In September 2022, then-30-year-old Hannah Meier woke up with a clobbering headache. She and her partner at the time left their Madison apartment. Meier wore a worn hoodie with a light jacket layered on top, prepared for the crisp, mid-50s morning as summer began to fade into fall. While they walked to James Madison Park, Meier felt dread in the pit of her stomach.
They sat on a bench, and the clear sky and calm lake were at odds with her fuzzy mind and pounding head.
Meier took a breath, readying for the unpleasant conversation to come. Although she kept trying to deny her struggles with alcohol, she knew she had lost control the night before.
Meier, who has long brown hair and a pierced eyebrow and septum, fidgeted with the bench while her partner walked her through what had happened, filling in her mostly blank memory.
The couple had ventured downtown to celebrate their friend’s birthday, but after one drink, Meier’s partner left to return to their apartment. While she was out on her own, Meier felt free to drink without fear of being scolded. But when she later returned home, she entered their apartment with force and volume, running around yelling, stumbling and undressing.
As her partner described this drunken chaos to her the next morning, she sat there in shock. Her headache only seemed to thump more as she tried to comprehend these actions that she knew were hers, but felt like someone else’s.
This isn’t me, she thought.
As they talked, she realized that her rehearsed apologies and promises to be better wouldn’t be enough this time to save their relationship.
“I don’t know what to do,” her partner said throughout the conversation.
Meier’s drinking had strained the relationship too much already, and her partner said this could never happen again. So, finally aware and scared of her actions after the conversation, she decided to commit to being alcohol-free for a year. Maybe this was the key.
This will fix me, she thought.
* * *
Meier, now 32, didn’t start drinking until she was 21. Originally from the suburbs of Denver, she stayed too focused on her AP classes — and later, on graduating early from Colorado State University with a math degree — to even think about drinking.
When Meier moved to Madison for a software job in 2014, she threw herself into a new atmosphere of work, friends and bars. Suddenly, drinking made sense, and as an overachiever at heart, she felt some need to catch up with more seasoned drinkers.
Soon, Meier’s entire social life centered around her next drink. She made some good friends, moved in with a long-term partner and kept a steady job. But there was always an excuse to drink — book club, or playing bar trivia or kickball. Meier pondered why she was the only one of her friends blacking out monthly, but she continued to justify it as part of being late to drinking culture. She moved downtown during her second year in Madison, and bars became even more accessible.
Wisconsin is known for its strong drinking culture, with 25.5% of residents self-reporting heavy drinking, according to Wisconsin Watch. In Wisconsin, binge drinking is “a critical public health concern,” per UW–Madison’s Population Health Institute. In Dane County, 27.6% of adults self-reported heavy drinking or binge drinking, making it the 25 drunkest county in the country, according to 24/7 Wall St.
Further conforming to the local drinking culture, Meier started going to the bars every weekend after she moved downtown. Surrounded by her new coworkers, friends and countless bars, heavy drinking seemed customary, but it slowly took over her social life.
“I think it’s really common for people to be kind of heavier drinkers in their early-mid 20s,” Meier said. “But for me, I noticed that my friends were kind of growing out of this. I was just starting. I kind of felt like I was making up for lost time because I didn’t really drink that much in college.”
In 2020, as Meier compared her drinking habits with her friends, she realized that she blacked out at least once a month, something her friends now tried to avoid.
This might be something that I need to fix, she thought at the time.
She tried rock climbing more, but stopped during the pandemic as drinking at home became her most accessible hobby.
She worked with a therapist to try to set limits for herself, including by counting her drinks and following Sober October and Dry January and other month-long challenges, Meier said. Often she would attempt to “white-knuckle through it,” resisting the urge to drink, but the plan, and her willpower, usually went down along with a few drinks.
Although she sneaked drinks around her partner and blacked out frequently, the conversation she had in James Madison that morning with her partner made her reevaluate. She felt sick of it all: sick of failing to stick to limits, sick of lying and sick of thinking about alcohol.
Five months later, Meier had avoided alcohol well enough, convincing herself she stopped drinking for health reasons, but she knew she needed more support to keep the momentum going.
Meier attended a recovery group in January 2023. As she sat and listened to people around her describing similar thought processes, she finally realized she was an alcoholic, too.
As spring arrived, Meier worried about staying sober during the upcoming summer. She always felt more social in the summer. Fed up by her continued cravings, she thought hibernation might be the only option to avoid drinking.
But rather than cozying up in a cave somewhere, she started attending daily recovery groups and throwing herself into activities that don’t involve drinking, like rock climbing.
* * *
That spring, Meier noticed a flyer on the bulletin board at the Boulders Climbing Gym on Carroll Street advertising one of the gym’s affinity groups, Climb To Recovery. The group began in 2018 after a physician assistant started it to support one of his patients.
Open to anyone in recovery, or to anyone supporting someone through recovery, the group meets the third Sunday of every month after the gym’s normal hours. At its downtown and east side locations, Boulders hosts other affinity groups, including Madison Climbers of Color, Queer Climbing Social, Madison Women Climbers, Vertical Veterans and Adaptive Climbing, with the hope of making climbing a more inclusive activity for all people, said Margo Keevil, the gym’s director of community.
