Professional climber Emily Harrington met her husband, pro mountaineer Adrian Ballinger, on an expedition 11 years ago. While their paths to become pro athletes were different, the couple has figured out how to balance their partnership and build a family while continuing to pursue what they love— adventuring in the mountains.
Professional climber Emily Harrington met her husband, pro mountaineer Adrian Ballinger, on an expedition 11 years ago. While their paths to become pro athletes were different, the couple has figured out how to balance their partnership and build a family while continuing to pursue what they love— adventuring in the mountains.
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Emily Harrington:
I think with our relationship it appears to be so perfect and work so well, but I think it's because we give and take a lot.
Shelby Stanger:
That's professional climber Emily Harrington. Emily met her husband Pro mountaineer Adrian Ballinger on an expedition 11 years ago. The couple has figured out how to balance their partnership while venturing in the mountains.
Adrian Ballinger:
Emily's strength comes from pure rock climbing and she's one of the very best at it. And then I'm a pretty average rock climber, but I'm really good at walking up big snowy hills and sometimes skiing back down there. And then we find adventures where we can meet in the middle and help each other to excel and do better.
Shelby Stanger:
Emily and Adrian have built a life together while encouraging each other to become better athletes. Emily is a five-time US national climbing champion, and November of 2020, she became the first woman to free climb, Golden Gate, a route on El Capitan and Yosemite. Adrian is also an impressive athlete and mountain guide. He summited bound Everest eight times once without supplemental oxygen. While their paths to become pro athletes were different, it was clear from a young age that Emily and Adrian share a love for mountains, for climbing and for pushing their limits.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-Op Studios production.
Emily Harrington and Adrian Ballinger. Welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living live.
Adrian Ballinger:
Hi.
Emily Harrington:
Hello.
Shelby Stanger:
So I'm going to ask you Emily, first, when did you know you wanted your life to center around rock climbing?
Emily Harrington:
My introduction to climbing was as a kid, I was 10 years old and I started climbing on an artificial wall in the climbing gym, and my introduction was through climbing competitions and the youth climbing team. And so it was a passion really early on, but at the beginning it was just another sport that I did just ski racing and gymnastics and soccer and all those things, even though I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But it still happened pretty gradually. I did a lot of competitions and then I started doing better on the World Cup circuit and then I went to college and I kept climbing and then I graduated college, and that's when I got my first big sponsor and decided that I would give professional climbing a shot and then see where it took me. And I'm still just in that place of seeing where it's taking me.
Shelby Stanger:
It's taken you really amazing places.
Emily Harrington:
Yeah, it really has.
Shelby Stanger:
You Could have probably been a really amazing competitor at a lot of sports. Why did you decide to choose climbing? What about it made it stick?
Emily Harrington:
When I was younger, I think I did like that. I was good at it. There was a draw there. I'm a competitive person and I have a background in gymnastics, and so I had a lot of upper body strength and a lot of body awareness and flexibility, and so I was naturally pretty good at climbing and I did enjoy that and I was very competitive, so I liked the competition aspect of it. And then it is a very cerebral, creative sport. There's a lot of solving the puzzle. For me, it's never boring because there's always a new challenge and a new way to experience climbing and you get to travel the world and be out in nature. So it's a lifestyle more than anything, and I think that's what I enjoy most about it.
Shelby Stanger:
So Adrian, how did you get into climbing?
Adrian Ballinger:
So I also started young, but I'd say my path felt pretty differently. So I was born in the UK, moved to Massachusetts when I was six years old, and my family was a very non-outdoorsy family. But luckily at around 12 years old, I ended up befriending this kid my age named Greg, and his dad was a great rock climber and a good skier, and he started taking his son and me out and teaching us these skills. So a first mentor that I had as a teenager and fell in love with climbing and skiing and all these things. I wasn't very good at any of them and I also never considered it being anything but a hobby. Academics was super important to my family, so I was focused.
Shelby Stanger:
What were you studying? What was the focus?
Adrian Ballinger:
Well, I mean this is all through junior high school and high school, but I would say my family decided I was going to be a doctor because I was great at science and math and things like that. I ended up going to college in Washington D.C. And lucky these fortunate events that happen in our lives. My second mentor was a climber named Chris Warner, who's a well-known high altitude climber who between high altitude expeditions was running an outdoor leadership program at Georgetown, the school that I went to. And so there I was for pre-med, double major, all the stuff, and I fell into this outdoor leadership climbing program.
