Sasha DiGiulian is one of the best female rock climbers in the world. She's spent over a decade competing internationally, she’s a three-time US National Champion, a World Champion, and she’s had over 30 first female ascents. Sasha is also the founder and CEO of the superfood protein bar company, Send Bars.
Sasha DiGiulian is one of the best female rock climbers in the world. She's spent over a decade competing internationally, she’s a three-time US National Champion, a World Champion, and she’s had over 30 first female ascents. Sasha is also the founder and CEO of the superfood protein bar company, Send Bars.
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Shelby Stanger:
Professional athlete Sasha DiGiulian is one of the best female rock climbers in the world. She's spent over a decade competing internationally, she's a three-time US national champion, and she's had over 30 first female ascents. When she began competitive climbing as a 12-year-old in the early 2000s, climbing gyms in the United States were few and far between. As her career has developed, the sport has become more mainstream. Today, there's even a rock climbing emoji on your phone, and Sasha helped design it. In the past few years, Sasha's career has grown even bigger. She wrote a memoir called Take the Lead, and she recently developed the snack company, Send Bars.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. Sasha DiGiulian, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You are a woman who has had so many beautiful, wild ideas that you've accomplished, so I'm excited to have you on.
Sasha DiGiulian:
Thanks so much for having me, Shelby. It's a true honor to be on your podcast.
Shelby Stanger:
But I thought we'd go back to the beginning because you're an extremely athletic woman, and there's a lot of things you could've done in life. You could've been a professional ice skater, maybe a professional gymnast, but you chose rock climbing at a time where it wasn't super well known. What hooked you in about rock climbing?
Sasha DiGiulian:
I feel like climbing chose me. I didn't have much conscious thought when I was getting into it. I mean, I was six years old and I was fully hooked after going to a birthday party my brother had at a climbing gym called Sportrock in Alexandria, Virginia. That's where I grew up. I started going about twice a week to their junior team program, stumbled upon a competition when I was seven, won my category of 11 and under, and then started really actively competing. By the time I was 12, I had won my first continental championship, and everything started escalating from there. I signed my first endorsement deal at 12. And so I didn't really think about other sports, to be honest. I was just so in love with climbing, and it was taking up basically all of my free time outside of school, that it was something I dove into.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just tell me about the first time you climbed outside and what that did for you and how that was different?
Sasha DiGiulian:
Yeah. Well, I actually remember one story really vividly. I think I was about nine, and my junior team program would go to places like the New River Gorge. But I remember that I was climbing and one of my friends was belaying my other friend on the team, and all of a sudden a lizard crawled up his pants and he was freaking out because there's a lizard that was literally going through his underwear, or just remembering how much fun it is to just eat snacks outside and be camping in a tent as a young kid. And you're not pining for anything materialistic. It's just a really fun moment.
Shelby Stanger:
When Sasha was a kid, the competitive climbing community in Virginia was really small. As she grew older, she began traveling all over the country and even to Europe for competitions, becoming one of the most watched climbers in the sport. After high school, Sasha was accepted into Columbia University. It was a big decision to go to college while pursuing competitive climbing, one that wasn't popular among other climbers at the time. In 2011, during her freshman year, Sasha won the US National Sport Climbing Championship. A year later, she became the overall female world champion. Sasha excelled at indoor climbing, but she hadn't yet ventured into the world of climbing outdoors. When she did, she fell in love. Slowly, she started transitioning away from the gym and at age 21, Sasha became the first woman to climb Bellavista, a challenging ascent in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy.
You've had so many first ascents. It's really incredible. Is there one that really sticks out for you?
Sasha DiGiulian:
So I had presented the Inspiration Awards at the Outdoor Retailer show in 2011 alongside Reinhold Messner, who yeah, needs no introduction. So I'm sitting at dinner with him and he takes this menu and flips it over and starts drawing on it. And he's like, "Sasha, you need to go to the Dolomites and climb Bellavista. And he starts identifying this climb that Alex Huber had first ascended, and it was one of the hardest climbs in the Alps. I, needless to say, had no experience in big wall climbing or anything like that.