Before walking through the doors of the east side gym for the first time on a Sunday, Meier felt nervous. She had been climbing for over a year at that point, but entering any new climbing space can create anxiety. However, as she entered the gym, with its sterile lighting and the nostalgic scents of sweat and chalk, kind faces greeted her, including that of a friend she’d met earlier through the Hoofers Sailing Club. As Meier climbed, she felt her tension ease, she said.
After that first successful trip to the club, Meier continued to attend the Sunday climb sessions, and she began to associate her recovery with the progress she was making as a rock climber.
In her early days of staying alcohol-free, the accomplishment she felt each time she completed a new climb excited her, while the exercise and the endorphins it produced helped distract her from alcohol cravings.
Climbing also proved to be something that Meier enjoyed in and of itself; it wasn’t just a precursor for getting drinks after — climbing was the event. But although Meier improved quickly, like most climbers, she plateaued after she started more intermediate climbs.
* * *
During her first year climbing with Climb To Recovery, Meier was stuck on an intermediate-level grades. She let out heavy sighs of frustration during each ascent.
As her frustration grew, so did her doubts about her recovery. Why am I so down on myself? Why haven’t I grown? Why do I still get cravings?
Despite Meier’s progress in recovery, she and her partner eventually split up. And with more free time to channel into climbing, she leaned on Climb To Recovery regulars and began to join the group on outdoor climbing trips, too, and gradually, the sport became her social activity of choice — a stronger draw than the drinking hangouts and culture she’d gotten into. Meier also joined two more affinity groups, Queer Climbing Social and Madison Women Climbers, to branch out further.
This year at a Climb To Recovery social, one of the other climbers pointed to a steep grade at the east side gym that Meier had yet to successfully climb. She stared at the challenging route, with its complicated holds demanding tricky body positioning.
“There’s no way I can do this,” she said.
But she went ahead and attempted it, following behind her friend and copying his route. Though neither of them finished the route that time, the pair began “projecting” the climb, pouring all their energy into extending their physical limits to complete the route.
For the next few weeks, Meier studied the route carefully, attempting to get further each time. The process wasn’t linear, and some days she wanted to quit. But a few weeks later, she finally felt ready.
She made her way up and across, clenching her toes to fit on the small holds and forcing her hips close to the wall. All the weeks of projecting the climb finally clicked in her brain like a puzzle, with each hold now ingrained in her muscles.
I know what is coming next. I know I can get this, she thought. Finally, Meier reached the route’s endpoint.
After completing the most difficult climb of her life, Meier made her way down the wall and celebrated on the bouncy grey mats at its base with delight and pride.
As she progressed further from her last drink and made further progress in climbing, Meier finally started dealing with why she drank. Along with other new active activities and continuing to attend recovery groups, climbing finally allowed Meier to understand how she used drinking to suppress her feelings and emotions, she said.
And indeed, rock climbing is being offered more as a holistic approach to addiction recovery. The sport helps people improve their physical health, confidence, impulse control, problem-solving and trust in others, while serving as a physical metaphor about climbing up the seemingly impossible wall of recovery, according to Moving Mountains Recovery.
Meier continued prioritizing her climbing as a way to boost her self-confidence and bring her joy. Rather than counting the months she had been sober, climbing offered something with small, tangible results, making her feel less bogged down in the emotional labor she has been doing for her recovery as she progressed little by little, surprising herself with evidence of her mental and physical strength.
* * *
On a Sunday evening in November, Climb To Recovery members met at the east side location. Within the cavernous space, upbeat music blasted from overhead speakers. After the group chatted and slid on their multicolored climbing shoes, the group started climbing.
Everyone fell into a familiar rhythm as people paired off and started belaying different routes. Clinks and clanks rang out as carabiners snapped into place. Another climber started climbing a medium-level route while Meier securely controlled their rope at the base of the wall.
“You got it,” Meier yelled up.
The woman easily scaled the wall to the top, starting slow with an easy route. Meier pulled all the slack out of the rope to create tension and began to feed the remaining rope back up toward the climber, allowing her to slowly rappel down the wall.
“Did you dye your hair?” another climber asked Meier a few minutes later.
She relayed the details of dying her brown hair a purplish red. Although climbing is fun and unique, it’s the shared interest and community aspect of it that is the reason why the group members, like Meier, consistently attend each month.
“For some people, it’s hard to have fun and learn to have fun when they’re not using substances,” one of Meier’s fellow climbers noted as he untied his rope.
In all of her other recovery circles, Meier talked about her emotions and her progress.
But at Climb To Recovery, there was an unspoken understanding: As long as people are having fun, climbing is serving an important role in their recovery. At one point, Meier let out a heavy sigh about three-quarters up a tall wall in the center of the gym.
“I was too scared!” she called down to the woman who was belaying her.
Meier tried to be gentle with herself after the failed climb, thinking, I get to define my own goals. She walked over to the seating area, took a sip from her water bottle and continued climbing.
After bonding more with the group and attending recovery circles each week, she has learned to accept her life in recovery, she said, and she continues to seek out opportunities to try new activities that don’t center around drinking, including ballet, pole dancing and running.
“I’m always going to be a person in recovery; there’s always room for improvement in my life,” Meier reflected. “I think that it has been important for me to have activities I like doing, and remember that these things give me joy and happiness, and that’s way more than alcohol ever gave me.”
