Big Wall Climbing and Ultrarunning with Thomas Bukowski

0:01I have to say the first like couple of years climbing I feel like I really had to work on fear management. I really had to be like okay like that was cool but like gosh I was just terrified most of the day and like if I keep staying terrified most of the day I'm just not gonna have a great of a time. And so for me it's really important to be like why am I doing this? Am I excited to do this? Am I not too tired? Whatever it is you know and when I'm like okay I'm really excited to do this. then I think you can push through a lot of discomfort or fear. And also you can rationalize and go, okay, this is a bit scary or whatever, but I have this goal that I'm working towards.

0:43In 2022, Thomas Bukowski had a wild idea. To apply for a spot in the North Face's athlete development program. Pitching himself was scary, but Thomas has built a career around facing his fear head on. As a queer person from Hong Kong who started climbing relatively late in life, Thomas has always felt like an outsider in the industry. But the pitch worked, and two years later, Thomas was offered a spot on the North Face's prestigious climbing team. Since then, he's faced his fears on some incredibly challenging routes in Argentina, Alaska, and Pakistan. Thomas' desire to push himself out of his comfort zone has spilled into the rest of his life, too.

1:24In 2024, he brought it to the sport of trail running when he ran the 211-mile John Muir Trail, which usually takes people two to three weeks in just four days. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:49Thomas Bukowski, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You've done a lot of things like you run, you climb, you're a North Face athlete. How did you get into climbing? Yeah, I didn't grow up very athletic. You know, I think the stereotype probably was kind of the nerd on a computer kind of thing. But I had this kind of wild opportunity to go to a boarding school in Norway. And while at that school, I became really good friends with the physics teacher there. turns out he was one of the best climbers in britain in like the 80s like there's like old guidebooks of him putting up the hardest route in you know the sheffield and um and then you know had kids and settled down he ended up teaching physics at a school but like sort of any good lifelong climber he like cleaned the cliff that was nearby the school and like bolted it and like got to school to buy a bunch of harnesses and shoes and everything and um he taught me how to climb and he was really my mentor yeah so that was i basically started climbing in high school do you remember any of those early days when you went climbing i think i was mostly really scared right to be off the ground and being like oh i'm gonna trust this rope and these little metal bolt things in the in the rock and everything um it was also really exciting but um yeah i i have to say the dominant thing i was trying to do was was was manage my fear those first couple years Were you also just naturally good at it?

3:18I think I was all right. Maybe I was a little bit above average, but I certainly wasn't like one of those natural talents where they start climbing. And even now, I think I see folks getting into climbing, like friends that sort of have been climbing for much less time than I have. And I'm like, wow, they got really good really fast. And sometimes they can be a little jealousy or envy there, of course. But then I was like, oh, okay, that's what talent looks like actually. And I feel like I've had to sort of really work my way up, you know, the grades and the kinds of climbing, things like that, which is totally fine.

3:52And that's the fun of it all. But I don't know if I naturally have that much of a predisposition. For sure, at least the fear thing is really not helpful. So that's really interesting. This school in Norway sounds incredible. And I'm curious, like, you know, you could have also picked up soccer. You could have picked up running. You could have picked up so many different sports. But climbing hit something within you. What do you think happened? Yeah, I'm not sure really. I mean, sometimes I think, you know, when you're an impressionable teenager, you kind of pick up the thing you end up picking up and that's what you end up doing.

4:27The only way I've been able to, because I've asked this question a lot, I'm like, why am I spending so much of my life and time and effort and money and all that kind of stuff and risk going climbing? Because sometimes I'm like, oh, if I'm not a climber, life would be a lot easier. here um but the only thing i've found is that i do like sort of going up to the top of the hill in the park being like i wonder what it looks like from up there it feels a little instinctual like i'm instinctively kind of curious about that even when i find myself in a in in a new place you know wherever you know you happen to be a new city somewhere i i often i'm like oh let's I often end up kind of on, you know, a little knoll somewhere to be like, oh, let's see what it looks like from up here.