But so fast forward to two years later. I was at Columbia University balancing being a professional climber while also being a full-time student, and summer vacation was the time that I got to get out and play. So I texted a friend that I had in Spain. I was like, "Do you want to climb Bellavista with me?" So we made this just total impromptu trip, went to the Dolomites, did a wall that we are totally benighted on, and ended up coming down 3:00 AM that day as our practice run. I was really excited and also saw time is of essence. I'm going to have to get back to my semester, so let's just start trying it. The first five pitches were 5.13s and 5.14s, and then after that was more adventure climbing. So I thought as soon as we can send these first five pitches, we'll be good to go.
So after a couple of weeks, we felt good. And I had set the 5.14 pitch and we were like, "Let's go to the top." So it was about 1:00 PM and my partner was like, "Are you sure you want to keep going? It's going to be really late by the time we get to the top." And we're like, "Yeah, but we're ascending. Let's keep going."
And we made some progress up the wall. It's about 1400 feet. And it starts hailing, and we're completely unprepared for it. So we find shelter in this crevasse on the wall and basically wait out the storm. The wall gets bit wet. We get disoriented on the wall.
The thing that I didn't know coming from a background of competition climbing and sport climbing where everything's very marked was all of a sudden, we were in this massive sea of limestone on Tre Cima Ovest in the Dolomites thousands of feet up, looking around trying to find where the route goes. So we continued questing our way through. About 200 feet from the top, we realized that we had no idea where any gear placement or bolts were. The rock was super malleable, and my climbing partner was like, "We're so close. This is easy terrain." We have two options. We could simul-climb to get to the top or untie, put the rope on our backs, and continue up. That way, we don't have the rope dragging between us to get stuck on something. Or God forbidding anything happens to one of us, you know the other isn't pulled off the wall. So both options did not sound appealing.
Shelby Stanger:
Free solo or climb together, but one of you could fly off. Got it.
Sasha DiGiulian:
Yeah, exactly. So I'm 19 years old, totally out of my league on this wall, realizing that no amount of competition success or background is going to get me through this totally life or death situation. And we decided to untie from the rope together, so free soloing for the rest of very manageable terrain. But also in the Dolomites, the rock is very malleable and loose. And I had this moment shortly after where my left hand and my left foot broke off the wall in what it felt like... It was probably three seconds, but it felt like 30 minutes of my life slow motion, realizing this rock is just falling into this blank space below me. And all of a sudden, the consequences are really real.
And I remember feeling this immense amount of anger and frustration and madness towards my climbing partner that I wanted to express and scream and be so angry, even though obviously it wasn't his fault. But I was just thinking, "You're the expert here. How did we get here?" But in climbing, you're in control of your own destiny and the decisions that you make and the terrain that you put yourself in. In that three-second moment that felt like 30 minutes, I had this totally life-altering moment in my mind where I realized that all this negative energy wasn't going to get me to the top, and it wouldn't matter what I felt towards the person I was with. It was about me controlling my emotions and controlling the moment enough to get through it.
And we ended up making it to the top. It was nightfall by that time. Again, super unprepared. My climbing partner had dropped his down jacket in the process. We had a Kit Kat bar left that was half eaten in my pocket, no water, anything. And we touched the top. We took photos by night next to the crest, and we couldn't find the way down.
So the one thing I did have was cell service. I was supposed to meet Alex Huber the next day, so I called him and I was like, "Hey, Alex." And he started telling me about his day. And I was like, "No, no, no. I'm at the top of Tre Cima Ovest. How do I get down?" And I remember him saying in his thick German accent, "Oh, Sasha. You're going to have to sleep at the top tonight." And I was like, "What?"
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, no.
