A viral term. A flood of forum posts. A court case in Austria. “Alpine divorce” could look like just another seasonal topic. But it points to something much older than the buzz around it. In the mountains, a gap in ability or experience does not always stay a minor detail of the day. It can turn into authority, then into a power dynamic, and, in the worst cases, into a very real threat to women’s safety. (cc) Andres Molina / Unsplash Before a court gets involved, before the media turns it into a trend piece, “alpine divorce” usually starts in a much less dramatic way. One person lengthens their stride. The other stops asking for breaks. Fatigue gets rebranded as lack of fitness or lack of skill. Then comes the pattern—very familiar to the women who have lived it—where you stop asking whether the other person is moving too fast and start wondering whether you are, in fact, the problem. That is the scene the forum posts of the past few weeks have brought back into focus. One woman writes about “how vulnerable and scary it felt.” Another says that after twenty minutes of hiking, her boyfriend would leave her behind, then brush it off as a matter of “different paces.” A TikTok video that went viral gave the experience an even wider audience: a young American woman in tears after being abandoned on a hike by her boyfriend. At that point, “alpine divorce” had already moved far beyond a couple’s argument or a bad day in the mountains. What comes into view is not just a mismatch in pace. It is the way a gap in experience or strength can turn into authority, and then into power. “Different paces” The term spread quickly not just because it was catchy. In February 2026, a court in Innsbruck convicted an Austrian climber after the death of his partner, who was found dead of hypothermia about 165 feet below the summit. The judge held that he had failed in the particular duty of care created by his greater experience. The verdict is not final, but it has already shifted the debate. The question is no longer just whether an outing went wrong. It is what the more experienced partner’s unspoken authority is worth in the mountains when the other person relies on it to move, decide, or simply keep going. “You mean do I want to hike by myself and meet you at the summit?” The word “divorce” may sound a little too perfectly built for the moment. But it works. It cuts through the euphemisms. It avoids calling someone simply “the faster partner,” or a couple that “doesn’t work well outside,” or chalking it up to a “difference in ability.” It forces a closer look at the scene. Who moves ahead. Who sets the pace. Who decides that fatigue is not a problem yet. Who makes the other person seem too slow, too sensitive, not tough enough—before the mountain turns that hierarchy into something concrete and dangerous. That is exactly what the forums describe. In a thread on Reddit’s r/climbergirls , one user writes: “20 minutes into every hike we did, he just left me behind, never stopping for a breather or water break.” Then she adds, describing the explanation he always gave: “Because he always said we just have ‘different paces’ and that I’m too slow blah blah blah.” The gesture is right there, along with the language that covers for it. Abandonment reframed as a difference in style, almost as if it were just the natural order of things. What is most unsettling in that testimony is how quickly repeated harm starts to feel normal. Over time, the same woman says, the situation became a running joke between them. “You mean do I want to hike by myself and meet you at the summit?” she eventually found herself saying whenever he suggested going out. At that point, this is no longer just a skill gap. It is the way that gap becomes a norm, then a backdrop, then a habit. That is often how domination settles in most effectively: not through one huge dramatic scene, but through repetition, through the same line coming back again and again, through the small adjustment to reality that everyone eventually gets used to. “One time he abandoned me at the parking lot of a small local Mountain in Oregon. The police pulled him over on his way out of the park and I was walking down the road.” And when that habit finally starts to crack, the language changes again. Later in the same post, she writes: “I wish I had trusted my instincts.” It is a very simple sentence. It says almost everything. In many of these accounts, the hardest part is not physical at first. It is trusting your own read of the situation enough to say that something is wrong. You feel humiliated, exposed, sometimes plainly unsafe, and still you keep looking for the mistake in yourself. Not fit enough. Not strong enough. Not alpine enough. The first doubt does not fall on the person leading. It falls on the woman who is struggling. An old story In the testimonies that have circulated most widely in recent weeks, it is overwhelmingly women describing being left behind by a male partner who is faster, more experienced, or simply more confident in his right to set the pace. That does not mean all men abandon and all women suffer through it. It means the scene does not come out of nowhere. It belongs to a world in which men are more readily seen as legitimate guides, decision-makers, and judges of what fear does or does not matter, while women are more often pushed to doubt their own reading of a situation. The mountains do not invent that distribution of roles. They simplify it, and sometimes harden it. In this kind of pair, the romantic relationship is doubled by a learning relationship. The stronger partner is not just loved. He is also the one who knows. In many of these stories, the man moves ahead, decides, and treats his version of events as the right one, sometimes without even needing to say so. The woman hangs back, follows, hesitates to push back, then questions her own worth before questioning his behavior. Patriarchy here does not show up as a slogan. It shows up in how easily male authority passes as pure competence, and female discomfort gets treated as individual weakness. A recent American Alpine Club article on human factors in accidents points in that direction. It notes that differences in experience, age, or gender shape how decisions get made and which doubts stay unspoken. It also points out that women are less likely to speak up in mixed-gender settings and that less experienced climbers tend to defer more readily to others. In practice, that does not always look like a major conflict. More often, it looks like someone who does not quite dare to say no early enough, or who thinks their discomfort does not yet count as a legitimate warning sign. Learning from him, depending on him The forums give this imbalance a texture no concept can replace. Another user writes: “When I was 21, I dated a climber who taught me how to climb.” The sentence seems harmless enough, but it sets the whole scene right away. In this kind of pair, the romantic relationship is doubled by a learning relationship. The stronger partner is not just loved. He is also the one who knows. And that changes everything when things start to go sideways, because competence is not just a technical resource. It becomes a way of interpreting reality. The same woman goes on: “One time he abandoned me at the parking lot of a small local Mountain in Oregon. The police pulled him over on his way out of the park and I was walking down the road.” Here, we move out of the recent Austrian case and into something grayer, more ordinary, and more awkward for the heroic story the outdoor world likes to tell about couples in the mountains. Abandonment does not happen only high on a ridge. It can start much lower down, in smaller ways: in how two people walk together, get irritated, move apart, and make one person feel like a burden on the day. That is where psychologist Amélie Boukhobza’s phrase “ violence through withdrawal ” helps make sense of these stories. Not violence through direct confrontation, necessarily, but through the withdrawal of support, attention, protection, sometimes even simple presence. One person is left alone with fear, fatigue, and lack of bearings, while the person who walks off can still claim to have done little or nothing at all. In a couple, that form of violence is especially hard to name because it happens inside a relationship where trust is supposed to offer protection in the first place. A courtroom at the end of the ridge The Austrian case does not just force a closer look at one more tragedy. It forces a different understanding of what experience means in the mountains. The judge did not say that every accident involving two people should end in criminal court. He said that a difference in competence is not neutral once it shapes decisions, pace, and the other person’s ability to keep themselves safe. That is where the case matters beyond its dramatic facts. In the mountains, experience is not just a personal quality. Once a partner relies on it for guidance, reassurance, or simply forward movement, it becomes a responsibility. That does not turn every uneven partnership into a legal matter. But it does make it harder to pretend that “pace” is just a personality trait, or that the stronger partner’s competence never carries any obligation toward the more vulnerable one. And that is exactly where gender comes back to the center of the story. In many of these accounts, the stronger person is not just stronger. He is also more socially authorized to think of himself that way, to trust his own judgment, to impose his reading of the situation, to decide that the other person is overreacting. The mountains intensify that permission. Cold, terrain, fatigue, speed, timing—all of it gives an already established hierarchy the power to go all the way to abandonment. What the numbers do not capture The available data still matters, and it is worth being careful with it. A study of hiking accidents in the Austrian Alps between 2015 and 2021 found that men accounted for 80.8 percent of fatal victims, while nonfatal accidents involved more women. Those numbers are obviously not enough to make “alpine divorce” a statistical category of its own. What they do show is that the term’s recent rise does not come from some newly discovered data point. It comes from stories that expose a relational blind spot that broad accident statistics are not very good at capturing. Forums do not replace studies or court records, but they do bring back the scene before the tragedy—or far away from tragedy. They show the moment when someone realizes, too late, that the “we just have different paces” line they had heard for months was not really describing the situation. It was putting them in their place. That is why the term hits a nerve. The mountains do not create these power dynamics from scratch. They strip them down, speed them up, and sometimes make them impossible to ignore. That may be why “alpine divorce” has landed so hard. The term is imperfect, but at least it makes one thing visible: the outdoors are not somehow outside society. Trails, ridgelines, approaches, and long descents do not magically wash social power dynamics away. They carry them with them. And when one person walks ahead and treats their own stride as the only measure of the world, that is not just a story about cardio. It is also a story about power.

People love to say a bouldering session “gives your brain a hit.” It sounds sharp, but it doesn’t really capture what we know. A climbing gym doesn’t pump out pleasure on an assembly line. What it does is combine clear goals, instant feedback, well-calibrated uncertainty, visible progress, and almost nonstop social reinforcement. It’s less a euphoria factory than a remarkably efficient setup for making you want to come back. (cc) Photo by Stacie Ong / Unsplash Over the course of an evening at the gym, the process can feel almost ordinary. A move doesn’t go, so you try again. It kind of goes, so you try again. A foot finally lands in the right spot, a coordination sequence that had felt impossible suddenly makes sense, and the whole problem changes shape. What looked out of reach 10 minutes earlier is suddenly “almost there.” Indoor climbing has a very specific way of creating these micro-events that make you want to fire off another attempt right away. That’s usually when dopamine enters the conversation, as a catchall for whatever grabs us, motivates us, stimulates us, or rewards us. The problem is not that the term is completely wrong. The problem is that it flattens several different realities into one image: a brain getting its little dose of pleasure with every try. Research on reward, motivation, and learning tells a more nuanced story—and honestly, a more interesting one. If the gym has such a strong pull on our desire to climb, it’s not because it’s some magic fountain of euphoria. It’s because, in a lot of ways, it works like a very well-designed learning machine. Wanting Isn’t Liking The first thing to do is clear up a misunderstanding that has become almost automatic. Dopamine is not simply the “pleasure molecule.” The sources used here, from Inserm to the Brain Institute, point instead to its role in motivation, anticipation, reward , and, above all, in how the brain learns that an action is worth repeating. In other words, it matters less as a happiness gauge than as fuel for forward motion. Sometimes the gym is appealing less because it makes you feel blissed out than because it keeps you keyed in That distinction matters if you want to understand what happens in the gym. One of the strongest frameworks for thinking about climbing comes from Wolfram Schultz’s work on reward prediction error . When the outcome is better than expected, the signal is not the same as when it matches expectations—or falls short. That is not some abstract lab detail with no relevance to climbers. It is exactly what happens in a session when you expect to peel off—fall unexpectedly—on the first move, then wind up getting shut down on the last one. The gap between what you expected and what you got becomes a driver in its own right. “Liking” and “wanting” in the brain and in addiction. © Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson Another distinction is just as useful here: the difference between liking and wanting. Kent Berridge’s work stresses that dopamine is tied more closely to wanting—to the pull toward something—than to the simple pleasure of having it . That helps explain something anyone who climbs indoors has probably felt. You can be dying to get back on a problem, watch a video of the move, or come back the next day, without experiencing every attempt as some euphoric high. Sometimes the gym is appealing less because it makes you feel blissed out than because it keeps you keyed in. The Power of Almost Without looking like much, a bouldering wall brings together several ingredients that research on reward and motivation makes easy to recognize: a clear goal, immediate feedback, low cost per attempt, lots of repeat tries, and progress broken down into micro-wins. Hanging onto a crimp—a small edge hold—figuring out where your hips need to be, unlocking the crux, the hardest move or sequence, finally finishing what had been shutting you down: it all counts. The mechanism partly resembles what we know from gambling: uncertainty, repetition, and above all the force of the near miss The gym adds another layer on top of that: a very specific kind of uncertainty. You do not know whether the next attempt will be the one, but you know it could be. That middle zone—the zone of almost—is probably one of its greatest powers. The last move where your foot skates, the beta—the sequence—that suddenly clicks, the problem that felt totally closed off and then opens up after one tiny adjustment: all of that feeds the urge to go again. Not because the gym delivers some huge reward every time, but because it makes the reward feel believable, close, and just out of reach. In that respect, the mechanism partly resembles what we know from gambling: uncertainty, repetition, and above all the force of the near miss. Obviously, the comparison has limits. A climbing gym is not a casino, and it is not a system built around engineered loss. But there is a structural similarity in the way a suspended outcome—close enough to feel real, repeatable enough to chase—can keep people coming back. The appeal of the gym does not come from one single pleasure circuit. It comes from a denser mix of motivation, tension, attention, and effort Frequent resets only intensify that dynamic. A gym does not offer a fixed object; it keeps circulating new puzzles. Every color, every volume, every coordination sequence, every setting style restarts an economy of attention and desire. And then there is the social dimension, which is never just background. Other people matter. So does watching them, being watched, hearing encouragement, hearing attempts dissected under someone’s breath, seeing clips shot on the fly. All of that adds value. Research on music and reward , along with studies on the social reward mechanisms tied to social media , suggests that the modern gym is not just a place for physical effort. It is a dense sensory, social, and symbolic environment. The Body Makes the Picture Messier If dopamine helps explain why the gym is attractive, it does not explain everything a session produces. Work by Vanessa D. Sherk, Artur Magiera, Nick Draper, and Dario Vrdoljak shows that climbing also engages other physiological dimensions tied to effort, stress, and the intensity of commitment . Biologically speaking, then, the gym is not some simple pleasure dispenser. Vanessa D. Sherk’s study of a continuous indoor climbing sequence reported an acute rise in testosterone and growth hormone , while Artur Magiera’s work shows that physiological stress also rises with difficulty, repetition, or competition . When a climber gets on a route without prior practice, other researchers had already identified changes in cortisol linked to anxiety and self-confidence. In other words, the appeal of the gym does not come from one single pleasure circuit. It comes from a denser mix of motivation, tension, attention, and effort. That is also why reducing the post-session feeling to dopamine alone would be misleading. A sense of well-being can involve other systems too, including those highlighted in Henning Boecker’s work on endogenous opioids and in studies reviewing post-exercise endocannabinoids. Dopamine sheds light on part of the picture, but it does not sum up all of climbing’s chemistry. So yes, calling the climbing gym a dopamine machine is too much—if by that we mean a simple chemical pleasure dispenser. But the phrase starts to make sense again once you strip away the pop-neuroscience folklore. The gym works less like a source of euphoria than like a machine for engagement: one that makes effort feel desirable, progress easy to read, and the return trip hard to resist.