5:12So there's clearly some subconscious, I think, interest or curiosity there. And I think that sort of that that lines up sort of well with climbing. You know, really climbing is just learning increasingly more complicated ways to get up to the top of things. Right.

5:31For Thomas, climbing has always been about more than the physical challenge. He loves being up high and seeing things from a different angle. In Norway, Thomas thrived. He was climbing, doing well in school, and he still had time to explore other interests. But after he graduated and moved to the U.S., the culture shock hit. He was studying computer science and was overwhelmed by the workload, which made it a lot harder to get out into nature.

6:06So you find climbing in high school and it opens your perspective. And then you go to the United States for college. You said it was not easy. It was not easy. Yeah, I went to Dartmouth, which, you know, is a bit of a preppy New England college. And I think it was just very different from the people there. I think also, I think at that time I was starting to kind of figure out sort of my sexuality a little bit more. And I think that also was tricky. but there's also some more practical things like i didn't know how to drive no one drives in hong kong so it was really hard to get around especially you know in a place that was a little more rural and um yeah so there's just a lot of practical things that's like cool i'm in the u.s now but how do i how do i find my place in this giant crazy country wow i appreciate you sharing this i could see how dartmouth would have been a bit of a shock i went to emory in atlanta georgia and I stuck out like a sore thumb and I'm from the United States so I can imagine coming from Hong Kong and then this diverse school in Norway and going to this kind of preppy east coast really academically rigorous school did you finish school or did you I didn't I never finished no I just dropped out so you just dropped out you're like the modern like tech entrepreneur I don't know about that but um I think academically I wasn't doing great and socially I wasn't doing great either so it was just kind of a rough time I was kind of like wow I like like it was a lot of like what am I doing here and like I think that was one of the first times I really I really developed this like okay if I'm gonna do something that's hard I have to really understand why I'm doing it and what I'm doing and if I can't at all the little moments of doubt kind of come up with something that's like okay come up with like the a phrase or like a sort of really know inside me why I'm doing this and what I'm trying to go towards, then I'm just not going to make it.

8:07After dropping out of school, Thomas moved to San Francisco. It was the perfect home base. There was a booming tech scene where he could apply his computer science studies, and there was a thriving LGBTQ community where he could fully be himself. When he arrived in the Bay Area, Thomas joined a climbing gym. and it wasn't long before he went to Yosemite for the first time. Some friends I met at the climbing team were like, oh, we're going to Yosemite. And I was like, cool, I hear there's like good climbing there, you know. And I go there and I'm like, wow, this place is crazy. It's really hard, really scary.

8:42It's trad climbing, which I didn't really know how to do. I'd mostly been a sport climber.

8:49Yosemite is a mecca for climbers. The landscape features endless granite walls and long technical routes. Thomas was so enamored with the challenge and natural beauty that he became the ultimate weekend warrior. One year, he spent a whopping 42 weekends in the park. Eventually, his day job started to wear on him, and he decided to go all in on the classic dirtbag lifestyle. In 2017, Thomas moved into a van and spent the next seven and a half years living in and around Yosemite, pursuing climbing full-time.

