Tommy Caldwell, writing in Rock & Ice:
My greatest hardship would be the ordeal in Kyrgyzstan where four of us were kidnapped by Islamic militants for six days. It’s a long, complicated story but, in short, we and our captors were hunted by the Kyrgyzstan military. We abandoned our food and warm clothes and hid out under boulders and in holes in the ground. We eventually escaped when I pushed one of our captors off a cliff and we made a run for the nearest military outpost.
It’s interesting to think about how Caldwell’s ensuing career of incredible big wall free ascents might have been different had the trauma of Kyrgyzstan not happened.