In the previous installment, we left the French Spider-Man at the top of his game, still nursing a deep need for recognition. Now we’re back in Paris, at the Salon de l’Escalade, where Alain Robert finally explains why he feels such a need to keep talking about his past—even if it gets on everyone’s nerves. The final chapter of our XXL series moves through rock, legacy, and Wall-E. A little scouting for an upcoming Instagram Live © Philippe Poulet A crowd has formed behind the temporary structures at Porte de Versailles. In the middle of the booths, Alain Robert is posing for a photo with Oriane Bertone, a four-time French champion and World Championship silver medalist in bouldering. From up there, the image looks like 40 years of climbing history staring back at us. While the old climber throws up rock-and-roll hand signs, the great hope of French climbing hides a laugh behind her hand. A kind word, a quick hug, and Bertone is gone, leaving Alain Robert surrounded by about 20 young fans who have shown up to get their fingerboards signed. Legacy Past 60, the French Spider-Man still seems wildly popular—even with people in the 18-to-25 crowd. Part of the reason is his closeness to the new generation of urban climbing. When Alain Robert ropes up to climb the Burj Khalifa with Alexis Landot, it’s not just to prove he can still hang. It’s also a way to reach the 1.5 million followers of the 23-year-old solo climber. The godfather of urban climbing also makes sure to appear alongside Leo Urban, the “French Tarzan,” another building climber with more than 2 million followers on Instagram and 300,000 on YouTube. Each of those appearances serves the same purpose: making sure his legend still lands with a young audience drawn to dangerous climbs and high-stakes suspense. Robert knows exactly what he’s doing. He runs his own social media and uses the same codes as the people who came after him: 30-second reels that open on slips, exposure, and titles like, “All of the sudden, I slipped and nearly fell… What the fuck.” The formula works. Alain Robert is now one of the very few climbers with more than a million Instagram followers, far ahead of current French stars like the Mawem brothers, Oriane Bertone, or Mejdi Schalck. “ He can’t sell his rock solos anymore. That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares ” Philippe Poulet But that constant digital presence comes at a cost. At times it feels scattered—at times just chaotic. Thrown into the social media machine, the French Spider-Man seems determined to latch onto anything that moves, spinning his web everywhere and nowhere at once. In interviews, Robert still complains. This time it’s about drones, which didn’t exist when he made his earliest ascents and which, in his view, can never do justice to those climbs when they’re compared with the videos of Alexis Landot or Leo Urban. Before long, he is back on one of his favorite themes: people won’t remember his real legacy—what he calls, in English, “my legacy.” That hunger for recognition is everywhere. It slips between questions and answers, fills every pause in the conversation, colors every digression. Online, it shows up in his Instagram Lives too. Alain Robert repeats his keywords and greatest hits like an alphabet lesson: Pol Pot, La Nuit du Lézard , first 5.13d (8b) free solo—free solo meaning climbing without a rope—and so on. For Philippe Poulet, editor in chief of Vertical , that media sprawl “builds hype.” “It feeds his notoriety. It’s also his business model,” the journalist says. “He needs to keep talking about himself so he can keep landing contracts.” So from Bali, Robert posts constantly. Since moving to the island with his second wife and fourth son, it’s not easy for the climber to live on fresh air and affection alone. And a small partnership with the local Sofitel is not exactly enough to fund a champagne lifestyle. “His ascents still bring in a little money, but far less than before,” Poulet says. “His main income now comes from speaking engagements.” Those talks can bring Robert between €10,000 and €12,000 from major companies that love pumping up their executives with adventure stories. Alain Robert et Alexis Landot au sommet du Burj Khalifa, la plus haute tour du monde © Coll Alexis Landot “I’m not in control anymore. Stop.” To sell himself well, Alain Robert doesn’t really have a choice. Even if he doesn’t love it, the French Spider-Man nickname is what gives him most of his marketing power. The spider is everywhere: his official site, his YouTube channel, his Instagram account. “He can’t sell his rock solos anymore,” Philippe Poulet says. “That was 30 years ago. Nobody cares.” Even if he still works a few stories about climbing on real rock into his masterclasses, Robert always ends up back at the buildings. “That speaks to people more,” says his brother Thierry. “Buildings are the city. They’re the backdrop of everyday life. And Spider-Man sticks in people’s heads a lot more than route grades do.” That also explains why the harder Robert tries to restore the prestige of his rock climbing, the more disconnect he creates. “At the same time, Alain doesn’t really do much anymore besides communicating,” says Laurent Belluard, his biographer. “He has to fill the void, because he’s never going to do anything major on rock again.” “ My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red ” Alain Robert For his 60th birthday, the iguana still tried one more media move: a comeback in the Verdon Gorge, where he hoped to get some footage and show the world he could still make people dizzy on real stone, barefoot and wearing snakeskin. It did not go as planned. Philippe Poulet was there. “He realized he was completely out of his depth,” Poulet says flatly. “He started on a 5.10c/d (6a+) and struggled like crazy. He was maxed out the whole time.” Robert was onsighting it—trying to lead it on his first go, with no prior beta—250 meters above the ground. A friend who had come to take photos got rattled too. “When he wanted to launch into a free solo, I yelled at him and threw him a rope. Honestly, he showed up from Bali with no prep, thinking he could just do the Verdon cold. But come on, man—you’ve gotten older.” The cameras from the TV show Riding Zone , invited for the event, were rolling too. They captured an Alain Robert feeling his way through the climb and admitting on camera that he wasn’t the climber he used to be. “I’m completely out of my depth,” he says in one of the documentary’s most moving moments . Then he ends with: “I’m not in control anymore. Stop.” Three years later, Robert says the episode shook him a little. But looking back, he doesn’t regret any of it. Climbing at his limit has always been one of his rules for living. “My strength has always been climbing right on my limit. Back then I was a Ferrari in the red. Now I’m a diesel hatchback in the red,” he likes to say. And behind the wheel of that little car, Alain Robert has no intention of stopping. In 2023, he decided he would climb the Total tower at La Défense every year until the French government’s official retirement age—64, maybe 67. Last time around, he brought along what many consider the best sport climber in the world, Sébastien Bouin. A fun day, with a few slips mixed in. First mud on the climbing shoes. Then a full-blown controversy, as members of the climbing community criticized both men for appearing on the tower of one of the world’s biggest polluting companies. Alain Robert free soloing in the Verdon, at age 60 © Philippe Poulet The Last Flower on Earth That is part of the Robert enigma too. Beneath the rambling and the verbal floods, it’s hard to know where the citizen ends and the character begins. At times, Robert has used his ascents to support political causes—at the Cheung Kong Center in China in 2019, for example, when he unfurled a banner backing peace protests between Hong Kong and Beijing. Ten years earlier, in London, he climbed to warn about global warming. Then, just as quickly, he gets on a first-class flight to go speak at private banks. In a recent profile published by the American magazine The Summit Journal , he is even portrayed as a conspiracy-minded figure who questions whether humans really landed on the moon. “That’s bullshit from the journalist,” Robert says, brushing it off. Part of that image also comes from his public, repeated comments on the war in Ukraine. His analysis often challenges the dominant line in mainstream media, which can easily feed the narrative of “Alain the reptilian outsider versus the deep state.” To defend himself, he points to the work of well-known American academics like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer—people he can quote and discuss for hours. “ Alain is Wall-E ” Laurent Jacob Just like his reckless soloing, his positions, his persona, and his projects will probably always carry some element of controversy. It seems stuck to his skin. Maybe those are the marks left by a man who has spent most of his life trying to get his revenge. “In my view, it goes much deeper than that,” says Laurent Jacob, who appears with his friend in a strange documentary about the keys to self-healing. “What matters most with Alain now isn’t what he is. It’s what he represents: a permanent middle finger. He’s been true to himself his whole life by telling us, ‘I’m small, I’m physically messed up, I’m broken all over, and screw you.’” For the former engine of French free climbing, now a doctor, Robert may not even grasp the scale—immense, in Jacob’s view—of the message he carries. But what message, exactly? “Alain is warning us,” Jacob says, slipping into a more poetic mode. “He’s warning us that we’re at a tipping point, and we need to wake up if we don’t want to end up like the frog slowly boiling in a pot. He makes me think of that little robot who falls in love with the last flower on Earth in a world turned into a dump. Alain is Wall-E.” For now, though, Robert says he sees his art as a way to contest “a society that is increasingly sanitized, protected, and obsessed with security.” In interview after interview, the daredevil urges people to “live their dreams instead of dreaming their lives.” He is convinced that his own battered story proves one thing above all else: it is possible to be “the master of your own destiny.” “A CIA study [sic] showed that 80% of people in the United States didn’t like their jobs,” he says. “I decided pretty early on that I was going to choose what I wanted to do with my life. And I’ve always stayed free.” The facts of Alain Robert’s life can be read as one long series of escapes from control: first from the rope, then from the climbing world, and finally from society itself. That leaves his obsession with controlling his “legacy.” But after four hours of conversation, the French Spider-Man finally seems a little more at peace. “I don’t want to come off as bitter,” he says. “A lot of people dragged my name through the mud, but since then Alex Honnold and a few journalists have given me back my legitimacy.” So what revenge is left to take? Ever since little Alain Robert decided to free solo the apartment building where he lived, he has known shame and redemption, coma and rehab, disgrace and glory, prison cells and the Élysée Palace, Valence and Bali. At the end of the meal, the two Robert brothers return to an old idea: fixing up a barn in La Palud-sur-Verdon and spending happy days there as a family. But not yet. There is a biopic still to shoot—scheduled for 2027—and besides, it would be madness. “I’m good in Bali. There’s no temptation there,” Alain Robert says. “If I moved to the Verdon, I’d go free solo every day, and that wouldn’t be reasonable anymore. I could die there. And the ultimate goal—the one that matters more than all the others—is to stay alive.”