9:26Explain how you're funding your climbing career. Some of it was for sure having some savings from just working a tech job for years. Some of it was guiding. You know, you kind of just piece it together. And it's a much more uncertain and unstable approach. You have like more money but less time. Or you have lots more time, but then you're kind of always a bit stressed being like, hmm, might run out of money. I'm curious how you ended up with the North Face. I'm sure like you know they found you in San Francisco like that that used to be where they were yeah at that point I was like not in SF as much anymore I was kind of mostly out in the van and um long story short they were running this program called the athlete development program this was in 2022 I think and basically it was an open call for folks just you know so apply to be an athlete you know which is I think their attempt to try to be like how can we sort of diversify it a little bit but also kind of open it up a little bit like there's always people you can find who are in the scene and like they feel like they're the up-and-coming folks and then there's always these folks just kind of just not quite in that same scene but they could also be doing really interesting things right so it's another way to also just sort of broaden the aperture a little bit and so i applied two and a half thousand people also applied and they picked 17 people you know across climbing trail running and snow sports and um they picked me and that ended up being a two-year program and then after that you know they offered me a proper contract on a team um i definitely i think by living in the city and living in san francisco and i think not growing up in a mountain town or parents who are also climbers or mountain guys and things that i like never was that plugged into like the the cool kids essentially right they know the sponsored athletes and also like it just took me a long time to get good at climbing so i i think without the program i really wouldn't have had this kind of opportunity to sort of be in this world at all i love that though because you pitched yourself and i think that like if you don't ask you don't get i think that's like all good things in life they're like if you really want to go do them like sure there's a lot of people who get lucky and you know they're in the right circles and they grow up and their parents are who they are and their friends are who they are.

11:44And then there's these people that pitch themselves. So good on the North Face for opening the door and good on you for pitching yourself. I think that's really cool. I think it was something I wasn't very good at doing for many years. I found it scary and overwhelming to pitch yourself. But also for many, many years, I was like, oh, I can never be a North Face athlete. So why even bother apply? But it was quite a sort of ingrained way of thinking. And I think around when that program happened and sort of when I put myself in for something like that I was starting to be like oh maybe I can just try and I think I was not always like that at all I was mostly the opposite of that I mostly didn't put myself into these things and I really kind of over time like recognized oh maybe I am holding myself back maybe I am thinking this way where I'm like oh I I'm never going to be someone who can do that or go go to this place to climb or whatever it is and that's maybe holding me back as much as, oh, maybe I need some more skills to climb there.

12:41You can sit here and think about, oh, I need to be better at, you know, glacier travel to go climb this peak. But it's like, well, I mean, are you going to try and get better at glacier travel? Or are you just going to be like, well, that's not me. I don't know. It's such a truism, right? Like, oh, you know, if you don't try, you won't get it. But I think often, you know, we don't even realize we're not trying. That certainly was the case for me. yeah I I'm wondering if um climbing helped you with that like in climbing you you you try and you fail all day like that is climbing is just failure over and over but trying again yeah I I think so I mean there's a and we could do a whole nother podcast on like climbing and how it sort of is this kind of arena for trying something and and and failing and that being okay and how that's like maybe a good way to retrain nervous systems and all that kind of stuff.

13:34But yeah, I think in a very basic way, you know, you just go to any climbing gym and there's some climbs that you'll be able to do and some climbs you won't be able to do and it's going to be there staring at you. And you can really think about like, oh, do I think I can't hold onto that next hold or have I tried and I'm falling off? And if you're trying and you're falling off, you can be like, well, why am I falling off? Do I need a little more chalk because my hands are sweaty? is hold a little too small? Do I need to like be a little stronger? Maybe I should just move my hip a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right.

14:05You know, it's like at least half of it is how you're thinking about it. Did you even try to climb the route? If you don't try it, you definitely won't get to the top.

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16:18Climber Thomas Bukowski has always been the kind of person who wants to see what's around the next corner or the view from the next peak. That curiosity has led him to visit some of the most dramatic landscapes around the world. Last summer, Thomas spent six weeks climbing in Kyrgyzstan. The area is dominated by two mountain ranges, and everywhere you look, there are high-altitude routes and granite cliffs. It's basically a giant playground for an athlete like Thomas.

16:51You just got back from Kyrgyzstan climbing? Yeah, just on a really great trip, actually. Almost a perfect trip. Can you tell me about that? That's a wild idea in itself. Yeah, it's funny. It's a little bit of a forgotten part of the world, right? I think that the western end of the sort of Soviet bloc has gotten a lot of attention. But it turns out, you know, there's Everest and the Himalaya, which are very famous, and they kind of stretch west a bit more, and that's the Karakorum. and then it kind of wraps up north. And there's a whole bunch of mountains up there, sort of around west and north of Xinjiang and sort of in southern, central southern Russia.