And so on my first Christmas break, he invited me down to Ecuador. So first time going to South America to climb 20,000 foot volcanoes and I was the intern, so I was making coffee for everyone and doing whatever I had to do to be on the trip. And I ended up summiting my first two 20,000 foot peaks down there. I had no idea what I was doing. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it totally clicked. I was like, "This is what I want to do."
But I'm meant to be going to school and being a doctor. So finished college, but every spring break, every summer break every day off. I was working with Chris teaching rock climbing, teaching ice climbing, going on these big expeditions. Graduated from school, persuaded my parents that I should spend a year to get climbing and skiing out of my system. So I deferred med school acceptance and that was 25 years ago and I haven't gone back to med school yet. So my parents, it's still not unusual for my dad to ask, "Maybe this year is it time to go back? But I'm still here.
Shelby Stanger:
In their twenties. Adrian and Emily both started working as professional athletes. Emily was excelling in climbing competitions around the world and Adrian was climbing the world's biggest mountains, eventually guiding others to do the same. Then in 2012, Emily was invited by legendary Mountaineer Conrad Anchor to go on an Everest expedition. Adrian was also on the mountain that season with a different group. That's when the sparks started flying 21,000 feet above sea level. Okay, I might be exaggerating, but I'm a sucker for a good adventure Love story.
How did you meet?
Emily Harrington:
We actually met on Mount Everest.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, that's so hot. Of course you did.
Emily Harrington:
It's funny because I was 25 and I was mainly a sport climber just coming out of the competition circuit, not sure what I wanted to do with my climbing, but I was sponsored by The North Face at the time. I'd never been high at all. I'd never been to high altitude. And we had a great expedition. We had a long expedition. We were there for almost three months. I got really sick. There was just a lot. It was a world that I was thrown into that I was very unfamiliar with.
Shelby Stanger:
You Got altitude sickness.
Emily Harrington:
Yeah. I got altitude sickness, I got respiratory sickness, all the things, but I recovered and stayed on the mountain, met Adrian eventually during a rescue of one of my teammates who ended up being totally fine. But that's how we met.
Adrian Ballinger:
I mean there's so much this wild story, but it was a wild year on the mountain. It was my fifth year on the mountain. So Mount Everest is a big part of where I spend my time and energy. And so when one of Emily's teammates needed this rescue, we were actually at 21,000 feet on the mountain and my team was really strongly resourced with incredibly strong and experienced ship, fully certified mountain guides and expedition doctor loads of oxygen. And so we ended up coming over to the camp at 21,000 feet and then the patient was doing better. And so Connor was like, "Let's go have a coffee." And it was actually sitting around having coffee where I finally noticed Emily for the first time. And I knew there were climbers on the mountain, but it's very unusual to see, or especially at that time, super cute blonde girl, 25 years old on the mountain. And I was like, the first espresso is definitely going to Emily.
And then we ended up just chatting and hanging out at camp too at 21,000 feet. A pretty painful, uncomfortable place. But that's where I initially was like, "Wow, I want to find out more about this person." And then we had unfortunately this series of really sad things happen, including one of my [inaudible] teammates being killed in the ice Icefall. My team ended up deciding to leave the mountain because we felt like the risk was too high that season and we basically threw a big party down in base camp to celebrate and memorialize and do all the things you do. And Emily's team came and that's when we really connected did.
But it was also, it was 2012, there wasn't really a lot of satellite internet or any of those things yet. So it was like, "Okay, now I'm leaving the mountain and maybe I'll never see you again." And it was that couple of months later that Emily was like, "Let's go on a climbing trip." And flew out to Reno and we hopped in my Tacoma and went climbing for two weeks and we finally got to see if we actually liked each other.
Shelby Stanger:
I've never gotten this many goosebumps doing a podcast interview. I really love a good adventure love story, but I think it's really unique because when you're doing an adventure like this on top of Everest, the stakes are high. You're really stripped away of all of the BS, you're your most vulnerable, raw, real, authentic self. And you're probably like that anyway, but I think it's a beautiful place to meet someone.
Emily Harrington:
Yeah.
Adrian Ballinger:
I think we very much had a no BS start.
Emily Harrington:
It was a no BS start. Absolutely.
