THE ADVENTURE PRO
“I NEVER THINK OF MY LIFE AS A JOB. IT’S A PASSION THAT’S ALSO A PROFESSION”
You know, it wasn’t by chance that I’m living this life. When I left school at 16, I very much set out to live a life of adventure and to be a professional climber. I started out living with very little money, living off pasta, tuna sandwiches and a lot of sofas, with stuff stashed in people’s lofts all over the place. Fortunately, in 1998, after two years of being a full-scale bum, Berghaus approached me and were like, ‘Hey, we’re looking for some younger up-andcoming climbers’. And I got sponsored by Berghaus from the age of 18, which is, wow, 22 years ago – more than half my life. To be honest, that’s been the kind of bread and butter which has enabled me to do lots of other stuff.
Berghaus pay me a retainer, which has gone up a lot since the start. It’s not enough to do everything on. But it means that I don’t have to have a day job. In that very first year (1998), I went to Yosemite in California and did some really impressive stuff that put me out onto the world stage. From that I got quite a lot of television work in my early 20s and got a bit of a name for myself, and at the time TV was pretty lucrative.
It is definitely the life I always dreamed of. I’m about to start writing a book, and looking back at all the things I’ve done, I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Wow,
I really have done a lot of cool stuff’.
I feel very grateful to be able to do these bigger trips I’ve been doing in recent years – they cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. But it’s not easy, nobody rings you up and says, ‘Here’s 100 grand to go and do something you’ve always dreamed of.’
A lot of expeditions are a massive suffer-fest too. We talk about taking a good spanking. You put yourself into very difficult situations and try to get out of them. And you spend a lot of time in uncomfortable positions – carrying heavy bags up hills pouring with sweat, being eaten by mosquitoes, or hanging for hours and hours in uncomfortable As one of the world’s most famous adventurers, LEO HOULDING is living the dream. Travelling the world as a full-time professional, he’s climbed in Yosemite, flown off peaks on Baffin Island in a wingsuit, climbed Everest, kite-skied across Antarctica, and a hell of a lot more we don’t have space to list here. From an early life of sofa surfing and living off tuna sandwiches, Leo has made a living doing what he loves most – dodging death, completing multi-million-pound expeditions, and achieving feats not matched by another human being on Earth. But it’s much more than just luck, as he explains…
places. I’ve spent so much of my life in those really uncomfortable positions.
There are times on every trip I’ve done where it’s kind of hell. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But when you catch up with your mates about something that happened decades ago, never, ever do you recount the story where everything went according to plan and you did something really hard and you got to the top and back for beers and medals. It’s always the ones where the shit hit the fan and it was a life-threatening epic or something funny happened. It’s the ones where you fight tooth and nail, where you snatch success from the jaws of defeat at the very last minute, that are without question the most powerful, memorable experiences.
I never think of my life as a job. It’s a passion that’s also a profession. And it did change probably in my early 30s. When I got married, and kids were immediately on the horizon, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, I should probably start thinking a little bit about the rest of my life here because it’s going to be a bit of a rude awakening’. I think one of the downsides of this life is a great deal of insecurity. You’re always one slip away from the end of your career. But on the other hand, that’s part of intentionally doing risky stuff. You learn to deal with uncertainty. It’s part of the thrill. So, I tend not to worry too much about the future. You’re just aware that it’s there.
There is a dark side to adventure sports. I had a bad spell a few years ago, where one of my best friends died.
And a load of my other close friends died. Pretty much all of them wingsuit BASE jumping. When you see it close up, it really does make you question your values, especially as a father and as a husband. When my best mate, Sean Leary, died in 2014 in a wingsuit flying accident, my daughter was six months old, his wife was seven months pregnant. And it just made me think, ‘Oh, shit, you know, maybe this isn’t that cool’. It’s not just wingsuit flying. When you go into super remote, big mountains, you are putting yourself in harm’s way. We take a lot of precautions, but there’s no denying the fact that, statistically speaking, in my line of work, you’re 100 times more likely to die prematurely than most people. I haven’t BASE jumped since.
I had a really profound experience in 2014, actually. A few months after Sean died, I was doing a big job for Discovery Channel and had a series travelling the world getting paid a lot of money to do amazing stuff. But in a nutshell, at the last minute I decided I needed to fly out to Borneo a few days earlier than I was due to. The production company said no, so I said I’d go unpaid because we need to do some prep. That saved my life, because I should have been on that Malaysian Airways flight that got shot down over the Ukraine. I actually had a booking on that plane, and I still have the email with my seat reservation. All 298 people died. And really, I couldn’t believe how close I came to the proverbial ‘you might get hit by a bus tomorrow’.
Yeah, I put myself in harm’s way intentionally. Yeah, I’m a parent. Yes, you could call that irresponsible. But pretty much the closest I’ve ever come to dying was that one decision, the click of a mouse. If I hadn’t said ‘reschedule’, I wouldn’t be here right now.
It just made me remember that we are not in control of our own destinies. You can try hard to live the life that you want to lead, certainly. I do feel very, very lucky to have lived this life, but I didn’t buy a ticket in a lottery. This is what I set out to do when I was 15 years old. That’s not to say there hasn’t been luck involved. But it doesn’t come to you on a plate. And you could live in a bubble and try to avoid risk and desert your dreams, but then still get hit by a bus or die of leukaemia. So, it really was positive thing for me not to die in that plane crash. It rebooted my motivation after Sean’s death to just carry on getting after it. Definitely with a more measured kind of approach. In some ways, some of the stuff I do these days is way more hardcore than anything I did in my 20s. But I feel like I do it now with a higher margin of safety because of the experience and knowledge I’ve gained.
We want to inspire our children to live the best life they can. And I don’t think I would be a good role model to my kids by abandoning my own dreams. We all want our children to dream big and to follow their own passions.