In the previous installment , a battered man — the survivor of two horrific accidents — proved he had an extraordinary ability to claw his way back. Stronger than ever, the climber from Valence was now about to stun his peers by rising to the very top of the climbing world. He didn’t know it yet, but the French Spider-Man was already starting to shed one skin for another, turning from rock climber into high-rise lizard. And into a legend. © Philippe Poulet Collection In 1991, Laurent Belluard walked into the offices of Vertical  for the first time. Founded in Grenoble in the early 1980s, the magazine had become the leading climbing publication of its era in France. As Belluard was getting his start at the paper, he had already heard of Alain Robert. He knew enough to understand that what Robert was doing was remarkable. So when the climber from Valence dropped by to see whether a journalist-photographer might want to join him on a new project, Belluard didn’t need much convincing. Alain vs. Goliath “We drove down to Buoux in his car,” Belluard recalls over the phone. “I still remember getting to the tollbooth. When it was time to pay, he poured the coins into his palm and struggled so much that half of them fell on the ground.” The damage left by Robert’s disabilities set the tone right away. Because the project was insane: he wanted to free solo — climb without a rope — La Nuit du Lézard . An improbable line established by Jean-Baptiste Tribout in 1986. It starts with a bulge, then rolls into a slab so slick it might as well have been graphene: 5.13c (8a+), wildly insecure. Pretty much the definition of a route you do not free solo. “When we got near the route, we saw a couple on it,” Belluard says. “A blond German guy, sculpted like a statue, climbing the route while his gorgeous girlfriend belayed him. As soon as we got there, Alain said, ‘Laurent, tell him to pull his rope. We can’t waste time — the sun’s about to swing around.’” In the heat, the friction would drop. “When the German saw Alain show up, all twisted up and bouncing around like a broken toy, he looked at him like he was some bum off the street. Alain did one rehearsal lap, then launched on the route and climbed it beautifully. He struggled a little at the top, but he finished it. I looked down at the German. I’ve never seen anybody so crushed. He probably quit climbing that same day.” “I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope” Laurent Belluard Behind the camera, Belluard never saw that Robert slipped twice off tiny dish holds and nearly died. It didn’t matter. The ascent was done, and one of the boldest free solos in climbing history had just gone down. That year, Robert would put up eleven major free solos, including the world’s first two 5.13d (8b) free solos. He was at the absolute peak of his soloing career. He may have had the strongest head in the world, and plenty of people still struggle to explain it. “I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope,” Belluard says now. For Laurent Jacob, the explanation almost enters spiritual territory: “Those accidents only strengthened his goals and his determination, to the point of making him an absolute champion. It was his destiny. He fulfilled the plan that was already in the seed.” Philippe Poulet, another Vertical  journalist, has a more grounded take: “Alain simply trained more than everybody else and developed physical and mental abilities that were beyond those of his contemporaries.” At the time, though, there wasn’t much debate. Alain Robert got filed under crazy . When other climbers heard he had soloed La Nuit du Lézard , the climber from the Drôme still looked to them like a reckless maniac in a damaged body. “What he was doing was incredibly random,” says David Chambre. “It was right at the edge of what’s reasonable. He does La Nuit , and then two years later he does it again on Pour une poignée de Chamallow  (5.13c/d, 8a/b). To me, that was his high point for commitment. It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds.” Nobody took risks like he did. Even thirty years later, the biggest names in the discipline still bow to that level of boldness. Starting with Alex Honnold, who said in a 2023 interview: “Personally, I always try to leave a margin, to be several grades below my max with a rope, and I want to stay in that comfort zone. Alain was soloing 8b at a time when the max with a rope was 9a, and with very little margin. So he was really at the cutting edge of the sport, right at the limit of human potential at the time.” Alain Robert’s Main Rock Free Solos Buoux Courage fuyons  — 5.12a (7a+), 1990 La Chèvre et le chou  — 5.12d (7c), 1990 Rêve de papillon  — 5.13b (8a), 1990 Cauchemar de l’éléphant  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 La Nuit du Lézard  — 5.13c (8a+), 1991 La Nuit du cauchemar  — 5.13c (8a+), 1991 Cornas L’Abominable Homme des doigts  — 5.12b/c (7b+) Boukouni  — 5.12d (7c), 1987 Au théâtre ce soir  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 L’Abominafreux  — 5.13b (8a), 1990 Pour une poignée de Chamallows  — 5.13c/d (8a/b), 1993 Triptyque  — 5.13d (8b) Verdon L’Ange en décomposition  — 5.11d (7a) Pol Pot  — 5.13a (7c+), 1996 Crac boum hue  — 5.13b (8a), 1991 “I Think I Really Am Crazy, Actually” Watch him ask a waitress for another glass of Champagne with the eager look of a kid, and it’s hard to picture Alain Robert going head-to-head with gravity at its worst. And yet around the table in Paris, everyone says the same thing: they’ve lost count of the scares this 110-pound man has given them on cliffs. For Claude, a friend of forty years, one of those moments came on Pol Pot  in 1996, with Robert’s wife and three children there at the cliff. “I wanted that 5.13a in the Verdon to be my farewell to extreme climbing, and Claude was photographing me,” Robert says. “I was 1,000 feet off the deck and got stuck at the crux because my reach came up short. After what felt like an eternity of hesitation, I pushed off the tip of my shoe to hit the saving hold — but honestly, it was like flipping a coin. I stuck the move, and right away I said to him, ‘Claude, I think I really am crazy, actually.’” Robert stopped counting long ago the number of times he could have flown off. He calls them “white moments,” those instants when even memory sometimes drops out: “You remember the before and the after, but in between, time stops. It turns transparent.” At 63, those mystical seconds have become the beads of a life philosophy he has never betrayed since childhood, when he first read a line from his idol, the Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner: “The greater the fear, the greater the joy.” Coupé-décalé © Philippe Poulet Collection “It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds” David Chambre In the early 1990s, when he first appeared on the TF1 evening news, Alain Robert hesitated between presenting himself as a responsible adult and leaning into the image of a madman. In the end, he did both. One minute he stressed that he was a family man. The next, he was posing for photos suspended above sharpened knives. The character was already mutating. After La Nuit du Lézard , Robert ditched the harlequin Lycra for a reptile look. He started imagining himself as an iguana, plastered to the rock in snake-print clothes that made him look a little like Crocodile Dundee. David Chambre sees a different pop-culture reference: “He reminded me of Gainsbarre .” It fits. Like Serge Gainsbourg’s darker alter ego, Robert seemed intent on giving birth to his own evil twin. Robert, the Rascal “My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.” Up on the top floor of his Paris hotel, Alain Robert is once again sitting in front of a full glass. The fizz of the Champagne mixes with a real trace of bitterness when he is asked to look back on his relationship with the climbing world in the early 1990s. And yet by the end of 1991, he had earned a small measure of revenge. Thanks to a film aired on TF1, Passion vitale , which documented his La Nuit du Lézard  ascent, Patrick Edlinger chose to present him with the Prix de la Performance Sportive . It was a kind of coronation, especially given the contrast between Edlinger — golden-boy angel of French climbing — and Robert, the outsider. “Patrick gave me back my legitimacy because he knew I’d done something important,” Robert says. “He knew because he never managed to do La Nuit du Lézard  with a rope.” Swirling his glass, he wants to make one thing clear: “I always got along well with Patrick, with Berhault, Tribout, and the others. The people who didn’t like me were the mediocre climbers.” Recognition from the best wasn’t enough. Unloved and increasingly sidelined by a sport that was becoming more standardized, Alain Robert kept carrying the image of a wounded, unwanted oddball. So when, in 1994, a watch brand offered to pay him to climb a skyscraper in Chicago, he didn’t hesitate. Even if it meant breaking for good with the climbing scene. “That was the moment competition climbing was starting to emerge and really organize itself,” Belluard says. “In France, the fashionable climbers were François Legrand and Didier Raboutou. On rock, it was all about the race to 9a, to 5.14d. Once again, Alain was completely out of step with the times.” For Belluard, it wasn’t even that the community rejected Robert. It was worse than that: it didn’t care. “What he was doing was looked down on. For them, building climbing was just beside the point.” And yet. By crossing the Atlantic to satisfy watch companies and insurance firms, Alain Robert would change his life. In almost no time at all, the former Bado Sport salesman became a globally known superhero whose ascents were sometimes watched by hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the base of the towers. The public, at last, connected with this lizard-skinned character who seemed as free as he was untouchable. They gave him a name — The French Spider-Man  — and the media turned that name into a legend. They loved the climbs as much as the arrests, since every one of those ascents was illegal. After climbing 250 structures around the world, the French Spider-Man also holds the record for the man who has seen the inside of the most different prisons. The stories sound almost made up: one-arm push-up contests with inmates on Staten Island; the king of Malaysia having him moved from his cell to the royal palace for dinner. Most of all, the “buildings,” as Robert likes to call them, finally gave him a real way to make a living. All driven by commercial deals, those ascents could sometimes earn him as much as €250,000. Spider-Man was having the time of his life, treating his family as he hauled them all over the world, and making a name for himself — a much bigger one than François Legrand’s or Didier Raboutou’s. Alain Robert on the Sears Tower in Chicago (443 meters) © Coll Philippe Poulet “My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.” Alain Robert For David Chambre, though, Alain Robert didn’t exactly invent building climbing. “I think I even did my first building ascent before he did,” Chambre says. “Jean-Claude Droyer had already climbed the Montparnasse Tower, and Laurent Jacob had already done the Eiffel Tower.” But for the climbing historian, Robert had a stroke of genius: “He invented a sport. Where the rest of us thought, ‘That’s kind of cool,’ he fully embraced the whole universe around it. That was his real masterstroke.” And for the purists, Chambre insists Robert wasn’t just doing it for the cameras. Some of those tower ascents were genuine feats. “Just like on rock, 90 percent of what he did has never been repeated. If you take the Sears Tower in Chicago or the Framatome Tower in La Défense — now the Areva Tower — I’d bet nobody’s ever going to put hands on those again.” Chambre even urged Robert to come up with his own grading scale for buildings. The result was predictable: Alain Robert had climbed the hardest towers in the world. At 64, that is now what the French Spider-Man is trying to defend. He understands perfectly well that he probably won’t succeed in rehabilitating his rock career. So he is trying instead to make people understand that his building climbs were not just media stunts. Some people do get it. Alexis Landot, France’s leading young name in urban climbing, considers what Alain Robert did “real feats.” At the climbing expo where the two shared a roundtable, the 23-year-old kept praising his elder. The next day, though, in the middle of an interview, Robert just shrugged. Landot’s praise seemed to slide off his alligator suit like water off scales. So is the Spider-Man frustrated? “Oh no — I really don’t want to come off like some frustrated guy,” he says, jumping at the word the moment it’s left hanging. “My recognition? I went out and got it. And I got it.” How? And from whom? With Alain Robert, as always, the only way to find out is to go everywhere except by the standard route. To be continued in the next and final installment…

