Hi there. My name is Warren Hollinger and I like to think of myself as a fairly ordinary guy who has had the opportunity to do some pretty extraordinary things. I have never really been the fastest or the strongest or the most talented at anything I’ve done. But I’ve never let that get in the way of always striving to be just a little bit better than I was yesterday. I’m the father of 9-year-old twins (Kai and Daisy), the husband of an awesome and talented wife (Karen), and the son of a fun and eccentric mother (Sharon) and golf junky dad (Stephen). I’m the owner of the photography website building platform known as Redframe.com and love practically all things tech. My main passion is learning everything I can about human potential – in particular how it relates to how far you can push the human mind/body connection. I’m a big fan of being the guinea pig for my own experiments and I love using the latest tech to measure and quantify my results.
What likely brought you to this site are the things I’ve done in the past or the adventures I now do outside of my day job. In the past, I’ve made a living as a professional Big Wall climber traveling to some truly remote locations in the world to spend weeks living on vertical cliffs thousands of feet tall. I spent 39 days living on and climbing a 5000-foot face above a frozen fjord to establishing one of the hardest Big Wall climbs of all time. I’ve been burned and paralyzed by being struck by lightning near the summit of a climb. I’ve taken 40 to 80-foot falls and hit nothing but air. I’ve taken a 60-foot fall and broke my back in 6 places. This last one ended my climbing career and added a foot of hardware to my back. I ran a marathon 16 months after doctors thought I might never walk again. I taught myself programming and created a successful online business with nothing but 1s and 0s. In my 40s I decided to get into triathlon and have done an Ultraman, 9 Ironman and dozens of half-iron and Olympic distance events. Most recently at 54, I’ve got into what I call a mix of ultra-running and backcountry adventure running. I’m not so much interested in events as I am into finding really big runs that feel like an adventure. My goal this year (2019) is to run from the Sea to the Summit of all 5 of our volcanoes on the Big Island. Then it feels natural to chain them together into one very long run. Obviously underlying all of this is my need to understand how far I can push this aging body. But I’m not looking for my limit so much as I am trying to figure out how I can get stronger and faster as I age. If we all had an owners manual this would be a much easier task. So this site (Life in Training) is really just me sharing my experience with pushing that mind/body connection and figuring out how to write my own owners manual. And who knows; maybe there something here that works for you and/or you might just be inspired to make a positive change in your life. If so let me know. I’d love to hear your story.
The Longer Story
In the late 1980s while working as a stockbroker for Shearson Lehman Hutton I discovered rock climbing. I fell so hard for this sport that within 6 months I had quit my job, moved into a recently acquired Volkswagen Bus and basically lived to climb. By the early 1990s, I found my true passion in climbing: Big Walls. Now a Big Wall is typically any vertical cliff over 1,000 feet that often takes multiple days to climb. Living in Southern California I was lucky to live close to the Mecca of all Big Wall climbing – Yosemite Valley. And within this valley is the granddaddy of all Big Walls – El Capitan. It was on El Capitan that I found out what I am truly talented at – enduring immense discomfort to accomplish a goal. Don’t get me wrong, to be great at Big Wall climbing there are a lot of skills you need to acquire and a great deal of fear you need to learn to embrace and move through. But what you really need to be good at is suffering. And consequently, this talent allowed me an extremely fast learning curve. I could do route after route on El Capitan with hardly a break in between. I was obsessed with becoming an expert at living in a vertical environment and climbing the hardest lines possible. Soon I started training on frozen waterfalls and then mixed rock and ice with the idea if I could get good at this discipline there was no chunk of rock on the planet I could not climb. And of course, this progressed to finding the hardest, tallest and most remote Big Walls on the planet and trying to put new routes on them. By 1996 I was making a living full time as a profession Big Wall climber (though I preferred the moniker: professional adventurer). What it really meant was I needed to take photos, write articles and give slideshow tours across the country to actually make a living. And it was there that I found the actual value in my job – it was to become a professional storyteller. I honestly felt what I did had no real value to anyone else. It was just my own personal evolution within a sport I loved and purely a selfish endeavor. I was a Conquistador of the Useless. But when I would share with a captive audience my story of some epic climb, on some unfathomable wall, in some inhospitable location, I realized I was giving them a chance to vicariously experience an adventure they could hardly dream of let alone actually do. Then I thought back to all the authors and adventurers that had inadvertently encouraged me to go out and find my life’s passion. And ultimately maybe my career wasn’t quite as selfish as I thought.
Inevitably climbing is a dangerous sport though, and I was lucky to escape it with my life – but just barely. In February 1999 I had just come back from 3 months in Patagonia climbing Cerro Torre and was at the beginning of a 4-month slideshow tour. I was outside Las Vegas for a few days helping establish a new climb with a friend Brian McCray when my life changed forever. Six hundred feet up the Rainbow wall in the Red Rocks a handhold snapped off as I traversed 30 feet above my last piece of protection. I fell 30 feet into a ledge and then another 30 feet past it. A minute later I woke up and was dangling hundreds of feet up this cliff in agonizing pain. Long story short I broke my back in 6 places, had an epic rescue, and spent 15 days in a Las Vegas ICU. Two 10+ hour operations, two footlong titanium rods, 1 large spacer to replace a couple disintegrated vertebrae, and the Vegas ICU released me to a spinal rehab center in Salt Lake City. A few months later I was released to fly and returned to live with my mother on the Big Island of Hawaii. I spent the next year in the gym practically every day trying to put my body back together and 16 months after the fall I ran a marathon. It was a slow marathon – haaa – but it was a sign that I might make it back to full health one day.
Twenty years have passed since that fateful day. In that time I found the love of my life and married her, started a business, started a family, and started dabbling into endurance sport. It took me 7 years to trust that my back could handle a fall from a bike and so in 2007 at 43 years old I tried out triathlon for the first time. That first year had me doing an Olympic distance, a half-Ironman and oddly enough the Big Show – The Ironman World Championships. It was there I got a taste for what it was like to push your body and mind for over 10 hours continuously. And I was hooked. The next year I did all the same events again but added Ultraman – basically a double Ironman around the Big Island over 3 days. Over the next few years when our twins were born I would have an “Ironman” year and train and then take a year off. And to tell the truth I never could figure out the formula of how to be excellent at this sport. I loved to train hard – really hard. But I would never give myself enough rest and sleep to recover. Balancing being a family man, a business owner and a 25 hour a week training schedule meant something always had to give and for me, it was always not getting enough sleep.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve definitely figured out how to get more out of less training but I realized doing another Ironman just to set a new PR (Personal Record) was not that interesting anymore. And this is where in the summer of 2018, as the 20-year anniversary of my fall was approaching I felt it was time to find that professional adventurer guy again. I’ve always wanted to run the 5 Volcanoes from Sea to Summit (and have never heard of anyone had done it) so this seemed the obvious inexpensive way to find some great adventure in my own back yard. And I would use these runs as the building blocks for a list of adventures I have plotted over the next few years. And that book that people have told me to write for years – well the outline has come together and the wheels feel like they are finally in motion. So I have to say that I am more motivated and excited about life than I have been in years. And as I go on this adventure I would like to share it with you all as best I can. Hopefully, even if I can’t encourage you to make those changes you’ve always wanted to make then at least you can live vicariously through the silly things I’m going to put myself through.
Gallery of Assorted Images
