Amber Constant is attempting to climb 3.65 million vertical feet in a single year and claim the overall vertical world record.
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She took the year off and made the project her full-time job: wake up, climb thousands of feet, recover, eat, sleep, and do it again. What began with 8,000-foot days and a weekly rest day eventually evolved into climbing every day, with some individual days reaching as high as 30,000 feet.
Amber joins me from her car in Vermont to talk about what a year-long endurance project actually looks like from the inside. We get into the logistics of finding the most efficient mountains, living out of her car, eating up to 10,000 calories a day, recovery, motivation, loneliness, and the grassroots community that has formed around the attempt. She estimates she's doing roughly 80% of the project alone and says the social isolation has become one of its hardest parts.
And then there are the things she couldn't plan for: brutal New England winter conditions, deep post-holing, black flies that sent her to urgent care after 167 bites, bears, coyotes, a moose collision, and a house with a bizarre connection to an unsolved murder.
But underneath all of the wild stories is a fascinating look at what happens when someone commits an entire year to a single goal—and keeps going long after the honeymoon phase is over.
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