EP 275: Yuji Hirayama — Japanese Focus, Improving Every Day, and the Secret to Staying Young

The Nugget Climbing Podcast

Steven Dimmitt

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4.2 • 576 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2025

⏱️ 117 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Yuji Hirayama is a Japanese professional climber and a living legend. We talked about visualizing his onsight attempt on The Salathe, channeling support into power, Daniel Woods, Mount Kinabalu, Japanese vs. Western culture, quitting school to climb, owning climbing gyms, how to stay 9a fit in your 50s, the secret to staying young, and much more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends, and welcome to the Nugget Climbing Podcast. This is your host, Stephen Dimit.
0:07.1	And my guest today, I'm honored to have him here, is Yuji Hiriyama. Uji is a Japanese professional
0:13.2	climber and a living legend. He's a two-time overall lead World Cup winner, 1998, and the year 2000. He was also the first person to on-site a root-graded
0:25.0	French 8C or 514B ever in history with the root white zombie in Spain in 2004. He also had the
0:33.4	best on site effort on the Salafay on El Capitan for over 20 years. This was in 1997.
0:40.3	He got very, very close, fell only three times on the entire route, which is 35 pitches,
0:46.3	and possibly the longest free route on El Capitan. And that was 1997. Nobody had a better
0:51.8	on-site attempt on the Salafay wall until Adam Andra in 2018.
0:57.0	And we talked about that in this episode. It was fascinating to hear how he visualized for two
1:03.0	years for that attempt. I loved learning about that. He's held the speed record on the nose on L-Cap
1:09.4	multiple times. He's climbed V14 and 515A,
1:14.2	and he's still climbing super hard. UG is 56 years old and climbed his most recent 9A just three
1:21.3	years ago in 2022, which is amazing. He owns multiple climbing gyms in Japan and continues to pursue hard rock climbing,
1:29.4	and he's still traveling and pushing his limits. He just got back from a trip to Yosemite,
1:33.3	and it looks like he had an amazing time. This episode was a real treat for me. Yugi is one of
1:38.8	my favorite characters in climbing. I love how thoughtful he is and how introspective and insightful he is.
1:46.6	There's a bit of a language barrier in this episode, so bear that in mind, but I think there
1:51.0	were still many nuggets in this conversation. Please enjoy Yuji Hiriyama.
1:58.6	No one can do it like we do it, like we it like we do it like we do it like we do it like we do it.
2:10.6	Okay, I want to start us off by talking about a climbing film actually.
2:15.5	I love climbing films and now everything's shifted over to YouTube,
2:20.4	but I used to go into my garage almost every day and put on a climbing film and I had this
	...

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