Sasha DiGiulian:
This is crazy. I'd never spent the night on the top of a mountain. And I was freezing. I had a thin jacket. My climbing partner had lost his. It was misting and starting to rain, and we stubbornly kept looking for the descent until at one point, about probably two in the morning, we had fallen asleep on the precipice of the cliff's edge. And I woke up at 5:00 AM with the sunrise and realized that I was huddled against a rock and we were just sitting there. And just below me was just this vast drop off the side of the tower, and I was like, "Oh, I'm glad we didn't keep looking for that descent."
So we ended up making our way down about four hours later. We were back in the refugio using these little coins to take five-minute showers and devouring pizza. Went to bed, slept all day. And then about two days later, we were like, "Should we do another adventure?"
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, Sasha talks about an injury that put her climbing on hold for a year and the two projects that came to life while she was recovering.
Over the course of her career. pro climber, Sasha DiGiulian has won plenty of prestigious awards and competitions. She's also completed more than 30 first female ascents around the world. Her path has been full of big successful moments, but there's been some rocky points along the way.
One of the most challenging moments happened in 2020 when, after years of pain, Sasha went through five different surgeries to completely reconstruct her hips. You had hip dysplasia, some pretty gnarly hip injury, and then surgeries on your hip where it sounded horrific. It sounded like they cut up your hip and put it back together rather than just doing a hip replacement.
Sasha DiGiulian:
Yeah, five surgeries.
Shelby Stanger:
I cannot imagine. And with climbing, you wear a harness on your hips, so you have to use your hips. You have to use your hips. Climbing is not arms. It's all legs, moving your legs up a mountain. I don't understand. Talk to me about this and how you had the mindset to keep going.
Sasha DiGiulian:
Yeah. At this point in my career, an injury's going to happen. And when I was younger, injury happened too. But yeah, I always say climbing is all in your hips, which is the deep irony.
So I was born and went my whole life with congenital hip dysplasia. And in my case, it was something that got worse and worse. And this is common across female athletes, specifically in sports like dance and ballet and, coincidentally, climbing because it's also a very hip-intensive sport, where that grinding of overuse in your hips and that connection point, right, between your upper body and your lower body is all from the core and hip area is overused. And the hip dysplasia manifests itself in a much worse way over time, and that time becomes accelerated through sport. And so what may have come into a necessity to have a hip replacement in my 60s was actually something that got so bad that I had chronic hip pain from when I was about 26 years old.
It was actually 2020 that I felt like I couldn't sleep at night. This hip pain is so bad, I need to find out what's going on. And I actually had a climb that I was planning for. It was in a week. And I was like, "I'm just going to go and get a cortisone shot so that I can go on my expedition and get through it without so much pain." Because you're right. The harness lies right on the hips. You're always falling into your hips. It's horrible.
I couldn't do long distance hikes or approaches to climbs. I was actually training for a New York City marathon for cross training for something fun and new to do, and I got shin splints and a stress factor in my leg. I had all these ancillary injuries coming from my hips being horribly out of place to the point that my femur head was essentially popping out of the socket. I went in to get the cortisone shot, and the surgeon was like, "I need to know what I'm working with, so we need to do an MRI." And that's when I found out that I was looking down the barrel of needing a total hip replacement in six months, or I could do this surgery that would in theory preserve my own hips and enable me to keep professionally climbing if I could come back from it.
So I went nine months, yeah, without being able to do much. I actually couldn't sit up at a 90-degree angle because of the restriction. So I was bedridden for three months at a time and had to relearn how to walk, and that was one of the most challenging, darkest times of my life.
But relearning my body after all of this was really what was both the most challenging but also the most rewarding because when I was in this dark period , need I say, I had to find my purpose. And I had to redefine my identity because I had been climbing for 20, 25 years nearly, and all of a sudden it was no longer a part of my life. Sport wasn't a part of my life. Going outside wasn't a part of my life. I couldn't even walk down to the kitchen to make a smoothie on my own. I couldn't go to the bathroom for a lot on my own, which was horrible and dehumanizing.
