The Best American Sports Writing 2014(104)

I first met Steck last November. He’d come to New York to run the marathon. His training regimen for each expedition is extremely meticulous, but it allows for larks, and since he runs for hours a day in the mountains, he thought he’d give the flats of the five boroughs a go. Like so many participants, he arrived in New York soon after Hurricane Sandy but before the race was canceled, at the last minute, by Mayor Bloomberg. Once it was called off, he had no reason to stay. “I would never go to a city just to go to a city,” he told me. Anyway, he wanted to get back to Interlaken to spend time with his wife. In the previous two months, he’d been home only a few days, amid a whirlwind of travel around Europe and North America to give talks and to shoot promotions and advertisements for his various sponsors. Half the life of a professional climber is retelling old stories to finance the creation of new ones. Steck gives as many as 100 slide shows a year, often to corporations, who pay him well.

He was as secretive about his winter plans as he was about his intentions on Everest, but in March he agreed to see me in Switzerland, a few days before he left for Nepal. He lives in the village of Ringgenberg, next to Interlaken, which is the gateway to the valleys leading up to the Jungfrau massif, the cluster of glaciated high peaks that includes the infamous Eiger. The day I arrived, he’d been planning to spend the night in a hut on the Jungfrau’s flank, to acclimatize to a higher altitude, prior to his flight to Kathmandu. But the weather was lousy, so instead he went for a jog. He ran up and down a mountain near Interlaken three times—18 miles, and 8,000 vertical feet—in three hours and 40 minutes. (“I enjoy it,” he said. “I feel my legs, I see the nature.”) Then, to cool down, he went to the gym and lifted weights for two hours. He explained, when I met him for coffee the next morning, that this was taking it easy: he was conserving energy for Nepal.

When you first see Steck, it is hard to believe that he can run any distance at all: he is almost comically bowlegged. He teeters on the outsides of his feet. He is lean and compact, with long muscular arms and fingers. He keeps his hair short and his face clean-shaven, and has intense blue eyes that seem to bulge and brighten when he discusses a project. He speaks with a reedy, heliated voice that suits his Swiss-German twang.

It was a day for business. Steck was wearing Levi’s and a lightweight blue down jacket with his sponsors’ names on it: Leki, Scarpa, Mountain Hardwear, Power Bar. He had a meeting in Bern, an hour away, with executives from another sponsor, Richner, a Swiss bathroom fixtures merchant. We drove there in his white Audi A4 wagon, with WWW.UELISTECK.CH emblazoned on both sides. (Audi, a sponsor, gives him a car every year.) He was careful to obey speed limits and to stop at crosswalks. “If I do one little thing wrong, people will make a big deal,” he said. “This is Switzerland.” His great fear was running over a toddler. He was anxious about his reputation—it was the distillate of all those faces and summits, his true currency—and this wasn’t a country that tolerated ostentation or entitlement in its mountain athletes, he said. Though he gave liberally of himself as a pitchman, he never let reporters meet his wife or talk to his parents or see his house. He wouldn’t even let me attend the bathroom fixtures meeting. But afterward he showed me around old Bern. His wife, who works for Bern’s electric company, had an apartment nearby. He’d met her at an ice-climbing competition. A year later, they climbed the Eiger together and spent a night sleeping on a ledge at what is called the Death Bivouac, because of climbers who died there.

After lunch, Steck drove to the city’s outskirts, to a warehouse that contained a vast climbing gym called Magnet: a Costco of climbing, with undulating pitches of varying steepness, each section a different hue, with hundreds of handholds affixed, stuck there like gobs of bubble gum, in dozens of bright colors, each denoting a particular line. Schoolkids, teens, seniors, and pros turtled in muscle: they scrambled up the walls and hung from the ceiling, belayed by companions on the ground. Steck changed into a Mountain Hardwear T-shirt and shorts and went over to a turret off to the side, a kind of pyramid stuck upside down into the ground, for bouldering—that is, scrambling without being roped. He began to maneuver around on it. A few patrons whispered and glanced in his direction—this was the equivalent of Tiger Woods showing up at the municipal driving range—but for the most part everyone left him alone. He followed a progression of blue handholds, then orange, then pink, hopping down to the mat each time, brushing the talc from his hands on his shorts and peering up at the wall, his head tilted as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember. “I can climb vertical ice—I don’t even need to train for it,” he said. “This is more for fun. This isn’t training—just moving a little bit. I don’t waste energy on climbing training. But I’m too fat now for hard rock climbing. I used to be eight kilos lighter. The weight gives me more stamina. It’s less cold.” After a while, he removed his T-shirt. With a woman named Julie, the wife of a friend, on belay, he began climbing a big wall. He moved Spider-Man fast, clipping in every three feet or so, until he was hanging from the ceiling. There were strange muscles in his back. Each contortion set off a different arrangement of them.