17:29And there's amazing climbing there, amazing rock climbing, amazing sort of alpine climbing. And also historically has mostly been a, sort of the Soviet sort of center of alpinism. You know, the valley that I went to, they used to hold like Soviet alpine, like climbing competitions there. You know, that was back in the 80s, I think. yeah um it was a good trip it was a trip to kind of go do this big wall the route's called the american way um on this peak called uh slislova and the axio valley and i think long story short it's it's kind of roughly a route that's about the same height and difficulty as as freerider on al capitan in yosemite um which of course is so famous because alisano free sold it so it's a roughly similarly difficult route but i climbed it with ropes which was um very necessary because I fell many times.

18:15But yeah, that was most of the trip. But we also did some other climbs in the area too. And it was a really successful trip.

18:28The American Way was one of the hardest routes Thomas has ever climbed. And it was a huge milestone for him. Prior to his trip, he had spent hours training in the gym, working on his general fitness. To help him with his endurance, Thomas took up trail running. In 2024, he ran all 211 miles of the John Muir Trail in just over four days.

18:54I want to shift gears to running. I'm a runner. It sounds like you're a trail runner. It turns out I am a trail runner, yeah. Have you always been? I mean... No, I always had pretty bad cardio. I always felt anyway, and I was always the last person up to the bottom of the climb and like i'm so winded and it would i was just like wow i'm just destroyed by this 45 minute hike up the hill you know um and i was just like i should try to get a little more fit but i was like running is good for getting fitter right and i mean this is maybe you know a good illustration of like this desire to go stand on top of a hill whatever but instead of running you know on the flat bits which is what most people do when they're like let's go running i was like well the nearest hill is berno so let's go run up to berno and of course running up a hill especially when you're not much of a runner is like brutal and so i just started doing that and um the first couple dozen times was like whoa this is not good like i'm gonna explode it's quite it can be quite a rude feeling i feel like um running sometimes but you know also when running if you just keep doing it a little bit you eventually get a little better and you get in And your aerobic capacity develops and your aerobic base gets a little stronger.

20:04And then running up the hill is not quite as bad. And then it just, you know, it escalates rapidly from there. I love that you said it was a rude feeling. It's just really like it's not very nice. You're like, oh, God, like I can't breathe. I need to stop right now. This is a terrible idea. Like that's how it feels to me. Okay, but like only last year you had this really badass wild idea where you ran the John Muir Trail. It's 211 miles from Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney. usually takes people like three weeks. You ran it in four and a half days. Yeah, it's an interesting story.

20:35So this running thing escalated over the years. You know, I was running up those three and a half miles to Berno and then I'll do like the six miles to go and get park and back. And I'll do like the 13 miles to the ocean and back, you know. I ran a marathon and then like ran a 50K and so on. And then eventually I ran my first 100 mile and it was just a blistering experience, both literally and figuratively. And it actually was my friend's idea. she was turning 40 and she you know she had gone a couple hundred miles under her belt too and she was like for my 40 birthday i want to run the john muir trail and i was like that seems crazy i could never do that um but i'm happy to support you on that and i was like well maybe i can run like half of it with you i was like i've run 100 miles so i feel like i could run 100 miles but i think one thing i keep relearning about myself i think around this topic of fear is that i never really could say to myself my goal this summer is to run the john muir trail because it was just too scary i mean it's funny because i mean i look back now i'm like i was aiming to do it i started with her you know i was kind of like let's run the john muir trail so her and i end up starting the the run and she's she's always kind of had some issues at altitude of like being able to keep things down and eating and basically about one and a half two days in she was pretty nauseous so she was like okay this is it you know i'm gonna hike out from here and i was kind of just like really had this moment where i was like oh no so do i keep going by myself now like and i almost didn't do it i was like okay well i'll just go through the motions i packed the bag i'll set the alarm for the time that should probably wake up and start running and so i did all that and i was kind of like okay i guess i start running now and it's like it's all mental right i mean of course i was tired but like i was like all right you can start running or not start running and i somehow managed to start running and the first couple miles i almost turned around i was like i could still turn around i don't have to do this you know but then i got you know i got through and the sun rose and then i was like actually it's really nice out here it's like quite pretty you know having quite a good time actually feeling pretty good at that moment anyway but like it took like it really took someone else being like i'm gonna do it and kind of like took like sneaking up on the goal sort of like from the side to to really get going on it i mean i learned a lot of things obviously from from from running for 200 something miles but i think one of the things i for sure learned about myself was like these things are still really scary and really hard and really overwhelming and my ability to try them, to commit to them is still mostly sort of guarded by fear, right?

