Growing up in Colorado, Tommy Caldwell’s family were an adventurous lot, prone to camping, skiing, and rock climbing. His father, a former bodybuilder and mountain guide, was determined to instill toughness and a love of the outdoors in his son. Caldwell was just three years old when he made his first roped climb, wearing a homemade harness made of seatbelt webbing and carrying a Spiderman kite. At seventeen, he entered a major sport climbing competition as an amateur and won. Instead of going to college, he embraced what he calls “the dirtbag life,” traveling to climbing competitions in the U.S. and abroad, sleeping in his car, showering in YMCAs, and paying discount for dented cans of food. Caldwell’s talent and obsessive hard work led him to the top of the sport climbing circuit, and then into the vertigo-inducing world of big wall free climbing.

But Caldwell’s evolution as a climber was met with debilitating setbacks. In his early twenties, while climbing in the Pamir-Alai mountains of Kyrgyzstan, he and three other climbers were held hostage by militant rebels. After six harrowing days of starving, being on the run, and dodging bullets from the Kyrgyz military, they escaped only when Caldwell made an impossible choice: to push one of their captors off a cliff. Soon after surviving that trauma, he lost his left index finger in an accident, and thought he might never climb again. But in typical Caldwell style, he was back on the rock in three months. Later, his wife and main climbing partner left him, and he found himself heartbroken and depressed. But Caldwell emerged from each hardship with a renewed sense of purpose and determination, and set his sights on a goal that he had been thinking about for years: free climbing El Capitan’s biggest, steepest, blankest face. The Dawn Wall had been widely considered too difficult for free climbing, and mastering the route took more than seven years, during which time Tommy redefined the sport, found love again, and became a father.

Caldwell's memoir is The Push: A Climbers Journey of Endurance, Risk, and Going Beyond Limits (2018).