Last time , we left Alain Robert in free fall. When he hit the ground, he lost 45% of his blood. He survived—somehow—and then started the long, stubborn climb back to elite-level climbing. Against every sensible prediction. La main de vieux... © Coll. Alain Robert “It happened on a Wednesday,” Thierry Robert says. “I remember because it’s the day the parents aren’t home. I was with my sister when the police knocked. They told us he’d had a serious accident and they’d flown him by helicopter to Grenoble.” Forty years later, Thierry still can’t tell it without emotion: “We had to wait for our parents to get back before we understood he was in a coma—between life and death.” At first, the details are blurry. But once the family reaches the hospital, the picture sharpens fast: Alain has bled out 45% of his total blood volume. The staff at Grenoble’s university hospital (the CHU) has basically never seen anything like it. He’s transfused nonstop for six days. Then, at some point in the night, he wakes up. Another miracle. The Mummy Returns “What saved my life,” Alain Robert says, “were my elbows. They acted like shock absorbers.” He fell headfirst, but he managed to throw his hands out in front of him. After a 65-foot fall, his hands hit the limestone and essentially detonated—wrists and forearms with them. “We call it a bone crush,” he says. “My bones broke into a hundred pieces.” After he wakes up, surgeons spend weeks operating. “They put pins in his forearms—the kind they usually put in the femur of a motorcycle crash victim,” his younger brother explains. Back at the hospital in Valence, he’s treated by a hand specialist, Gérard Hoel. Hoel looks at what’s in front of him and comes to two conclusions: one, he’s never seen hands this destroyed; two, this patient will never climb again. “He told me my wrists were like scrambled eggs,” Alain says. “And that I could forget about climbing.” On paper, for a 20-year-old with a fractured knee, foot, pelvis, and forearms that look like they went through a blender, he’s “lucky.” Alain Robert ou Philippe Candeloro ? © Coll Philippe Poulet After two months in the hospital, Alain goes home. He can’t turn a faucet. He can’t twist a key in a lock. “I felt like I had two crystal flutes instead of hands,” he says, stroking his forearms. “Like if I bumped them on anything, they’d just snap.” Over lunch, he shows his wrists. The left still carries faint marks. The right sits at an angle that would make a radiologist wince. It’s hard to picture that, forty years earlier, Alain Robert decided he was going to rebuild his upper body on his own—openly defying the limits of conventional medicine. “It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head” Alain Robert “I started by filling pots with water and carrying them, one by one,” he says. “Once I could lift all four sizes, I started hanging from my hands—first on a stair railing, then doing pull-ups.” One pull-up. Then two. Then three. “I went with baby steps,” he says. “Every day, my goal was just a little higher than the day before.” To prove to himself it was real, he sets a target: traversing the wall of the MJC in Valence, the community center down the street. He crimps his fingers on the mortar seams between bricks and moves sideways. Every day, he falls. Every day, he tries again. Two years later, he finally traverses the whole thing—about 330 feet. “That wall saved my life as a climber,” he says now. “It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head.” Unbreakable. Because when he comes out the other side, Alain Robert is stronger than he’s ever been. Alain Robert sur le mur de la MJC de Valence © Coll Alain Robert “Do You Recognize Me? It’s Alain Robert.” Gérard Hoel also climbs—casually. One day, he’s fighting his way up something in the French 5th grade range (think roughly 5.8-ish in Yosemite grades) when he sees a shadow move past him. A guy in the next line just eats up the overhang—steep, roofy climbing—like it’s nothing. At the top, the man introduces himself, wearing blue tights: “Do you recognize me? It’s Alain Robert.” “He smiled and told me I’d really worked hard to prove him wrong,” Alain says, still amused. Hoel was wrong. But Alain thinks his case fascinated the doctor—because it cracked open a world Hoel didn’t know existed. A lot of other people can’t believe it either. Like the day in 1984 when, after rehab, a Social Security medical examiner comes to calculate Alain Robert’s disability rating. The verdict: 66% disability. (For context, a paraplegic is around 70%.) Following Alain Robert’s “baby steps” means walking through his philosophy. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he says in interview after interview, like it’s a New Year’s toast you can’t stop repeating. Still, his case stays strange. It starts to gather a kind of mystique. Two years after his coma, Alain Robert is back at his top level. He can do 700 pull-ups an hour. He’s on rock every day. And he picks up right where he left off: a route called L’Abominable homme des doigts —“The Abominable Finger Man,” nicknamed “L’Abo.” Before the accident, he’d failed on it every time. Now, at 22, he finishes it in a few weeks. It’s graded 7b+, roughly 5.12c/d—at a moment when the climbing world has only just broken into the 5.13 range. His comeback starts inside a life that looks almost normal. He gets a job at Bado Sport, a shop in downtown Valence, working the climbing-and-mountain department. On his lunch break, he heads to the nearby cliffs and inhales hard routes. “In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites” Laurent Belluard He keeps that ritual through the second half of the 1980s. One obsession among others: L’Abo. He opens variations. He bans himself from using certain holds. And eventually he promises himself he’ll climb it as a free solo—no rope, no gear, no margin for error. He does it in 1986. From then on, the guy running the department spends his lunch breaks grinding on that chunk of rock without a rope the way other people go play squash. As he gets more confident, the free-soloist stays almost totally unknown. He signs up for the Vaulx-en-Vélin World Cup event in 1986, but his injuries keep him just outside the final. His hopes of doing anything in competition climbing die right there. So there’s the solo. But Alain Robert isn’t alone anymore… Edlinger vs. The Abominable Finger Man In 1982, climbing enters French living rooms through a mid-length film, La vie au bout des doigts  ( Life at the Tips of Your Fingers ). You watch Patrick Edlinger free solo on his Mediterranean cliffs. When Jean-Pierre Janssens’ film airs on Antenne 2, it hits like a bomb. For the first time, climbing in its “purest” form—free soloing—is embodied by a climber presented as chemically pure, too. Handsome, loose, weightless, Edlinger becomes a star. He’s on the cover of Paris Match . That same year, Alain Robert is flat on his back in a hospital bed, watching the train go by. Behind the Edlinger locomotive come Patrick Berhault, Catherine Destivelle, Isabelle Patissier… In the south, there’s also a crew of young climbers who settle in Buoux for half the year. Stage name: the “Parisian gang.” Laurent Jacob, Jean-Baptiste Tribout, Marc and Antoine Le Menestrel—they open routes, harder and harder. David Chambre is part of the group, too. “The first time we heard about Alain, he was basically a curiosity,” Chambre says. “We’d heard about his accidents and a few of his solos, but honestly, we had a hard time believing it.” Starting in 1985, Robert comes to Buoux once in a while. But when he runs into them at the base of routes, he often heads off alone to climb on the west face—abandoned, out of the way. “He didn’t have a place back then,” Chambre continues. “He wasn’t part of the movement pushing free climbing upward, and competition wasn’t really an option because of his disabilities. He chose a solitary life, doing his thing in his corner.” Philippe Poulet, editor-in-chief of Vertical , says the same thing: “He slipped through that era. That’s why he’ll carry this image his whole life—this little troublemaker trying to sneak in through the back door.” Alain Robert wasn’t there at the right moment. And now he simply isn’t where he “should” be. “He’s at Crussol, at Entrechaux, in the Drôme… super hard cliffs, but not the stuff that’s fashionable,” adds Laurent Belluard. For Belluard, it’s also about aesthetics. “In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites.” So much so that you could almost cast him as the anti-hero. Alain Robert can pull on fluorescent, harlequin tights and grind himself into the most extreme routes on his home crag in Cornas—the decade still forgets him. Edlinger keeps shining. Catherine Destivelle stacks world titles. Alain climbs in the shadows, alone. Or under the worried eyes of his wife and two kids. By 1990, the soloist is a family man. And to break the spell of his invisibility, he’s about to throw himself into the boldest solos of his career. Also the most reckless. A slice of the climbing world starts to buzz about what he’s doing, but Alain Robert still looks, to most people, like a sporting-goods store employee who climbs pitches on his lunch break. Until 1991, when he’s going to change scale entirely. To be continued…

As France’s private climbing-gym market struggles, the independent gym network The Roof looks like it’s found another way forward. Built on a cooperative structure and a mutual-aid network that’s unusual in France, these gyms aim for shared governance, capped pay gaps, and deep local roots. This is a look inside a model that’s holding up—somewhere between hard-nosed financial discipline and what its builders call a “sincere utopia.” The Roof team in Toulouse © Julien Petitpierre The scene has become a modern cliché. Stand in the right spot and you can take in the whole mural commercial climbing gyms have learned to paint: stylish twenty-somethings sipping beer in the warm glow of a trendy bar. Only in the back—behind big glass walls—do you finally spot the panels of steep terrain studded with bright holds. Like plenty of others, The Roof’s gym in Toulouse checks the boxes of what people now call a “third place” (a hangout that’s not home or work). People drift through the big entry hall with the body language of regulars. Lots of them won’t climb. They’re here for what the place is —and, sure, for the craft beer and the small plates too. A Good SCOP The Roof Toulouse opened in 2023 inside Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, a former factory turned cultural hub in western Toulouse. Since its makeover, the place has become an institution in the Pink City, drawing more than two million visitors a year. You pass the gym’s terrace—palm trees and all—before stepping into the vast nave that holds the city’s biggest food court, plus a performance venue, coworking spaces, and even squash courts. Planted right in the middle of it all, The Roof feeds off the buzz. On this winter weekend, the gym is even hosting an eco-focused festival with Les Halles, called “Faire écologie,” bringing together nonprofits, activists, and public figures for two days of discussions. That’s probably why Pierre-Olivier Dupuy—co-founder and co-manager of the climbing gym—looks even more slammed than usual. Between scanning people in at the door, pouring pints, and getting ready for classes, he’s also greeting the next panelist and making sure the conference room is set. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong. We didn’t want to become a standard company” Pierre-Olivier Dupuy, co-manager of The Roof Toulouse Somewhere in the middle of his thousand daily tasks, Dupuy sits down to talk about the model behind his gym. He’s 44, and he’s celebrating the start of The Roof Toulouse’s third year in business. He rubs his scalp, glances around, then smiles. “See this festival?” he says. “This is exactly what we wanted here—bringing a bunch of different people together around shared values. For me, that’s what The Roof is. Not just a climbing gym, but a place that actually means something.” A former academic researcher, Dupuy has been nursing the dream of making a living from climbing since 2015. Back then, he was climbing in a club with his friend Aurélien Guesdon, who would become his first business partner. