RunOut 29: Who is the Lord of the Abyss?

If I told you this episode is about a time in climbing when the top climbers of the day were locked into a heated argument over the rules of our sport—everything from the hardware we used to the style we climbed in—what era might you guess?

Or what if I told you this episode was also about the best climber in the world at that time, a professional free soloist who pioneered thousands of cutting-edge routes at the upper limits of free-climbing difficulty, and even paid his way by going around to give slide shows and spraying about his achievements, what might your guess be?

The fact that you could almost pick almost any year in climbing and virtually be right says so much about our sport. But I can almost guarantee you that very few of you might ever guess the name Paul Preuss, a young Austrian climber from the early 1900s, who was arguably one of the most influential climbers to have ever lived.

This is Andrew Bisharat, and I’m here with my co-host Chris Kalous. And today, we’re speaking to Dave Smart, a founding editor of Gripped Magazine, who has just released a new biography about Paul Preuss.

This is true, geeky climbing history—so, listener beware. But what’s so interesting about Preuss is that, despite being dead for over a hundred years, his ideas were so progressive and also so provocative, that they remain relevant a century later.

I hope you find this conversation as interesting as I did. Please make sure you get a copy of Dave’s book. It’s call Paul Preuss, Lord of the Abyss: Life and Death at the birth of Free Climbing. It’s a pretty quick read, and Dave did an excellent job of researching and fleshing out this unsung, but extremely influential, founder of our sport.

Thanks for listening, and our deepest apologies for the recent delay in putting out an episode. We had one recorded a couple weeks ago about Alex Honnold’s nude expose in ESPN magazine, but Chris and I decided it wasn’t all that funny and there were too many jokes about balls, so we decided to lock it up along with our other lost tapes that will no doubt be used to slander our characters and bring shame upon our families one day after we’re both dead.

Until then, the show goes on …