But what I did learn was how to control what I can control. And I had this inkling of this business that I had registered in 2012 because I always really cared about nutrition and made my own bars and couldn't find what I wanted out there. So I was like, "The universe is telling me this is the time to build the company." And then also writing my book, that's really a big part of what got me through this crisis of identity during a time where I really needed to define it. But then my climbing and the style by which I climb completely changed too. I have this benefit now that I can actually use my lower body and build up strength in a way that I never could before.
Shelby Stanger:
While Sasha was healing from her surgeries, she started building up her career off the wall. She turned her longtime passion for nutrition into her own company called Send Bars. Unlike the energy bars she saw on the market, Send Bars contain leafy greens, adaptogens, and have zero preservatives. The goal was to create something she'd not only enjoy eating while climbing, but that would also keep her healthy and fueled on long adventures. Around the same time Sasha started Send Bars, she started pouring her most vulnerable stories into a memoir called Take the Lead. I read it before our interview, and I absolutely loved it.
You share some pretty intimate stories in the book and a lot of your life of climbing and love and loss and everything in between. Failures, triumphs. What was it like to write it and share those moments with the world?
Sasha DiGiulian:
Writing the book was a really rewarding, but also really challenging experience. I had to go into the furthest corners of my mind of things that I haven't really revisited or reflected on. So it was a really cathartic, live three-year process of therapy because-
Shelby Stanger:
That's exactly what I say about books.
Sasha DiGiulian:
Right?
Shelby Stanger:
It's like live therapy. It sucks.
Sasha DiGiulian:
It really is. It gave me a very deep appreciation for parenting because you realize how much of a foundational role early relationships and experiences have on childhood development, and it did highlight things that I need to improve and things that I've learned about myself in ways that I've interacted and really laid everything out on a platter for me to very meticulously dissect.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you tell people who haven't read it just in your words what it's about and why you wrote it?
Sasha DiGiulian:
Yeah. So I started the book with the intention of going a little bit more chronologically, and then as I was writing it, I realized that different lessons that I've had from expeditions, from balancing being a professional athlete to being a full-time student at Columbia, but really using the backdrop of building my career in a niche industry, going through and opening that door of making climbing more mainstream, because at the time that I started climbing wasn't. And I went through incredible amounts of hate and scrutiny and judgment for doing that and being a woman in a male-dominated sport. And climbing does have this upper echelon of a bros club in the industry, and I've never fit in.
I've just realized the people that don't like me and have an issue with my career are never going to like me. And I think that there's empowerment in that because you build your own path and you build your circle and you build the field of voices that you're going to listen to, and then you realize the voices that don't matter. And in doing that, I've found a lot of strength and unfortunately, I had to learn it through some of these hard ways, but also through my injury of not having the physical capacity to climb, but having all of this time to reflect and really grow my community outside of climbing to then come back to climbing with a stronger mindset.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. So what's your relationship with climbing today?
Sasha DiGiulian:
Climbing, I would say it's a great question because it morphs every day. I love climbing. It makes me feel live. It's the space where all of the chaos feels pretty muted. And I have to be singularly focused, and it's one of the few areas in my life where I can be because you can't be multitasking while on the side of a cliff. You need both hands.
But it's also come with a lot of complications, and it's brought me a lot of really hard times. And I would say I don't always have the most positive relationship with climbing. It's made me really have to find a better balance of my relationship with my body, with my sense of community, because it's not all kumbaya in climbing, especially at the professional level. It's not, and that's normal. It is a competitive sport with professional athletes with different friends and different jealousies. I have a lot of hope in the new generation because I think that that's growing and evolving out of it.
But I would say where I enjoy climbing the most is when I'm with good people with good energy and surrounded by positivity. And then I climb my best. I have the most fun and I get the most out of it.