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong,” he says over an espresso. “We didn’t want to become a standard company. At the same time, we didn’t want to stay a nonprofit either, stuck depending on time slots and public subsidies.” The “third way” they landed on was France’s Entreprise Sociale et Solidaire  (social and solidarity economy). That’s where they found the legal structure that, in their eyes, checked every box: a SCOP—a Société Coopérative Participative , essentially a French worker cooperative. It took Dupuy and Guesdon seven years before they could finally open the doors. Linked to the massive redevelopment project at Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, The Roof Toulouse depended on a complex project package, bank negotiations, and plenty of administrative headaches. But since opening in 2023, it’s done fairly well: €1.6 million in revenue, up 14% from 2024 to 2025. That number looks even more striking next to figures recently shared by L’Observatoire de l’escalade , which reports an average 5% decline in revenue for private climbing gyms in France. Today, Dupuy’s company employs 22 people—eight of them are also member-owners. That, he says, is what he’s proudest of. “We decide together,” he says. “That was one of our guiding principles from the start.” Like a conventional company, a SCOP has a general assembly where members vote on big decisions: strategy, investments, pay, leadership appointments, and more. The difference is that in a cooperative, one person equals one vote. “Decision-making is disconnected from capital,” Dupuy says. “Aurélien and I each put €30,000 into the company. Our vote still carries the same weight as someone else’s who put in three times less.” Under the Same Roof The Roof Toulouse’s SCOP bylaws give employees three years to decide whether they want to buy into the cooperative. So far, most of the first wave of staff have said yes, and two more people are expected to join this year. For Dupuy, it’s “a real lever to get involved in strategic decisions instead of just executing.” It’s also how the model’s other pillars take shape: pay gaps capped at 1-to-3 (editor’s note: in conventional companies, the average is closer to 1-to-7), and a required minimum share of profits that must be reinvested in the company—at least 15%. “Most of the value created has to be put back toward the people who actually work here,” Dupuy says. Those choices help explain why The Roof says it sees very little turnover—despite running a gym with 750 square meters (about 8,100 square feet) of climbable surface, plus a yoga and Pilates studio, a restaurant, and a bar. Les deux co-fondateurs de The Roof Toulouse, Pierre-Olivier Dupuy à gauche et Aurélien Guesdon à droite © Julien Petitpierre Still, a SCOP doesn’t protect you from everything. The broader economy hits everyone the same way, and in 2025 it has landed hard on climbing gyms. “We might have good revenue, but we’re barely breaking even,” Dupuy says. With 2,500 members, The Roof Toulouse’s attendance hasn’t dipped. But everything around it keeps rising: food, energy, holds, cleaning—while customers’ purchasing power slides the other way. It’s a tough equation, and it demands strict management if you want to avoid what just happened next door: Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, despite growing popularity, has been placed into court-ordered reorganization. To better ride out headwinds, The Roof Toulouse is also part of a larger network: The Roof France, itself organized as a cooperative—more specifically a SCIC  ( Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif , a French “collective interest” cooperative). The network now includes nine gyms across France: Bayonne, Brest, Poitiers, Rennes, Le Havre, Saint-Brieuc, Albi, Bourg-de-Péage—and Toulouse. “Each gym is completely independent—free and autonomous in its decisions and choices,” Dupuy says. “At a minimum, we share a name—The Roof—a visual identity, and a collective commitment to help each other.” Every Thursday morning, the managers across the network meet in a “co-dir” (a co-leadership meeting) to compare notes. “For a lot of us, it’s our first time building a business,” Dupuy says. “So we all feel the need to share our thinking—our doubts, our challenges, and what’s working.” When Dupuy and Guesdon first heard about The Roof network at the start of their own journey—more than ten years ago—it didn’t take long to buy in. “We’d just gone all-in on the social and solidarity economy, and the people there already shared those values,” Dupuy recalls. “Everyone was trying to build an alternative to the excesses of the standard economic model.” In other words: a whole crew of committed builders—led, at the beginning, by a trailblazer who didn’t exactly plan on becoming the face of a national network. UCPA, Mont Blanc, and Isabelle Autissier The story starts not far from Toulouse, in Durfort-Lacapelette, in 2012. Benoît Lacroix, then a specialized educator at Fondation d’Auteuil, didn’t know it yet, but he was about to fall hard for something besides climbing: the city of La Rochelle. On a weekend trip with his then-partner, the two became so taken with the “Ocean Gate” that they started hunting for local crags to climb. Problem: Charente-Maritime is famously short on real relief. So on the train back to Montauban, they scribbled a wild idea on a scrap of paper: build their own climbing gym. “It was sincere and kind of utopian,” Lacroix tells me over the phone. “We were kids—maybe 23 or 24—but we had a sense of the values we wanted in the project. We wrote that our goal wasn’t to extract value at all costs, but to make sure the value flows back to the people who make the place run. But once you say that, you still have to choose a structure—and we had no idea how.” So they did what most people do when they need help: they called friends. With a small crew in Montauban, they took over a former boat dealership building and built the gym the old-fashioned way—by sheer effort. Along the way, they crossed paths with people from the world of ecology and cooperation, including the sailor Isabelle Autissier. They convinced elected officials and local stakeholders, and soon The Roof La Rochelle opened its doors—in December 2013. The gym took off quickly—and it drew the attention of other local project leaders, first in Bayonne, then in Brest. “That’s when I started thinking the model could be shared,” Lacroix says. “I wrote this document called ‘Recipe for Making a The Roof’ and started supporting other entrepreneurs. And I realized I’d developed a real passion for putting projects together.” The expanded team of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle during El Capp Fest in 2023 © courtesy of Benoît Lacroix Lacroix, it turns out, collects passions. The former Montauban resident also got hooked on solo offshore sailing. “That’s actually what pushed the first Roof gyms toward the Atlantic coast,” he says, laughing. “At the start, I thought it’d be cool to visit them by boat!” He never did, but that sailing obsession led to a meeting that would reshape The Roof network. “I was training for a Mini-Transat and looking for sponsors,” he says. “I’d met the guy who was going to become CEO of UCPA during a climb on Mont Blanc, so I knocked on his door. He told me, ‘Your Mini-Transat doesn’t interest me, but your climbing thing does—I want us in.’” That’s how UCPA—the large French nonprofit known for outdoor sports centers—entered the The Roof France project. And it changed a lot. “They first put equity into the network structure, which indirectly helped finance the creation of The Roof in Brest,” Lacroix explains. “Then we benefitted from their financial backbone, legal support, and expertise.” The First Cracks Years later, UCPA is still there. The organization even holds the presidency of The Roof France within the SCIC. And every Thursday morning, it’s Ludovic Marchant—head of sports activities and events development—who runs those co-leadership meetings for The Roof managers. “We stay humble and at a distance,” Marchant insists. “The cooperative is really run by the gyms. We do have signing authority as president, sure, but the gyms remain the majority.” Marchant calls himself “an administrative link.” But his inbox is where the first membership requests land. He’s also the one who calls the group together when a local project looks promising. Candidates then go through an onboarding path: they present their project to the network and get challenged on it. “We’re not thirsty for growth. We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne By his own account, that structure reassures people. “We’re a big organization, and bankers like seeing that we’re there when it’s time to put together a financing package,” he says. Dupuy agrees. “Without UCPA, we probably wouldn’t have as much room to maneuver,” he says. “Even if, again, you still have to know how to stand on your own.” UCPA was drawn in by the agility and social-economy values The Roof network carried. But it also saw a growing market. Looking back, Lacroix puts it plainly: “I think there was an idea of using the engineering we’d developed with our projects to get a foot in the door. Was that fully clear to them at the time? I don’t know. What I do know is that later on, I was asked a lot to help them think through their own UCPA Sport Nation model.” During a contest at The Roof Bayonne in November 2025 © William Desse Today, across France, UCPA has built five indoor-sports centers, and each one includes a climbing wall. If UCPA gives the network a stronger backbone, it also helps it push through turbulence. In 2016, after UCPA joined The Roof France, things sped up. Toulouse started to emerge. Rennes came knocking. “But those were projects on a totally different scale,” Lacroix says. “Two gyms tied to massive redevelopment programs—Les Halles de la Cartoucherie in Toulouse, and Hôtel-Dieu in Rennes.” Lacroix poured time into it—lots of time—and got pulled under. “Between that, my Mini-Transat project, and other stuff, I think I ended up projecting a kind of instability back onto Brest and Bayonne,” he says. The result: in 2018, Lacroix was voted out of the presidency. A year later, he and his former partner removed their La Rochelle gym from the network. “It was one of the worst moments of my life—hell,” Lacroix says. “But that’s the game. They didn’t want me as president anymore. I knew the rules of democracy. That’s how it goes.” He has since launched another climbing-related project in La Rochelle called Les Cabanes Urbaines . After that rupture, UCPA took the helm and kept supporting the network’s growth in places like Albi, Saint-Brieuc, and Le Havre. From behind the bar noise in his Toulouse gym, Dupuy zooms out. “Like any human organization, being a cooperative doesn’t exempt us from a lot of issues—financial difficulty, management problems, burnout,” he says. He even points to a hard truth: “Overwork is a real issue in SCOPs. You see the same pattern of over-investment from some employees because the work feels meaningful. You throw yourself fully into projects you care about—and it can lead to mental overload and trouble unplugging.” Alone, With People All Around You Every The Roof gym founder says some version of the same thing: you have to learn to rebalance your life, and you often have to give something up. Dupuy says he’s lost friendships. Julien Muller, a director in the Vercors, learned what it means to work 90-hour weeks. In Le Havre, Antonin Salze learned to live on the SMIC—the French minimum wage. Even so, while financial results vary from gym to gym—The Roof Vercors saw a 20% revenue increase from 2024 to 2025, while The Roof Le Havre saw a 17% drop—every gym in the network is at least breaking even. “It’s very solid,” Marchant says. “Every Thursday, I’m surrounded by people who love climbing—but first and foremost, they’re business leaders.” Agile, sincere, and convinced their model can’t survive without a certain amount of hard rationality. “We’re not thirsty for growth,” says Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne. “We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” “We wanted to do social good, so we had to be social all the way through,” adds Muller, whose Vercors gym runs sport-and-health programs and works with local associations to broaden access to climbing. In Le Havre, Salze and his team welcome groups of patients in remission from long illnesses or addiction, as well as children with disabilities. Most of all, none of them say they would have opened their gym without first getting a green light from the nearby clubs and associations. “Those groups became our ambassadors—bringing in more climbers,” Salze says. “That’s the heart of The Roof,” Dupuy says. “These are projects rooted locally. UCPA, the network, the other gyms—they help. But what matters most is what you manage to do with your own local ecosystem.” “In the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Benoît Lacroix, founder of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle For more than a decade now, the independent gyms in The Roof network have been carrying a different model than the big commercial chains. With no outside investors and no promise of double-digit growth, they even seem to be holding up better than their competitors now that the market has flattened out. Dupuy, though, won’t declare victory. “Is our model more resilient?” he says. “Only the future will tell.” Back at the beginning of this cooperative horizon, Lacroix never imagined that an idea scribbled on a train would grow this big. Today, with Les Cabanes Urbaines , he’s careful too. Still, when he looks in the rearview mirror at SCOPs, SCICs, the PACTE law, and the rise of “mission-driven companies,” he allows himself one breath of relief: “Clearly, this isn’t a year where we’ll be handing out bonuses or big raises,” he says. “But in the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Lacroix quotes his business partner, Serge Papin—former president of the Système U cooperative and current Minister for SMEs, Commerce, Crafts, Tourism, and Purchasing Power: “Purpose creates the reason for being, which creates the reason to come.” Proof the model attracts interest: UCPA’s development director says he has counted around a hundred inquiries in his inbox over the last three years. In the summer of 2026, the network is set to welcome its tenth independent gym—in Cherbourg.