Adrian Ballinger:
It was very real.
Shelby Stanger:
You guys had the coolest wedding. Tell me about it.
Emily Harrington:
Our wedding was awesome because we decided we were going to get married in Ecuador, which is a place that's super meaningful for both of us. Adrian spent a lot of time down there. He mentioned it's the first place that he went and climbed big mountains.
Adrian Ballinger:
Two years into our relationship, we did a trip down there.
Emily Harrington:
We went there.
Adrian Ballinger:
And we actually went to the beach after went surfing, after climbing a bunch of mountains or skiing mountains. I can't remember what we were doing. And we were only two years in and we didn't get married until we had been dating for over 10 years. So in terms of timeline, you get the idea, but I remember we were sitting on the beach two years in and we decided if we ever got married, we were going to do it on the beach in Ecuador. And it was like this weird uncomfortable talk. Did we just talk about marriage?
Emily Harrington:
One of those weird early talks we're like maybe it's too early, but whatever. And so we ended up actually doing it when Adrian proposed to me. But he proposed in the thick of COVID and so we were like, "We're going to have to wait a few years because we want to get married in Ecuador." And obviously-
Shelby Stanger:
How did he propose?
Emily Harrington:
On the top of...
Adrian Ballinger:
Very nervously.
Emily Harrington:
We went for a hike. We went for a run hike in the middle of COVID and it was snowy. We were postholing a lot. I didn't want to go to the summit because it was becoming a lot of work. And Adrian's like, "We got to go to the summit." And I was like, "Why? This is stupid."
Adrian Ballinger:
It's the perfect time to propose. When Em was completely annoyed and freezing cold,
Emily Harrington:
We were postholing up to our thighs to get to the top of this mountain. I was like, "This isn't a run anymore. This is just dumb. Why are we here?" And then he proposed and it was awesome. It all made sense. But we decided to get married in Ecuador and we invited a ton of people who we thought wouldn't come. Turns out most of them came and we also added this little adventure at the beginning because we love Ecuador so much for the fact that it has mountains and beach. We offered as an add-on an Alp and Glow expeditions trip guided trip to climb Cotopaxi, which is a volcano, a 19,000-foot volcano.
Adrian Ballinger:
So fully glaciated, high altitude, gated, like a real mountain.
Shelby Stanger:
And you would guide guests, even guests that-
Adrian Ballinger:
We invited all 110 people who were going to the wedding and we thought six or eight would decide to go and we were like [inaudible], my company, which I have two partners in, they're like, "What are you doing?" I was like, "Don't worry, it's going to be a tiny group. We're going to have fun." 42 people said, "I'm climbing Cotopaxi before we go to the beach to get married." And we're like, "Oh shit. What do we do now?"
Shelby Stanger:
Of all different levels?
Emily Harrington:
Oh yeah.
Adrian Ballinger:
Probably two thirds had never climbed a big mountain before. So many sport climber friends, gym climber friends.
Emily Harrington:
Friends who just climbed in the gym.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you have to send them a training guide?
Adrian Ballinger:
My college roommate, one of my college roommates who lives in Minnesota is like, "I'm climbing." I'm like, "What is happening?" Alex Arnold, "I'm climbing here," like, oh gosh, what have we done?
Shelby Stanger:
I want you guys to get married again. Invite me.
Emily Harrington:
It was so fun.
Adrian Ballinger:
Then we had 12 mountain guides, just this huge crew. We had to talk to everyone in the Ecuadorian climbing scene, "We're so sorry, can we please take over this one mountain for one day," or for three days actually how long it takes to climb. But in the end, 30-something people summited on this totally rowdy day with 70 mile per hour winds, not your average guiding day on a big mountain, a half dozen of us skied in.
Emily Harrington:
So yeah, we climbed the mountain, had this crazy cool experience with all these people, and then the next day we flew to the beach and got married the next day.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you logistically pull that off?
Emily Harrington:
That's when someone was like, "You guys are going to be good at having kids because this is a lot."
Adrian Ballinger:
It's just all about breaking the big, audacious, crazy, unimaginable things into small little pieces, and that's what expeditions are all about. If you think about trying to go from Tahoe to the summit of Mount Everest and you've never climbed before, that is an impossible goal. You can't even conceptualize it. But if you're like, "Well, first, I need to figure out how to climb a little hill outside of San Francisco where I live and be successful on that, and then I'm going to go to Tahoe and do a hill there, and then I'm going to go to Whitney, the tallest peak in California, and then I'm going to go to Denali," and breaking things down into pieces and feeling success in the pieces instead of in the ultimate goal that's out there and you might never achieve. I think that's what makes complicated things possible.