Shelby Stanger:
Since recovering from her hip surgery, Sasha has been feeling exceptionally healthy and strong. She recently completed a 70-mile Ironman competition just to prove to herself that she could do it. As far as climbing goes, Sasha is back on the wall and pushing herself to go after some extremely challenging ascents.
I'm really curious though. A lot of the things you do are really scary. I just want to hear a little bit about how you approach fear, and maybe you can give us some advice because I'm scared all the time of all sorts of things.
Sasha DiGiulian:
But I think that we're all scared all the time. And that's been a big fallacy that comes with people's perception of me and my career, is that in some way I'm fearless and I'm absolutely not. I get scared even lead climbing sometimes, and I've been lead climbing since I was seven years old. That's just climbing while bringing up your own rope.
I think that the way that I classify fear is by really trying to rationally look at what's a real fear that I should be cognizant of and consider that it has real consequences that I can't control, and then what's a fear that's maybe a little bit more irrational and doesn't necessarily have consequences that are fatal consequences or injury-provoking consequences. So I think that the first step that I do is really try and rationalize what and where the root of the fear is coming from.
And I liken this a lot to business. There's always risk and there's risk mitigation. And that's the same thing that I've learned from climbing, is the way to manage risk is really understanding where it's coming from, what the controllables are. And there's definitely areas within climbing, like in life, where there's no fall zones. And that's where the consequences are real. In those circumstances, I would say they're the most tricky, but also the most straightforward.
I don't think about falling. I can't think about falling. Because if you're thinking about "What if I fall?" in those moments where it requires such mental and physical clarity, then those thoughts can occupy and hold you back from actual performance.
Shelby Stanger:
What are some of the best lessons you've learned from the sport that you use today in your life?
Sasha DiGiulian:
Climbing and failure are synonymous. I mean, 99% of the time that I'm training, I'm falling off these little specific moves and figuring out how I could maybe move my hips two centimeters to the right so that my center of gravity is more in line with my fingertips and adjusting my feet in these very minuscule ways.
I would say that one thing is, the devil's in the details, and the success in climbing is being very attuned to what the microscopic adjustments are. You can't get to the top of a climb while thinking about the summit because you could be looking at a 3,000-foot climb and you're like, "How in the world am I ever going to do this?" Then the way that you do it is you break it down pitch by pitch. And then even more microscopically, you start looking at each pitch. Maybe there's a five-foot, 10-foot section of the wall that is just seemingly impossible, and you need to figure out those microscopic little adjustments and where you're going to put your feet, where you're going to really engage your core so that there's that connection between your fingertips and your toes.
And I liken it to a lot in life because say you have a business. You have a big, lofty goal in life that is just so big that it's hard to comprehend. But the only way to really start is by breaking it down into these micro steps. I mean, one example. I have this big, lofty goal this year. Maybe it's for two years, maybe it's for five years. I don't know if I'm capable of it. It seems so beyond my ability right now that it stresses me out to think about.
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, what is it?
Sasha DiGiulian:
It's a route on El Cap.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay.
Sasha DiGiulian:
And it's 39 pitches. It's the longest route on El Cap. And it scares me and it excites me, and it's something that I decided as a goal of mine because of that. But I also think that in my approach to training, it's setting these smart goals, too, of you have to have something that gives you that sense of satisfaction and achievement along the way to keep you on that path of the greater goal.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to learn more about Sasha, check out her Instagram at Sasha DiGiulian. That's S-A-S-H-A-D-I-G-I-U-L-I-A-N. Sasha's book, Take the Lead, is available wherever you buy books. I liked it so much that I even sent a copy to my producer, Sylvia. You can also buy Send Bars at sendbars.com or on Amazon. Sasha also has a film called Here to Climb. It premieres on May 31st and will be available to stream online later this year on Max.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger. Produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby.
As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.