We treat chalk like a given in climbing: you slap some on, you stick. But friction isn’t a belief system—it’s a messy equation with a bunch of variables. Depending on humidity (in the air and in your fingers), the condition of your skin, and the texture of the rock, chalk can boost friction… or quietly make it worse. This piece follows the trail of studies that don’t agree with each other and turns the mechanics into simple, usable takeaways: when chalk helps, when it sabotages you, and why “more” can end up meaning “less.” © David Pillet The chalk bag has become a comfort object. You dip a hand into it like you’re reaching back for certainty—especially when you can feel the crux coming. The problem is that between living skin and uneven rock, certainty is a terrible measuring tool. If you stick to everyday experience, the story sounds straightforward: chalk “dries” sweat, so of course it improves grip. But the research literature tells a less tidy story. One lab study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in the early 2000s actually found a drop in friction with chalk. The authors offered a simple explanation: too much powder can form a gritty layer that shears and slides, and drying your skin too much can stiffen it so it doesn’t mold to tiny features as well. A few years later, another study in Sports Biomechanics measured a clear friction gain on a hangboard. More recently, work by researchers at the University of Sheffield adds the missing piece: the effect depends heavily on both rock type and humidity—to the point that, on certain minerals, chalk can be counterproductive. So the question isn’t “Is chalk useful?” It’s “Under what conditions, on what rock, with what kind of skin, and how much chalk?” That’s the thread we’re going to follow: understand friction, and get back to a practice based on reading conditions—not reflex, not faith, but diagnosis. Grip Doesn’t Have a Moral Compass In climbing, friction isn’t a character trait. It’s not a reward handed out to the deserving or a punishment for everyone else. It’s resistance to sliding between two surfaces—contact, materials, forces. Researchers often boil it down to a number—the coefficient of friction—which feels comforting, like you could end all arguments with enough decimals. Except climbing is basically the art of what refuses to stay constant. That coefficient shifts with how hard you pull, how quickly you load a hold, the direction of force, the presence of dust, temperature, and microscopic wear. Most of all, it changes with what you can’t see but that decides everything: an invisible film of water, a barely-there deposit, a surface polished slick by repetition—or, on the flip side, “woken up” by brushing. And then there’s the most underestimated variable: your skin. A fingertip pad isn’t a stable industrial material. It’s living tissue—hydrated, compressible, swelling and stiffening, wearing down and rebuilding, constantly trading moisture with the air. Talking about friction in climbing means talking about an encounter between an organism and a mineral—not a standardized contact between two clean, identical plates. Humidity, the Fake Villain This is where humidity stops being “bad conditions” and starts acting like a double agent. Most climbers know the confusing part: a little bit of moisture can feel grippy, while perfect dryness can turn a decent hold into soap. That only seems like a paradox if you assume the goal is to be bone-dry all the time. Skin that’s too dry loses its ability to deform. It doesn’t mold into micro-textures as well, doesn’t “print” fine features, doesn’t anchor the same way. But add too much water and the physics flips. Past a certain point, moisture doesn’t help contact—it creates a thin interface layer that behaves like lubricant. Your skin isn’t working against the rock anymore; it’s working against a film. Grip gets twitchy. What felt like sticking turns into slipping faster, and the sense of control can vanish all at once. Chalk operates inside that fragile window—not as a talisman, but as a tuning tool. It pulls some water out, stabilizes the interface, and makes the feel more predictable. And that’s exactly why it’s not a universal law: if the air is heavy, if sweat comes right back, if your skin has already stiffened, or if the hold needs really direct contact with the texture, chalk can push the dial too far. It stops correcting an excess and starts changing the nature of the contact. Three Studies, Three Stories, One Reality The science around chalk is interesting because it reads like an investigation: serious results that don’t match, and a truth hiding in the conditions. In 2001, a lab study in the Journal of Sports Sciences— “Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth?” —landed on a conclusion that clashes with intuition: chalk lowered the coefficient of friction. The setup was tightly controlled, measuring fingertip sliding on a flattened rock sample. In that context, the authors proposed two mechanisms that make sense: drying stiffens skin and reduces how well it conforms to texture, and the powder can form a granular layer that sits between skin and rock and shears under load. © « Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth? » In 2012, the scene changes and the movement gets closer to real climbing. Eleven experienced climbers hung from a hangboard-style device while the angle increased until they slipped. This time, chalk clearly improved grip, with measured gains on limestone and sandstone—and with a takeaway that matches what people feel on rock: not all stone offers the same friction, even with the same skin. © The effect of chalk on the finger–hold friction coefficient in rock climbing Then a more recent piece of work arrives and feels like a relief because it finally accepts complexity instead of hiding it: the effect depends on humidity and, crucially, on the rock itself. When you test multiple stones—with different roughness levels—under “dry” and “humid” conditions, you see what many climbers have long suspected: on some textures, especially certain very “bitey” limestones, chalk can become counterproductive. Not because white powder is magically “bad,” but because it changes an interface that, in that specific case, needed more direct contact. The “Third Body,” or How You Get in Your Own Way The most useful concept here is simple: the “third body.” We tend to imagine a straight relationship between skin and rock, but the second chalk shows up, a third element inserts itself. That third body can do what you want—absorb moisture, stabilize, even things out—but it can also turn the contact into something else: a thin film that fills in useful micro-features, a layer that shears, a material that slips precisely because it’s made of particles. © The effectiveness of chalk as a friction modifier for finger pad contact with rocks of varying roughness This is where the most stubborn myth collapses: “The more you use, the better it sticks.” As long as the layer stays thin, chalk works like a small adjustment. When it gets thick, it stops “drying” and starts replacing direct contact. And in a sport where success can come down to tiny texture, swapping rock-on-skin contact for a dusty, gritty layer can make a move suddenly feel inexplicable. At that point, chalk becomes a very clean way to sabotage yourself: something meant to reassure you ends up changing the mechanics at the worst moment. It also explains a familiar pattern: the hold that gets “worse” try after try. That isn’t always the climber falling apart. Sometimes it’s the interface loading up. Your skin heats up, moisture returns, powder accumulates, deposits shift around, the surface subtly changes. It’s easy to mistake that mechanical slide for a confidence problem when it’s really material saturation—a hold that needs to be brushed. Less Reflex, More Reading The takeaway isn’t a moral verdict (“chalk: yes” or “chalk: no”). It’s a way of reading the situation. The real question isn’t “Does chalk actually work?” It’s: Under what conditions, on what rock, with what skin state, and at what dose does it genuinely improve grip? That reframing does something immediately useful: it turns a cultural reflex into an adjustable tool. Seen that way, chalk goes back to what it should have always been: a minimal intervention on a fragile interface. A thin layer can stabilize things and bring you back into a “useful” humidity zone. A thick layer can insert a slippery third body. Skin that’s too dry can lose its ability to conform; skin that’s too wet can start lubricating. And the same action—chalking up again—can produce opposite results depending on the hold, the air, and the skin you showed up with that day. There’s something kind of satisfying in the conclusion, honestly: climbing isn’t just a strength sport. It’s a conditions sport. Chalk isn’t a miracle. It’s a dial.

Self-taught photographer, purebred city climber, and a perpetually “in-transition” lawyer, Hugo Perez has made a habit of turning climbing’s failures into something worth staring at. Chaos is his latest photo project: a close-up, personal notebook where skin splits, bodies hit the ground, and poetry shows up—happily—right in the mess. © Hugo Perez Climbing is usually sold as an airy dance between holds. Perez is clearly more into the sketchier version: the one where you hesitate, slip, swear, and end up with wrecked fingers and an ego in pieces. With Chaos, this 29-year-old Parisian puts his finger on what’s most moving about climbing: how it can leave you exposed. And honestly, it’s beautiful. The good mess of failure Fifteen years grinding away on the plastic in Paris gyms will sharpen your eye like a razor-thin crimp. Perez came up with that first wave of gym-raised urban climbers. “I was climbing almost every day around Antrebloc,” he tells us, with the easy calm of someone who wore out resin holds before it was cool. Pretty quickly, like a lot of people on that track, he got pulled toward the “sacred forest”: Fontainebleau—the bouldering mecca where you learn to fall hard as often as you learn to move well. No federation certificate, no formal coaching. Perez owns that DIY split without making a big deal of it. “I didn’t turn it into a job, and I wasn’t really trying to,” he says—more interested in working a flash than clipping carabiners. A photo book—without the polish The project started with a public photography class offered by the City of Paris. The assignment: make a photo book. Perez didn’t take long to decide. It would be climbing—but the rebellious version. “I was tired of the overly polished Fontainebleau shots. Sometimes it feels like you’re going in circles,” he says flatly. Instead of chasing perfect movement and squeaky-clean boulders, he points his flash at what usually gets edited out: the repeated failures, the bleeding fingertips, the tight smiles after the tenth fall. “Most of the time, we show the final photo—the nice move, done perfectly. But failure? We don’t really show that,” he explains. And yet, he insists, “they’re still good moments.” Someone had to say it. © Hugo Perez Blur as a choice: when the photographer loses his footing With an unapologetic mix of blur and flash, Perez isn’t trying to gently unsettle you—he wants to knock you off-balance. Where classic climbing photos turn bodies into graceful shapes floating in clean air, Chaos draws different lines: the line of the fall, the uncontrolled skid, the openly owned wipeout. “It was about breaking the lines, creating new ones—especially the lines of the fall,” he says. The approach calls to mind American photographer Chad Moore, known for leaning into blur, raw grain, and the kind of rough-edged poetry that comes straight from real life. Perez builds a joyful choreography where bodies stall out, wobble, and slam down without shame—an ode to gravity, literally and otherwise. A geological—and existential—poetry With the title Chaos, Perez isn’t just going for a provocative vibe. He’s also slipping in a small geology lesson. In the Fontainebleau area, “chaos” can refer to a natural, jumbled pile of boulders—common in places like the Apremont gorges. It’s a fitting image for the way bouldering can feel: a joyful mess. But Perez, committed to the idea, pushes it further. His “chaos” turns metaphorical, even existential: the stubborn, absurd fight of a climber against a piece of rock that refuses to be “conquered.” In a single flash, a plain old fall starts to look almost philosophical. © Hugo Perez What’s next: cliffs—and women in the frame Chaos is already a strong first chapter, but Perez wants more. He’s quick to name what’s missing—“There aren’t any women, for example”—and he wants to widen the project toward outdoor cliffs. Friends even gave him a rope specifically so he can spend hours hanging in space, shooting from the wall. The long-term goal: turn Chaos into a more ambitious book, open to more kinds of climbers, able to speak to a broader audience. In the meantime, he hopes to exhibit the photos in Paris gyms—bringing a little poetry into these modern temples where, too often, only success gets the spotlight. With Chaos, Hugo Perez isn’t just showing the “behind the scenes” of climbing. He celebrates it—with real, giddy swagger. By fully embracing imperfection, he reminds us that climbing, like life, is often a story of beautiful failures and modest wins. With Perez, the chaos starts to look downright appealing. You almost find yourself wanting to fall more often. To view Chaos online, it’s right here.

