The Complete Chris Sharma Interview

In professional climbing, where talent burns hot and fast, a decade is a long time. Ankles snap. Shoulders pop from sockets. Fingers calcify. And those rare talents that don't succumb to nagging injuries often falter beneath the mental pressure.
Picking projects at your physical and mental limits means constant exposure to the reality of failure. The struggle crushes many, weeding out the strong-fingered charlatans from the lifers. Above it all reigns Chris Sharma, 26, an athlete endowed with unparalleled physical strength and mental tenacity, dominating world sport climbing and bouldering for the last dozen years. 

Last July, six years after his historic ascent of Realization — the first confirmed 5.15a in the world — Sharma returned to Ceüse to tick another monster, Three Degrees of Separation, redpointed on July 23. This 5.14d follows desperate climbing up tufas and micro-crimps to series of three spectacular, all-points-off dynos, a hyper-dynamic line one French climber deemed "c'est moderne." For someone who's spent the last decade on the road, the Ceüse trip was a coming home of sorts. Close friend David Graham, who became the first American to repeat Realization, on July 30, was there, as well as climber Ethan Pringle (who became the third American to repeat Realization).

Meanwhile, photographer and long-time collaborator Corey Rich, whose images grace these pages, came to document Sharma's ascent, while the filmmaker Josh Lowell captured the final segment of his upcoming film King Lines. (The film opened in August to a standing-room-only crowd, with rabid applause, in Salt Lake City's Rose Wagner Theatre.) And last year, Lowell and Peter Mortimer introduced Sharma to mainstream America when NBC aired their hour-long segment on Es Pontas, the deep-water solo off the Spanish island of Mallorca. With so much media exposure, keeping a low profile has been next to impossible for Sharma, and anonymity will only be harder to come by.