23:10And okay, so that's something I should try and focus on and work on because I don't want to be always, you know, needing someone else to kind of like set the goal for me. Like I want to be able to do that myself, you know, I have lots of things I want to do.

23:28After Thomas finished running the John Muir Trail, his head was in a different place. Climbing was still a huge part of the picture, but suddenly he was craving something else. Community.

23:44After many years in the wilderness, living in the van and all that, I think I just got to a point where I wanted to be in a little more queer community. And there are a bunch of queer people in Yosemite for sure, but it's not a place where there's a lot of queer community. In the same way that I think a lot of small towns don't have a lot of queer community. And I feel like this is like a central struggle of my life. I've like looked high and low and thought a lot about should I move here? Should I move there? And I think I ended up coming back to San Francisco for better and for worse. It's not so bad.

24:21You know, Yosemite is not so far away. The trail running here is incredible. The career community here is incredible. San Francisco is also an incredible city. The food is incredible. The food is incredible. There's lots of things to like, you know. I think it feels like a better balance for me right now to be in a place where I can have a little more career community than being like kind of absolute in that climbing life and in the mountains like 100 % of the time. I think a lot of us are craving community right now. And I think sometimes it's hard to find your community, especially if you're someone like you or I who likes to like, for me, I want to just like go live on an island and serve perfect waves.

24:57But that requires being away from humans. And like, you know, you want to go climb these rocks, but a lot of these outdoor places don't have a lot of diversity or humans in general as well. Totally. I'm curious, like how, like how you figure that out? I think for many years I had this like running joke with my friends where I was like, let me know if you hear of another gay climber in Yosemite. I'm here all the time, you know. And then and these are friends that like lived in Yosemite and were way more plugged in than I was. And like I realized, wait a minute, how would someone find out that I was a gay climber?

25:33Not that, you know, you need to like sort of shout out from the rooftops necessarily. But I certainly wasn't, I wasn't clauseted, but I also wasn't quite that out either because it's kind of scary to be like out. And you also don't necessarily want to lead with your sexuality all the time. So I was kind of like, hmm, maybe I'm also contributing to this problem of there being quote unquote no queer climbers by just also being kind of a quiet queer climber. So I think then I tried to be a little more public about it. If only just to be like, OK, well, then at least people know that this is a thing that exists because I'm sure there's other people.

26:05just like me that are like, I wonder where all the queer climbers are. What's your vision for climbing? Because you're a queer climber who's also just broadening the landscape for others. And I'm curious what that looks like for you. Oh, gosh. I mean, I would say climbing is incredible for me, but I just wish that there were more people that could get into it. And those that really like it have an encumbered of an experience of doing it and exploring it for themselves. It's not about sexuality or gender or things like that, right? It's like, it's an incredible tool, right? To think through and manage your own fear, learn about yourself.

26:48You end up processing a lot of things because it is this arena where you can try and fail safely. and everyone should give it a go. Hopefully it does something for them like it did for me.

27:10If you want to keep up with Thomas and see more of his climbing adventures, you can find him on Instagram at neodude. That's N-E-O-D-U-D-E. He also has a rock climbing guidebook about the Tuolumne Meadows, a region in Yosemite Park. You can find the link to get a copy for yourself in his Instagram profile. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Pella Motula and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

27:56As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.