What it means to go all in on your dream.
🧊 About the episode
Marianne van der Steen is one of the top female ice and mixed climbers, and competition dry-toolers in the world today. She’s climbed WI7, M10 trad, and recently joined the D15 club, the third woman to climb the grade, alongside Angelika Rainer and Haruko Takeuchi.
While she’s won many European Cups in ice climbing and reached the World Cup finals a number of times, she hasn’t yet been able to break through to the podium. Will that change this season?
Damned if she isn’t giving it her all to make it happen, often training two to three times a day and at least 5 days a week. We talk with Marianne about what it looks like to go all in for your goal, what ”Der Weg ist das Ziel” and “DTS” mean, and how we need to have a hard talk about ethics in outdoor dry-tooling.
When she’s not out climbing, you can find her and her partner, Dennis, training at their 100% sustainable tiny house in the Netherlands or traveling about in their VW T3 campervan with three weiner dogs in tow.
I do not choose the easiest way. I can, I can scramble up a mountain, but no, I decide to take the north face. You can take the easy ice climb, or you can take the ice climb that has a higher technical difficulty. And maybe you cannot do it, but you find yourself so much more on the way. And in that is also a bit of honesty. You can only do this to yourself, and you can only do this if you're actually honest to yourself. And that's the beauty of the mountains also. There's no way to lie.
🧊 Resources and links
Marianne's recap of climbing A Line Above the Sky (D15) on Scarpa's blog.
You can read more about one of Marianne's idols, Robert Jasper, in this Climbing article, and here is a powerful obit about the late Tom Ballard, who established A Line Above the Sky, and the crag, Tomorrow's World.
You can connect with Marianne:
📸 @verticalmarianne | 🔗 verticallife.nl
🧊 Credits
Original photo used in cover image by Robert Hendriksen (@thatcrazydutchguy).
Intro music by Hannah Noelle Enomoto (thanks, sis!).
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