Anak Verhoeven on Sending 5.15b—Twice!

Belgian Anak Verhoeven made the hardest send of her career with the 5.15b endurance climb La Planta de Shiva last month. The 27-year-old has now joined the slim ranks of women who have climbed 5.15b, alongside just three others: Laura Rogora, Julia Chanourdie, and Angela Eiter (who made the first female ascent of La Planta de Shiva in 2017).

A youth prodigy, Verhoeven has been on the wall from age four. As a teen, she won 10 consecutive European Youth Cups, and went on to collect 19 World Cup medals during her nearly decade-long stint on the IFSC Open circuit. But she’s no stranger to pushing grade ceilings on rock, either. Her masterful pioneering of Sweet Neuf (5.15a) in 2017 made Verhoeven the first woman to establish a route at that grade. Since then, the Belgian has made the first female ascents of 5.15a lines Joe Mama (Oliana) and No Pain No Gain (Rodellar), among a dozen other lines marked 5.14d and harder.

Several climbers had recommended La Planta de Shiva to Verhoeven in recent years, so this spring she traveled to Villanueva del Rosario, Spain, to try to line. “From what I had heard, it was an endurance test piece that required fighting,” she told Climbing. “Exactly the way I like it.”

Adam Ondra put up the 150-foot Shiva, an extension to an existing 5.14b, in 2011. The route—a lengthy tufa-pulling mission—saw repeats by Jakob Schubert in 2016 and Eiter the following year, as well as ticks from Jonathan Siegrest, Jorge Díaz-Rullo, and Jonatan Flor.

After the 5.14b start, Shiva hopefuls cop a kneebar rest before the crux: a sustained overhanging traverse on tiny crimps. For Verhoeven, the sequence was 35 moves, with only one opportunity for her to chalk up—and only with her left hand. “I had never before done a route with a crux that is so relentlessly long,” she reported.

Verhoeven spent 18 days learning her beta via many bite-sized segments, then dove into ground-up attempts. She said that finding the beta “was a tough process, both for the body and the mind. But there was constant progress, and that was encouraging.” Verhoeven reached a new highpoint on each of her first three redpoint attempts, though she could only manage a single attempt per day—and had to take an entire rest day between each burn. She sent the line on her fourth redpoint attempt.

Verhoeven said there was no one strategy she employed to decipher Shiva, and that the main battle was managing the stress of working something above her previous grade ceiling, noting that it was sometimes hard to keep things in perspective. “I intentionally fought against this project becoming an unhealthy obsession,” she said. “Of course, it was necessary that I wanted [to send] really badly so I could try hard, but at the same time, I didn’t want to let the route control me.”

Her father Wim almost always belays Verhoeven on her hardest climbs, and it was no different on Shiva. “It’s lovely to work so closely together as a team and be focused on the same goals,” she said. “I can fully trust him and it’s tremendously helpful that he knows me very well. Of course, we’re far from perfect and we have to put a lot of effort into good communication to avoid misunderstandings and irritation.”

Shortly after finishing the route, Verhoeven decided to climb it a second time without using knee pads to protect herself during the kneebar rests. While this may sound odd, Verhoeven is no stranger to doubling up on hard sends. She did the exact same thing on Esclatamasters (5.14d), repeating it without a knee pad, and Cosi se Arete (5.14d), which she first climbed during the day, and later repeated at night, using a headlamp.

According to Verhoeven, there isn’t a specific reason why she enjoys diving into hard sends a second time. She simply figured if she had a chance to send La Planta Shiva without pads, a style which most feel is more aesthetically pure, it would be then, immediately after dialing the sequences.

She reported on Instagram that she also originally thought Ondra had sent the line without knee pads, and wanted to see if she could match his feat. However, a commenter corrected her—even Ondra had used a pad on Shiva. “When I managed to clip the chains a second time, I was so excited that my idea worked out,” she told Climbing. “Achieving this felt like a special bonus. It made the whole experience even more beautiful.”

Verhoeven has always been public about her Christian faith (her Instagram bio is “Living by His Grace”) but she said her relationship with her god has no direct connection to her climbing. “My faith is ever-present,” she said, “but simply because it is linked to the whole of life … It would be exactly the same if I did any other job. It certainly doesn’t make me a stronger climber.”

If anything, she said, her religious beliefs help her keep climbing in its place, and avoid the pitfalls of a tough rock project encroaching into other aspects of her life. “Reading the Bible and praying are helpful,” she remarked, because this helps her “see more clearly how temporary climbing is, and how fleeting the happiness of a send when compared to the true joy and eternal hope God can give.”

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