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This is Rebecca Lo or Rebecca Loa if you listen to suboptimal radio and you are listening to Men in Blazers on the NBC Sports Network.

It's unbelievable!

Recently, I've discussed on the pod one of my great-life regrets is so many, but one of them I don't spend more time in nature.

And it was around this time that my next guest, New Book, landed on my desk.

And what a remarkable gent he is. He's known widely as the best all-round rock climber in the world.

An adventurer, a defy of the odds, a liver of life, a man whose first formative infant memory is of holding up an amount in cave to where there is snowstorm, a gent who survives six days in captivity amidst the peaks of Kurgistan.

After being kidnapped by his plumbing militants, who then severed his finger off, yet persevered to become a giant in his sport and the first human being to free climb the eternally feared dawn wall on El Capitan in Yosemite, a 3000 feet granite face as smooth as porcelain, sounds a bit like Peter Crouch.

The face had long been considered to be impossible to climb, took him three attempts over seven years, but in 2015 over the course of two and a half, grueling weeks with the world following along via the media and social media, my guest lived on that dawn wall, inching up its unforgiving face, and slowly, brutally conquering it.

In the new book The Push, a climber's journey of endurance risk and going beyond limits tells the whole story.

I read it, I was fascinated by his outlook on life, his ability to suffer to endure torturous levels of pain in the single-minded pursuit of his life goals, and above all, his masterful understanding of the difference between risk and recklessness.

He's essentially the complete opposite of me, which is why I'm so glad to have him here in the studio with us. We welcome for Mestys Colorado, the legendary Mr. Tommy Coldwell.

Wow, I must admit I'm holding my head up a bit higher after that introduction.

Tommy, I've been so excited for you to come and have so many questions, and I think if this works, I'm going to leave this room as a better man.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that usually happens when people get in the same room with me. I think it's just a common thing.

No pressure, man. You're beginnings. You grew up in Colorado with a climber obsessed dad.

age six, you started to make all-day cliff face climbs. You were a small kid, painfully shy, an introvert, but you wrote, on the wall, I came alive.

This place changes me. Can you describe that transformation that you experienced as a kid when you were alone, thousands of feet up on this sheer face of a cliff?

Yeah, you know, my dad was kind of this earlier doctor of this like adventure parenting.

There he didn't call it that at the time per se, but it was really this idea that you could bring kids out in nature and scare the hell out of them, essentially, and that would help them build confidence.

And so he would like go out and big storms with me, and we'd sleep in snow caves. He said he'd change my diapers in snow caves.

And that did two things. For one, it was effective in terms of making me love adventure and be excited by this outdoor environment.

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