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back. Emily and Adrian talk about becoming parents and share advice on cultivating an adventurous relationship.
Climber Emily Harrington and mountaineer Adrian Ballinger have chased some pretty amazing feats together and separately they've climbed the world's tallest mountains set records and built careers as pro athletes. I mean, come on, the couple met on Mount Everest, now Emily and Adrian are taking on a new adventure and November of 2022, they had a baby boy named Aaro.
So how's it been having a kid?
Emily Harrington:
It's really fun. It's tiring, but in a way that I didn't anticipate it to be. It's really satisfying. I think it exceeded my expectations like parenthood, motherhood, at least right now. I just always thought it might be monotonous or I might miss my previous life or I might wish that it was different or wish I had more freedom, but I actually don't at all. I'm totally content and happy, even in the tired, frustrating moments and that's been a really cool, refreshing place to be in.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious, as a woman adventurer, there's not this long lineage of woman adventure moms.
Emily Harrington:
No, there's not.
Shelby Stanger:
You're still really early.
Emily Harrington:
Yeah, I think 10 years ago, 15 years ago when I started this career, I thought that it would end when I had a kid just because that's how it seemed like the trajectory went with women. But then thankfully, I have had women who came a little bit before me who showed me that it didn't have to be that way, but it was hard. They fought and they were the pioneers of this adventure space.
And so gradually I started to realize that it was possible with a lot of work and a lot of commitment and dedication and a lot of balance and a really supportive partner. But yes, I agree. It does feel early and it does feel like there's a lot of women now who reach out to me who are like, "This is so inspiring. How do you do it? How's it been so far?" They want to know more. They just want to know because it is different as a woman, I think, and we can't deny we've had a lot of help. We have a third who's helping us to be here right now recording a podcast together. Without him, we wouldn't be able to do that. We have a friend who's essentially serving as our nanny right now who's helping us with the baby.
Shelby Stanger:
It's a Manny.
Adrian Ballinger:
It's a Manny.
Emily Harrington:
He's a Manny. I love it.
Adrian Ballinger:
He's awesome.
Emily Harrington:
And he's great. And so we do have that, but then we also have each other and we can trade off and it just takes a lot. It just takes more effort than it did before.
Shelby Stanger:
How has being a parent changed your outlook on adventure? To me, being a parent is the biggest adventure of them all.
Adrian Ballinger:
Yeah, I mean it's still really early on for us, so we're just in the beginning. The honeymoon phase of child raising every day is so rad, and I know it will not always feel that there will be hotter days and hotter periods than we have right now. He's also a potato sack right now. He's not walking yet or moving, and so right now it's pretty easy. We just have to be more efficient and do all logistics even better than we used to, but I think we haven't started to have the hard situations yet, which is how much risk actually are we willing to take? How many weeks are we willing to be away from him? He can't go on a Himalayan expedition to 8,000 meters with me, and so this year it's very easy to just be like, "Well, I'm not doing a big Himalayan expedition this year." But I know I'm not done doing Himalayan expeditions in my life. And so that natural tension is still there, but I don't feel like we've really dove in yet to what it means or had to really figure it out.
So right now, most of the, how is it adventuring? It is just more fun. It's like a slightly different lens on everything we used to do in a slightly different way. We're doing it now with him.
Emily Harrington:
It's more fun and it's harder, but it's like we like hard things. We like doing things that are complicated. We like doing things that are logistically challenging and we're actually quite good at it, especially Adrian, when you talked about the logistics. Doing something with a baby just requires a lot more organization and a lot more stuff and a lot more thinking ahead, and we're quite good at that actually. And so we're thriving in it right now.
Shelby Stanger:
I watched you today, it was pretty incredible. We're at this Revelshine event and we had yoga class this morning and your baby was between you two and your baby started getting fussy, and I just saw Adrian casually pick up the baby, hold him very gracefully and walk up and the baby stopped crying immediately and I was like, "Wow, that's a good dad. That's really kind. Patient, awesome dad." And I was like, "These guys are a great team." At one point you had the baby between your legs and were able to stretch and coo at him, and he was just loving it and looking up at you and then you guys traded off and it was very seamless, but yet it took this communication that you didn't necessarily communicate with words in yoga and we're quiet, but you just knew and you each took the lead. It was really cool to watch.