Muscle fatigue isn’t just that heavy, useless feeling in your arms—it’s a whole neurochemical show run by your central nervous system. Between warning signals and built-in protective brakes, your body is way smarter about effort than we give it credit for. Ready for a delightfully brainy dive into what’s really happening behind the scenes when your forearms are blowing up? Let’s go. We all know that climber: the veteran who casually cruises 5.11d (7a) while practically whistling, then hits you with that half-patronizing, half-dad-voice line: “Don’t worry—climbing’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget.” An infuriating thing to hear, especially after three forced months off thanks to a wrecked ankle. But what if, behind that smug little smile, they’re right? Because while your brain is busy holding onto your credit card PIN and the name of the neighbor you’ve “totally met before,” your body is quietly logging every foot placement, every hip shift, every tiny controlled wobble you saved at the last second. Yes—your body remembers how to climb. And the bad news is, it probably remembers better than you do. Are your muscles smarter than you? Quick spoiler so nobody spirals: your biceps don’t think. Your quads have never had an identity crisis. And no, your forearms are not secretly storing your favorite playlists. What people casually call “muscle memory” is really your nervous system doing its job. When you drill the same movement over and over—methodically, stubbornly, sometimes obsessively—control starts shifting away from the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain doing the anxious, conscious thinking) and toward more efficient systems, including the cerebellum, which helps run smooth, precise movement. The result: you suddenly move in a clean, fluid sequence almost without thinking. Your brain is working in the background. Your body executes. And you’re just there, in the middle, looking talented without being totally sure how you pulled it off. In other words: you climb better than your conscious brain ever gave you credit for. It’s kind of flattering. The brain remodel: when your head gets hooked Every time you repeat the same climbing move, you’re not just pumping your forearms until they feel like overfilled balloons—you’re literally reshaping your brain. That’s not poetic. That’s neuroscience. One study (Di Paola, 2013) found that expert climbers can show an enlarged cerebellum, likely tied to the constant demand for ultra-precise coordination. Translation: the more you climb, the more your brain adapts—sometimes in ways that are objectively fun to bring up at a party if you feel like impressing or boring people. But there’s a catch. Your brain will learn anything you feed it, including bad habits. If you consistently botch a move, you’re teaching that error with the same seriousness as the correct version. Tend to ignore your footwork the second you get stressed? Do that enough, and you’re building it into your default settings. Moral: learn it clean early, or you’ll spend the rest of your climbing life trying to unlearn the thing you accidentally mastered. And here’s the wilder part: your muscles have their own kind of long-term advantage. When you train hard—sets, reps, the whole grind until you’re flirting with that nasty burn—your muscle fibers add extra nuclei. And the evolutionary joke is that those nuclei tend to stick around even after long breaks (thank you, Netflix, delivery apps, and extended couch seasons). A study (Bruusgaard, 2010) showed these added nuclei can persist for months, even years, during inactivity. So when you come back after your “little break” and start climbing again, your strength rebuilds faster than you expect. You think you’re starting from scratch. Your body disagrees. It remembers what it used to be. And suddenly you’re back to form after three sessions—while pretending to be surprised, just to stay humble in front of your friends. Nice little perk, right? Basic instinct Once your movement patterns get automated, you hit the climber’s holy grail: you move on instinct. According to research by Zampagni (2011) , experienced climbers are much better at distributing their weight across all four limbs. Beginners, stuck overthinking everything, often default to hauling with their arms—then wonder why they’re cooked after two moves. The other upside is more subtle: your conscious brain gets freed up from the low-level technical stuff. It can focus on what actually matters—reading the next hold, managing that quiet fear of falling, or, if you’re that type, having a full philosophical moment mid-crux (the hardest part of the route). That’s the real win. When your movement is automatic, you can perform with an ease that feels almost unfair to your climbing partners. And if you’re convinced you’ve “lost everything” after a six-month break? Not quite. Motor memory is stubborn—borderline obsessive. A precisely learned movement can reportedly be reproduced up to eight years after the last time you did it. Eight years. No practice, no reminders, and your feet still know where they’re supposed to go, like some eerie ghost of old beta (the sequence) coming back online. Sure, your raw strength and endurance will take a hit. But your technique tends to return faster than you think. And if we’re being honest, you’ll enjoy it—the quiet, slightly smug pleasure of realizing you still have it. Not because you’re special. Just because your nervous system is doing its job. Three ways to train your brain like you train your body Your body hands you a pretty solid neurological superpower: muscle memory that’s reliable and a little cocky. It would be a shame not to use it. Here are three research-backed tips (that are actually easy to apply) to turn that memory into better climbing. 1) Mix it up (including the stuff that shuts you down) Your brain hates boredom. So don’t feed it the same movement pattern forever. Switch styles constantly: delicate slab, steep overhang, boulders that feel personal, long endurance routes that never end. The more variety you give your nervous system, the richer your movement library gets. Over time, your body becomes a living encyclopedia of climbing options—ready to adapt with an annoying amount of ease. 2) Visualize moves (yes, from the couch) This one is for the fans of “productive procrastination.” Simply imagining a climbing movement in detail activates many of the same brain regions as actually doing it ( Filgueiras, 2018 ). Scientists call it “motor imagery.” You can call it “training without putting on pants.” It’s a legit way to reinforce technique on rainy days, or when your gym is swarmed by an overexcited school group. 3) Sleep like it’s part of your training plan According to Fogel (2017) , the real consolidation of technical skills doesn’t happen standing around after your session or while sipping a protein smoothie. It happens during sleep. Practical translation: sleeping well after training helps lock those movement patterns into motor memory. Thinking about pulling an all-nighter before a session? You might as well try climbing barefoot on broken glass. Your call. The dark side of muscle memory As powerful as muscle memory is, it has a sneaky downside: it can trap you in a very specific comfort zone. If you climb the same style, the same angles, the same types of routes over and over, your body becomes that coworker who orders the exact same lunch every day. Predictable. Repetitive. Not great when something unexpected shows up. The risk is becoming a vertical robot—perfectly smooth on familiar sequences, completely lost the second the route forces a new solution. So build the opposite habit, too: disrupt your patterns on purpose. Seek unfamiliar movement. Put yourself in situations that don’t fit your usual strengths. Keep your motor memory flexible, not locked into one narrow script. Otherwise you’ll spend your entire climbing life playing the same tune—about as spontaneous as an elevator stuck between floors. Your best ally: you After this brainy (slightly irreverent, but scientifically grounded) trip, here’s the takeaway that’s both comforting and mildly unsettling: your body remembers your favorite foot placements better than you remember the name of your last climbing partner. Muscle memory, paired with the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself. Put those two together and you get the climber’s real superpower: moving better, moving smoother, moving without overthinking every micro-decision. Your brain adapts. Your body stores the pattern. You end up with a built-in motor intelligence that’s always quietly running. So next time someone tells you climbing is just about strong arms and brute force, smile—just a little—and say, calmly: “Sorry. Climbing is mostly about a brain that knows how to talk to your muscles. And mine’s wired up just fine.”

“So what do you do?” You’ve probably noticed that this question—almost automatic everywhere else—rarely makes it through the door of a climbing gym or out to the base of a crag. Nobody leans over between burns on a route and asks about your job title. Nobody sizes you up by your résumé before offering beta (route advice on how to do a sequence). Why is that? Maybe it’s because climbing creates the conditions for something the French sociologist Bernard Lahire calls the “plural actor.” Let’s unpack that—and look at what climbing does to our sense of who we are. (cc) Sean Benesh / Unsplash The 9-to-5 Identity Trap It’s almost funny when you think about it. Leaning against the fridge at a party, stuck between strangers at dinner, chatting with the neighbors—no one ever asks if you climb 5.11 (roughly French 6c/7a). No one asks if you’re a solid cook or a killer chess player. But in most social settings, one question dominates: “So what do you do?” Modern Western societies are fixated on what happens between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. That question shapes introductions, small talk, even first impressions. It flattens people fast. And yet, those same societies are deeply differentiated. On any given day, most of us move through a handful of social worlds: family, work, friends, sports, volunteer groups. We should be identity chameleons, shaped by all those environments. Instead, we’re pushed to present as one thing. A job. A degree. A background. A single, tidy version of ourselves. Lahire has spent much of his career breaking down that illusion. In The Plural Actor, he argues that we are made up of multiple “repertoires of action”—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting shaped by different social contexts. Each context leaves a mark. Those layers don’t cancel each other out; they stack. We are plural by construction. But socially, that plurality gets compressed into one dominant identity—usually professional. Lahire describes a tension between what we are (multiple, layered) and what society expects (coherent, unified). That tension can hurt—especially for people who move between social classes and feel pulled in different directions. Pierre Bourdieu, two decades earlier, showed how sports themselves are distributed along class lines. Working-class sports emphasize contact, endurance, physical sacrifice—boxing, soccer, rugby. Upper-class sports lean toward control, technique, distance from impact—tennis, golf, swimming. Sports reflect and reproduce class dispositions. Climbing sits in a more complicated spot. Why Climbing Feels Different Climbing demands raw strength—holding tiny crimps, pulling through steep terrain—but it also rewards precision and movement quality. You don’t just muscle your way up; you solve sequences. You manage pump (forearm fatigue), read the crux (the hardest move), and refine beta. But what really sets climbing apart is social. Knowledge flows sideways, not top-down. You trade beta. You talk through foot placements. You break down a sequence together. The dynamic isn’t coach-to-athlete or opponent-to-opponent. It’s peer-to-peer. Lahire points out that context has the power to activate or inhibit parts of our past. In simple terms: different environments bring different parts of us online. At work, your professional habits kick in. With family, other patterns take over. In leisure spaces, different dispositions surface. Climbing—because of its structure—can temporarily quiet the identities that dominate elsewhere. They don’t disappear. But they stop being the main lens through which people see you. On the wall, your paycheck doesn’t matter. Your job title doesn’t matter. Your LinkedIn doesn’t matter. The wall calls up other parts of you. Bernard Lahire Taking the Fold Every regular practice leaves traces in the body and mind. Climbing does too. The void—whether you’re 20 feet up in the gym or higher on a sport route—shifts from pure threat to something you learn to manage. Effort changes meaning. Failure stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like process. You fall, you lower, you try again. You project (work a route over multiple attempts) without shame. Belaying—managing the rope for your partner—creates a rare kind of trust. It’s literal interdependence. You’re tied in together. That’s not common in most modern relationships, which tend to be more transactional. Sharing beta builds a cooperative culture. You’re not hiding information to win. You’re helping someone else send (complete the route cleanly). Over time, you develop a physical vocabulary—a sharper sense of balance, body tension, timing. All of that becomes part of your repertoire. Saying “I’m a climber” doesn’t erase “I’m a teacher” or “I’m a parent.” Those identities stack. Lahire borrows the idea of a “fold”: each socialization creates a fold in us, layered over others without flattening them. We’re less like a solid block and more like laminated layers. That’s not abstract. It shows up in real life. A stressed-out manager might rediscover a slower sense of time while climbing—and carry some of that calm back to work. A manual laborer who experiences horizontal respect in a gym—where their beta counts as much as an engineer’s—may incorporate that into how they see themselves. Someone used to being marked first by their origin might find that, on the wall, what matters most is whether they stick the crux. These are transfers between contexts. Climbing adds flexibility to the system. The Limits None of this means climbing escapes social reproduction. Access costs money. Gym memberships, shoes, harnesses, travel. It also requires cultural familiarity—the idea that spending weekends chasing routes is normal. Social networks matter too; many people get into climbing through friends. The demographic data reflects that. In the U.S. and Europe, climbing skews urban, college-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class. The aesthetic codes—technical puffy jackets, Sprinter vans, outdoor slang—signal that background. So yes, climbing can soften dominant identities inside the space. But the door into that space is still filtered. That doesn’t contradict Lahire’s framework. It sharpens it. He distinguishes between contexts that reinforce our existing dispositions and those that create partial misalignment—spaces where different parts of us can emerge. For those with access, climbing can be that kind of space. Not a revolution. Not a total reset. But an interstice—a gap in which a secondary identity gets room to breathe. Conditions for Flourishing Lahire goes further and asks a political question: under what conditions can people actually express their internal plurality? The more social worlds you move through, the more varied your dispositions become. If you’re confined to a single world—by economic constraint, geography, or culture—your repertoire shrinks. Climbing can create what Lahire calls favorable conditions for the plural actor. It opens a context where you’re not reduced to your administrative or professional identity. You’re a body moving on stone. A mind solving problems. A partner in trust. But as long as access remains uneven, that function stays partial. Internal plurality isn’t total freedom. Lahire rejects that kind of romanticism. Your past, your upbringing, your resources—they still shape what’s possible. Climbing doesn’t magically free you from social structures. What it does offer is margin. Another fold. Another set of habits. Another way of being that can coexist with the rest. A Different Way of Being Seen Back at the fridge. At dinner. With the neighbors. That same narrowing question waits: “So what do you do?” Climbing doesn’t eliminate that pressure. But it shows, in miniature, what it feels like to step outside it. On the wall, you are not primarily your profession or your background. You are the sum of what’s activated in that moment: your strength, your balance, your problem-solving, your trust in the belayer, your willingness to fall and try again. For a pitch, a session, a season, another version of you gets airtime. That version doesn’t cancel the others. It folds in. It expands your range. And maybe that’s the quiet power of climbing—not that it erases identity, but that it multiplies it.

