, set a record, did the first one day ascent of the aid route on a, anyway, a route in Squamish on the Chief.
00:23:22.328 --> 00:23:26.318
and that was extraordinary to be able to do that.
00:23:26.769 --> 00:23:33.507
I was reading a little bit about your, ascent with Hans, and Brian I actually am familiar with Brian McRae.
00:23:33.507 --> 00:23:36.666
I think that he also goes by flying Brian.
00:23:36.666 --> 00:23:42.097
I think I used to climb at the new river gorge where, uh, Brian, left a legacy.
00:23:42.268 --> 00:23:42.837
behind.
00:23:43.421 --> 00:23:53.835
I remember reading, uh, Wayne, that your climbing style was so different than everybody else's because you could not use your entire body the same way.
00:23:54.285 --> 00:23:56.855
So in essence, you were doing, is that true?
00:23:56.855 --> 00:23:59.434
You were doing thousands of Pull ups
00:23:59.855 --> 00:24:00.125
yeah.
00:24:00.402 --> 00:24:01.112
how is that?
00:24:01.132 --> 00:24:05.172
Like, how is, what do you have to do to get up on a wall?
00:24:05.182 --> 00:24:05.852
What's the routine?
00:24:05.872 --> 00:24:08.281
Like, how do you gear up?
00:24:08.862 --> 00:24:10.372
How do you start climbing?
00:24:10.561 --> 00:24:18.407
How do you exchange, places in all of those 30 odd pitches to get to the top of that monolith?
00:24:18.828 --> 00:24:22.398
well, I wear a sit harness as well as a chest harness.
00:24:22.403 --> 00:24:28.578
I use skateboard, elbow, knee pads, as well as, you know, knee pads on my elbows and my knees.
00:24:28.872 --> 00:25:05.790
And I use a speed stirrup that Hans actually designed, that Yates makes and it's just an adjust, it's like a, as, as the name implies, a stirrup that goes around your foot with a little adjustment on it and you clip that to your system, you know, your, when your jug, I, I have a chest harness, so I have my bottom jug between my sit harness and my chest harness, I'm connected from my sit harness to my jug, know, my, my chest harness and my sit harness, I have a jug in between.
00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:15.240
And then I have my top jug connected to the speed stirrup and connected to my bottom harness.
00:25:15.560 --> 00:25:30.866
So when I throw the top jug up and step up, With the speed harness, then a lot of times I have to pull the rope underneath me through the bottom, Jumar.
00:25:31.586 --> 00:25:35.656
And I also use my hands and my feet a lot on the wall.
00:25:35.817 --> 00:25:43.366
It depends, like if I'm on the chief, for instance, there's lots of places where I'm actually free climbing and just pulling my jugs up.
00:25:43.781 --> 00:25:50.307
And I can remember on one route I did on The Chief, not that many years ago, that I did a whole pitch.
00:25:50.587 --> 00:25:58.167
I free climbed the whole pitch and had to pull my jugs up as I was free climbing, just for the heck of it, just because I could do it, because it was easy free climbing.
00:25:58.637 --> 00:26:04.900
and I do mantles, and I do, you know, I'm actually doing a lot more than just ju marring.
00:26:04.940 --> 00:26:10.404
And then when I'm on, you know, Really steep roots, like on the southeast face where bad seed is.
00:26:10.404 --> 00:26:13.464
Which is the root you were talking about that I did with Hans and Brian.
00:26:13.875 --> 00:26:19.335
And that was the first one day adaptive el cap ascent.
00:26:19.815 --> 00:26:24.075
And before I did that, I didn't even know how my body would react.
00:26:24.569 --> 00:26:32.410
I had tried cleaning, well, I did lurking fear in 94 Was coming back from some major injuries.
00:26:32.410 --> 00:26:35.660
I had climbed the diamond earlier that year and was carried in.
00:26:36.358 --> 00:26:53.644
and that's a big story in that I brought my, I worked and worked and worked and worked and got myself strong enough and used my poles to actually hike in and did three ascents of the diamond in a row, many years later, but, on this ascent of lurking fear that I did in 94, I tried to clean.
00:26:53.683 --> 00:26:55.653
Well, I didn't clean the two traverses.
00:26:56.239 --> 00:26:59.259
because the pitches, it would just take me too long to clean them.
00:26:59.288 --> 00:27:00.489
They're traversing pitches.
00:27:01.169 --> 00:27:04.935
Um, but I cleaned all the other pitches easily.
00:27:04.935 --> 00:27:07.915
It wasn't even a problem for me until I got to the top.
00:27:08.076 --> 00:27:14.885
And then I realized I had been overtaxing my right leg to the point where it didn't even move when I got to the top.
00:27:15.256 --> 00:27:19.655
And the next day I started getting a little bit back and a little bit, but it took a long time.