Adrian Ballinger:
Well, that's fun. It worked out. You saw us at a good moment.
Shelby Stanger:
That was a good communicative moment.
Adrian Ballinger:
But I think that is the basis of our relationship throughout has been communication, trust and honesty, and we have dealt with so many hard things, like taking big risks in the mountain, watching him take a huge fall. That's one of the first times I've been on the other side of the coin of not being able to help, and it was this process of, I think faith in yourself, trust in yourself, intense communication with your partners and me of why it was worth it and what you were going to do differently and all these things. And I think that's the same way we approach having a child is trying to just always go back to those fundamentals of communication and trust in each other's instincts. Even though neither of us actually know how to raise a kid. We don't have a clue, but we're figuring out day by day and arguing about it and debating about it and doing the best we can and then being okay when it doesn't go the way we planned it to go.
Shelby Stanger:
Any advice to other people who want to cultivate an adventurous relationship together?
Adrian Ballinger:
I think a lot of people want to find that adventure partner, that person for these to just have this, we're so lucky. We do probably like 70% of our adventures together now and have on a powder day in Tahoe, it's like, I know my most natural best built-in partner is right here and we're going to go do something together. And that's amazing and I see a lot of people wanting that.
I think if I had any advice, it would be like to cultivate your own adventure life first instead of focusing on always finding that other person. I think it's focusing on finding joy within yourself, within your community, within what you do have. I know I really needed to find that, and then I do believe that connection with the right person to be additive to that, not that you need it, but it becomes additive is easier to find and create.
Shelby Stanger:
I think that makes a lot of sense. There was a time in my twenties where I was on a string of dating photographers, boatmen, stuntmen and pro surfers or semi-pro surfers because I just wanted to be a better surfer and I wanted to live on a boat and I wanted to have someone take photos from my stories, but that's not how you find a partner.
Adrian Ballinger:
Good for business.
Shelby Stanger:
it was just fun. But I ended up meeting Johnny when I wasn't thinking about it and I was teaching surfing to other women and there was some men in the water and they were cute, and I was like, "Well, if it's not for me, someone else might like them in the group."
Adrian Ballinger:
And there was Johnny.
Emily Harrington:
I think that, I guess it's just piggybacking off of what you both said is following your own passion and whatever's feels good for you and not focusing so much on finding the one and realizing that it's not going to fit perfectly or it's not going to be how you expect it. It's never that way. We give and take a lot. We support one another when it may not always be what's best for us, but it's not always what's best for me, but it's what's best for Adrian in the moment. And then vice versa.
He supported me on El Cap for years and put his dreams aside and went up there with me when he could have been going to the Himalaya and trying to climb the biggest mountains. He probably sacrificed a lot of time in order to see me succeed. And then once I succeeded, then we flipped and I supported him on a project the rest of that year. And so I think recognizing that or one thing not to have that be your priority, like having to find the one and then realizing that when you do have a partner in that person, it's going to take some sacrifice and to be in support mode in order to get the support as well. So it's not going to be perfect.
Shelby Stanger:
I think that part, it's not perfect.
Emily Harrington:
We're not perfect. It doesn't just mesh perfectly all the time. It takes a lot of work.
Shelby Stanger:
In some ways. Emily and Adrian's athletic background has prepared them for marriage and parenthood. They know how to solve problems and handle unexpected challenges, which are pretty useful skills when it comes to raising a family and to building a wildlife.
Emily and Adrian, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas worth Living. I loved hearing about your relationship and your adventures, and I'm excited to keep following your parenting journey as Aaro gets older. If you want to learn more about Emily and Adrian, check them out on Instagram. Emily is @EmilyAharrington and Adrian is @AdrianBallinger. We'll link to their profiles in the show notes.
We interviewed Emily and Adrian at the Revelshine Wine in Laguna Beach, and it was so fun to connect with these athletes in person. Huge shout out to Revelshine Wine for the Invitation. A special thank you also to SCP Hotels for providing incredible accommodations for our team in Laguna Beach.
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 Piers Mintzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motala 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.