Ben Rodden is one of climbing’s most influential athletes. In the nineties she gained attention for her junior national titles and impressive ascents of big walls in Yosemite. Then, in 2000, Rodden was thrust into the mainstream when she and her partner Tommy Caldwell executed a harrowing escape from kidnappers in Kyrgyzstan. In the mid-aughts, she and Caldwell became two of the most visible climbers on the planet.
In 2014, after becoming a mother, Rodden began speaking and writing about her internal struggles during this period, shattering the illusion that she’d enjoyed the perfect career and life. She wrote candidly about her 2009 divorce from Caldwell, who’d been her climbing partner on many of her groundbreaking ascents, yet wasn’t the love of her life.
I found Rodden’s openness to be extremely relatable, and at the time I was dealing with a resurgence of clinical anxiety that I thought I’d beaten. In her essays, Rodden revealed that she, too, struggled with anxiety, shame, and a host of other mental health hurdles including PTSD and disordered eating.
Earlier this year, Rodden, now 44, published a memoir, titled . The book is a compilation of everything she’s learned in the decade since she began opening up about her inner landscape. I recently caught up with Rodden to talk about the book and her experiences in climbing.
OUTSIDE: What motivated you to writeA Light Through the Cracks?
Rodden: I grew up climbing in the nineties and early aughts. Back then, vulnerability was seen as a weakness, talking about fear was seen as a weakness, eating issues were prevalent but never talked about. Attempts to talk about mental health were shut down.
As I got older, I saw how much of a disservice those kinds of attitudes did me. I thought that if I had heard people talking about any of that stuff, being vulnerable, showing anything except the highlight reels of their sends and how they conquered the mountain through suffering and all the chest thumping that was happening, it would have really helped me.
I first started talking about some of these things, and writing about them on social media and for ϳԹ because I felt like it was a huge void in our community that needed to be filled. With the book, I hoped to be able to shed a broader light by using a longer medium. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good entertaining, reaching-the-summit story, but there’s more to people than just that. And the fact that we’re not sharing that is, I think, a real missed opportunity.
Climbing has struggled with sexism. Where has the sport made progress since the nineties, and where do you see room for more work to be done?
When I started climbing there were just so few women and girls in the sport because climbing’s culture was so male-dominated. When I became a professional, there were just one or two women on a company’s team of sponsored climbers. And they were token women, so that the brand could check the diversity box. Like, ‘oh yeah we’ve got women!’ Now, you look at the teams and it’s way more equal, sometimes even skewed toward having more women on the team. That’s been a huge transformation and an ongoing progress.
But I don’t feel like the outdoor or climbing communities have crossed the finish line. If you look at feature films or a lot of books out there, or you look at the media, it’s still pretty male-dominated.
For mental health issues and body shaming and disordered eating and those types of things, we’re shedding light on them, but I don’t feel like we have reached a point where they’re no longer prevalent issues in our sport. If you look through a typical climber’s social media feed, I bet 90-percent of the images are of really fit people. Go into any climbing gym and that’s not an accurate representation of who’s climbing. I feel like there’s this image, or this myth, out there that you have to look a certain way to be strong, but in real life strength comes in so many different shapes and sizes. Marketing could better reflect our whole community instead of just the top one-percent.
Two years ago you launched the short film This is Beth, in which you confront some of your struggles with body image, including your self-described “soft” abdominal region. What did you take away from that project?
That was the first time I’d worked on a media project that was fully women led and run. It was a joy to work with them. Nothing against the male producers that I’d worked with—they’re some of my best friends—but it spoke to the change that’s happening in the industry that there could be an all-women production team.
It’s so great that the film was able to have so much traction. It talked about something that would never—at least not when I was growing up in climbing—have had the opportunity to be shown. And the more people can talk about these so-called shameful topics, the less power they’ll have over us.
What are your go-to practices for keeping perfectionism, negative self-talk, and other damaging elements of the psyche in check?
None of those things are like a box that you can just check and be done. For me a lot of times, if I feel myself kind of slipping down that slope, I stop and ask myself, Why am I feeling that way? Who or what made me think that way? And that’s always such a big eye opener. I’ll realize something like, ‘Oh, it’s because of that magazine shoot in the late nineties when the photo editor asked me to suck in my stomach.’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh, well, that’s silly. Clearly, I don’t need to try and impress, or listen to, that guy.’
I usually find that the reason I’m feeling that way is because of some sort of external dialogue that I subscribed to that doesn’t deserve that power over my body anymore.
What’s your next project?
I’m getting ready to head to Banff for the Festival. I’ll be there talking about the book. I first went to the festival like ten years ago and was really blown away. All the films that I saw and the topics I went to were just so engaging and inspiring.
It was really busy this spring and summer with book promotion. Now, I have some stuff for fall, but it’s one of the first times in my adult life where I’ve purposely not tried to fill the void with some big thing, whether it was a climb or a creative project, because the quiet times are when the creative things happen. It’s easy for me to just stay really busy, and I’m purposely trying not to do that, to just give myself a little bit of time and space.
This interview was edited for space and clarity.