Legends sometimes start with almost nothing. Alain Robert’s begins with a forgotten set of keys. Everything that follows plays out between an apartment building in Valence, Zorro, Patrick Edlinger—and one brutal accident. Here’s episode two in the wild life of the man they’d later call Spider-Man. Alain Robert © Alain Robert Collection Alain has had a rotten day. In the courtyard, the older kids made his life miserable again—name-calling, mocking, getting smacked around at recess. He’s seven. He’s small, skinny, and doesn’t exactly project “don’t mess with me.” To top it off, he’s locked himself out. He’s standing in front of his apartment building in Valence. His parents aren’t home. It sucks. And it’s also the moment something in his head snaps into place. Without thinking twice, he starts climbing—three stories up to his balcony. He treats the facade like a jungle gym, pulls himself level with the balcony, slides the door open. Done. Little Robert “That day, something unlocked,” Alain Robert says, looking back fifty years later. “I was born a second time, with the feeling that I really could do things I’d always dreamed of doing.” Back then, he wanted to be Zorro, d’Artagnan, Robin Hood. The problem was, he was scared of everything. “I remember a car trip with my parents when we were going on vacation to Toulouse,” he says. “My dad decided to get off the highway and drive along the Gorges du Tarn. I curled up in the back seat. I was terrified of the exposure.” Then an ordinary winter weekend lit the first fuse. Alain, almost seven, finally earns the right to watch the Sunday night movie. In 1969, the TV airs La Neige en deuil (The Mountain), Edward Dmytryk’s film based on Henri Troyat’s novel. Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner are shown climbing Mont Blanc to rescue plane-crash victims. “That was the first spark,” Robert says. “I’d never seen mountains before, and something happened to me that night.” So it’s not really a surprise that a few months later, Alain does his first full solo—moving balcony to balcony on his own building. What is a coincidence: the building is named “Ailefroide,” after the famous Écrins massif in the French Alps. One thing is certain: after his first “climb,” the kid basically quits using the stairs. Watching from the front row, his little brother Thierry is both horrified and fascinated. “I remember we had a neighbor downstairs who worked as a projectionist,” Thierry says. “And the guy would watch my brother climbing and go, ‘What, the elevator’s broken?’ It cracked me up.” These are the years Alain takes his little brother under his wing—dragging him out to climb around the area, and also into plenty of dumb kid trouble. “For my parents, I was supposed to go to soccer,” Thierry says. “But Alain would take me into these situations… Believe me, sometimes I would’ve preferred practice.” By his own account, Thierry—now a filmmaker preparing a documentary series on his brother’s career—never saw Alain as insecure. “Honestly, it was the opposite. To me he was already a total daredevil. Seriously fearless.” Not far from downtown Valence sits Château de Crussol, a fortress perched on a rocky outcrop above the Rhône Valley. It becomes young Alain Robert’s first real playground—the place where the kid who used to be afraid of heights starts posting up 200 meters above the ground. The Roberts originally come from Saône-et-Loire. One of four kids, Alain doesn’t grow up with much. His mother stays home. His father leaves Digoin for Valence to take what Alain calls “a regular job in telecommunications.” At home, everything is quiet—too quiet. “After his heart attack, my dad spent the rest of his life doing needlepoint,” Alain says. “We didn’t go out. We didn’t do anything.” But once Alain starts climbing, he can’t sit still. So his parents send him to summer camp. There, he slips the counselors and goes off to climb five-meter boulders—naming them like they’re real routes: “The Rooster Rock,” “The Beige Glacier,” “The Finger of God.” Those are his first “ticks” (the little checkmarks climbers use to mark a route they’ve done), and eventually big brother starts backing off because the climbs are getting too hard. That’s when Alain meets someone who matters: Pierre Jamet, a fellow scooter kid. Together they tackle their first serious projects, tying in around the waist and heading for sketchy climbs around Valence. Little by little, they get better. The problem is, they have nobody to measure themselves against. “Back then, nobody around us climbed,” Robert says. Their bible is Gaston Rébuffat’s Glace, Neige et Roc. “We read a ton of mountain stories,” he says. “As teenagers, we knew all the legends and all the tricks—Rébuffat, but also Desmaison, Terray, Bonatti…” Alain Robert making his first ascents near his home in Valence. Bottom right: with his first climbing partner, Pierre Jamet. © Coll Alain Robert A Cliff-Dwelling Bum “I must’ve been 25 and he was 18,” says Laurent Jacob. “It was in Buoux and I was trying to put up a pretty intense route called La Volière. I was alone and needed someone to belay me. That’s when I ran into this kid. It’s funny—I remember a guy with a bit of a gut, not exactly athletic. But he helped me out, and I freed the route.” Jacob, in 1980, is the engine of French sport climbing—one of the pioneers of the era, and the guy credited with inventing the “Lolotte,” a knee-turning trick that buys you reach. When Alain Robert watches him on La Volière, he’s seeing something new: seventh-grade climbing—hard and beautiful. In modern terms, that’s roughly the 5.12 range (French 7s), and it’s Alain’s first close-up look at truly high-level climbing. It turns into an obsession. The teenager pushes beyond his local Drôme crags. He basically moves to Buoux in the Luberon, throwing himself into both the rock and the golden age of French free climbing. He crosses paths with “the two Patricks”—Patrick Berhault and Patrick Edlinger—and with Jean-Pierre Bouvier, known as “La Mouche.” He quickly realizes that if he wants to improve, he has to sleep there. “That’s when I gave up on my plans to become a guide,” Robert says, “and turned into a kind of cliff-dwelling bum.” With a small crew, they shoplift from grocery stores, sleep in barns. Every morning, they wake up in Buoux—the mecca of French free climbing—and run laps on seventh-grade routes, often solo. For them, it’s pure joy. “That’s really where I realized I might be among the best French climbers,” Robert says. “I was doing 7a, even 7b—while still being kind of chubby.” So he heads to Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, full of confidence. It’s February 1982. Bouvier has freed a 7c there the year before—around 5.12d/5.13a (French 7c). Alain wants to test himself on that slab climbing, but first he sets up a top-rope (a rope run from above, so you can work the moves safely) to study the sequence. And then he makes a beginner mistake that costs him. He runs the rope through cord slings instead of a carabiner. The rope saws through. The slings snap clean. Alain drops twenty meters. He lies on the ground unconscious for about thirty minutes before he’s taken care of. Hours later, at the hospital in Valence, it looks like a small miracle: a climber just took a huge fall and walks away with “only” a few fractures. He leaves on crutches. A month later, he’s back on rock—with both arms in casts. Smashed on the Ground “What you have to understand is, this was a childhood dream,” Robert says. “I fell, sure. But I was alive, and I wasn’t that bad off. There was no way I was quitting.” So Alain Robert shows up in Buis-les-Baronnies on crutches, hiking in on approaches where you basically need your hands. He puts on his harness and starts climbing 6b—around 5.10d—while his arms are still in plaster. “People at the base thought I was out of my mind,” he says. “And honestly, I get it. But that was a fundamental period in my life—when I knew I’d never give up on my dreams. When I realized that if you have a goal, you can do some crazy things.” It’s also when Alain Robert starts putting words to his view of climbing. Forty years later, it hasn’t changed. “For me, it has to stay dangerous,” he says. “In the ’80s, a guy like Christian Guyomard”—the inventor of “banzaï climbing”—“when he put up routes, he’d place the first bolt at ten meters, and he’d make sure that if you fell before the second, you’d slam into the ground. That’s anti-conformist. Anti-FFME”—the French climbing federation. “That’s completely my view: climbing is, first and foremost, an adventure.” Alain Robert © Alain Robert Collection Six months later, Alain Robert is chasing that “adventure” every day, back on his favorite crags—Buoux, the Verdon, Cornas. He’s twenty, hungry, ready to bite into rock with both teeth. He’s moved in with his wife, Nicole. But for one summer—1982—he becomes that “cliff bum” again and grinds day and night on a project at Cornas, L’Abominable homme des doigts—his cliff. Two months all-in. Two months getting shut down at the crux, a few meters from the top. Three tries a day, and he can’t do it. Then, at the end of September, while he’s finishing a training session at a nearby wall, he hears voices. It’s a group of beginners from Jeunesse et Sports, asking him to put up a rope by leading the route. He’s experienced. He reaches the top quickly—fifteen meters up. He does his rope setup, then starts to lean back to descend in an alpine rappel (a fast rappel style), trying not to scrape up his knees. He throws one last joke down to the kids. One last look at the little stream of La Goule. The rope goes tight. And then it blows. Immediately. Alain Robert falls backward, headfirst. And this time, when he hits, everything goes completely black. To be continued…

Scarpa offered to let us test the Drago XT with no strings attached. Forty-three sessions later, one thing is clear: this is a shoe built around precision. It takes some breaking in, and it raises the same old question every high-end climbing shoe does—where the balance really sits between comfort, durability, and performance. Scarpa Drago XT © Vertige Media Over the weeks, the Drago XT traced its own arc: early sessions marked by that familiar Scarpa “performance fit” squeeze, then a gradual shift into a shoe that rewards clean foot placements and efficient climbing. The soft rubber loses its edge faster, sure—but it gives you extra confidence in return. The heel won’t work for every foot shape, but the toe is unusually precise. The XT doesn’t reinvent anything. It just sharpens a lot. It doesn’t change how you climb—it makes things easier to read. For a shoe, that’s already a win. Vibram XS Grip 2: instant stick Scarpa puts Vibram XS Grip 2 on the Drago XT, a rubber most climbers know well. It’s soft and sensitive, and it conforms to whatever you’re standing on—slick gym volumes or tiny edges on a limestone slab. That softness is the whole point: the rubber deforms just enough to spread pressure and increase your contact patch. The tradeoff is obvious, and it shows up fast. The softer the rubber, the quicker it wears. After around forty sessions, abrasion started showing up at the big toe—right where the downturn concentrates pressure. Nothing surprising for XS Grip 2. It’s a deliberate compromise: you buy stickiness and feel, and you pay for it in millimeters of rubber. The heel: better, but not a perfect fit for everyone Scarpa reworked the Drago XT heel with a textured design and full-coverage rubber, aiming to address complaints about the original Drago. In practice, heel hooks feel easier to “set” (to really lock in), the hold is more solid, and hooking feels more reliable overall. But there’s no such thing as a universal heel. Depending on your foot shape, you may still notice some dead space—the classic “baggy heel” feeling—and it can seem like the back of your foot never fully seats. So: real improvement, not a one-size-fits-all fix. You’ll need a break-in period Scarpa’s reputation isn’t made up. Sliding into one of their performance shoes has never meant instant comfort. The first sessions remind you what that looks like: noticeable pressure in the forefoot, an arch held under tension, and the sense that the shoe sets the terms before it starts working with you. The Drago XT uses microsuede, a synthetic material that mimics suede. Unlike leather, it won’t stretch enough to “gain” half a size, but it does soften, pack down a bit, and eventually conform better. After two or three sessions, the initial stiffness eases, the pain fades, and the XT finds its groove: demanding but manageable, technical without feeling like a punishment. A downturn that steers your climbing The Drago XT’s downturn is built on Scarpa’s FZR last—one of their most aggressive shapes. It’s a tight profile designed to funnel power onto the front of the shoe. That lets you load the big toe efficiently and use tiny footholds that would feel sketchy in a flatter shoe. That setup takes some adjusting. If you’re coming from a more neutral shoe, you’ll need to relearn how you place your feet: more precision, more targeted pressure, and more attention if you want to avoid burning through rubber early. Once it clicks, the downturn turns into real leverage. It helps you stand on micro-features, stabilizes hooks, and gives you that “locked-in” feeling that changes how you commit to certain moves. A shoe built for precision, not power After 43 sessions, the Drago XT’s logic is consistent: it rewards accuracy more than brute force. The toe responds when you place it cleanly, the downturn channels pressure, and the rubber amplifies small adjustments. The whole design nudges you toward better footwork instead of letting you muscle through with your arms. It won’t magically level up your climbing overnight. But it does shape habits that last: placing your feet more deliberately, reading sequences with more detail, and accepting a simple truth—precision tires you out less than trying to overpower everything. The XT isn’t just a performance tool. At times it feels like a quiet coach: demanding, but fair. Conclusion The Drago XT isn’t a “for everyone” shoe. The soft rubber wears faster than a stiffer sole. The heel won’t fit every foot. And you do need a real break-in period. But if you stop there, you miss what it actually brings. Session after session, it starts to feel like a progression partner. A shoe that pushes you to climb with finesse instead of force, and that reminds you economy of movement usually beats brute effort. It’s demanding. It doesn’t stroke your ego. But it does make you more honest—and that might be the best thing a climbing shoe can do. Specs Model:  Scarpa Drago XT Upper:  Multi-panel microsuede (synthetic) Closure:  Dual Velcro straps Midsole:  1.0 mm Flexan, floating pad under the big toe Tension system:  PCB-Tension + SRT (M50 rubber) Outsole:  Vibram XS Grip 2, 3.5 mm (1/3 length) Heel:  IHC (3 mm rubber, textured) Downturn:  Aggressive (FZR last, asymmetric profile) Weight:  ~200 g (size 41 / EU; ±10 g depending on size) Sizes:  35–45 (half sizes) Made in:  Italy MSRP:  ≈ €150 (seen roughly €145–€180 depending on retailer) Best for:  Indoor/outdoor bouldering, hard sport routes, precision-focused climbing (not designed for big walls or long comfort sessions)