For the past 20 years, Sasha DiGiulian has won climbing world championships, sent big walls from Madagascar to Spain, and pushed the boundaries of what’s possible for women’s climbing—all by age 33. But while DiGiulian has settled into a rhythm in Boulder, Colorado, she hasn’t slowed down one bit. In the past five years alone, she’s launched a nutrition bar company, published a memoir, recovered from five hip surgeries, completed an Ironman 70.3, starred in an HBO documentary, and returned to Yosemite to make the first female ascent of El Capitan’s longest free route, The Direct Line (5.13d).
Operating in the chaos, not resisting it. I was at a dinner in Salt Lake City in January 2013 with Reinhold Messner. He flipped over the wine menu and started drawing Bellavista, this 5.14b big wall in the Dolomites.
He was like, “This is what you should go do.” I didn’t have any experience with multi-pitch climbing or big-wall climbing. It’s every guide’s nightmare to hear this, but I was learning how to jumar [use metal ascenders to move upward on a rope] while hanging in free space thousands of feet above the ground, with Edu [Marín] screaming at me in Spanish and me using my limited knowledge of Spanish to figure it out. I learned so much on that trip being thrown into the deep end … I chose to go [to Spain] instead of the World Games that year.
After [Bellavista], I actively chose to stop competing as much and really started to fall in love with big outdoor experiences. The ability to compartmentalize. You have to be able to put aside everything that’s going on, show up, and do your best.
I’m a big Swiftie, so I think of that [Taylor Swift] song, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” I do about five days of cardio a week, normally a trail run or road biking. I really like swimming, too; that was the impetus for dabbling in the Ironman sphere. I train climbing four to five times a week.
On a typical day, I’ll do a [training] session in my garage for two to three hours, then I’ll do about 90 minutes of strength and conditioning. If I’m going outside, I’ll truncate meetings or move them. [In 2020,] I didn’t know if I’d be able to come back to climbing, or if I’d ever be able to climb 5.14 again. I literally had a panic attack the day before we hiked in because I was so nervous and had so many question marks around it.
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