“I Had To Become Invisible.” Hamish McArthur Makes First Repeat of ‘Megatron’ (V17)

On April 20, English climber and Olympian Hamish McArthur made the first repeat of Shawn Raboutou’s Megatron (V17), one of the world’s hardest boulders. Megatron adds about half-a-dozen moves of V15/16 into the stand-start Tron (V14) in Colorado’s Eldorado Canyon State Park.

Megatron is the latest success in a meteoric rise for the 23-year-old McArthur, who until recently was almost exclusively known as a competition climber. He has ticked just one V15 (The Singularity) and one V16 (Big Z), and put both boulders down in the last year.

Though Megatron has been attempted for years by the world’s best, including Daniel Woods and Drew Ruana (the latter of whom famously logged hundreds of sessions), McArthur solved Megatron in just five sessions, reaching the top a week and a half after he first started working on it.

He managed to solve Tron, the stand start, in his first session on the boulder, but the Mega-prelude proved difficult. “All of the sequences that I’d seen on videos were done by people significantly shorter than I am,” McArthur told me. (He is six feet tall, while first ascensionist Shawn Raboutou is 5’6”.) “So none of their techniques worked.” On his second day, he teamed up with Noah Wheeler, another strong climber with two V17s to his name, and the pair “figured out some taller person beta.” On the third day, McArthur started making big links from the start way up into Tron, and it was off to the races.

He described the 17-move Megatron as a “very three-dimensional boulder,” a compression problem that requires endurance coupled with extremely precise footwork and body positioning. The first half of the climb is essentially an overhanging arête, but even after pulling out of this press-fest and onto a face, Megatron remains “very squeezy,” McArthur said. “Those 17 moves are on you, the whole way. They don’t get any easier.”

Near the top of the problem, McArthur managed a bit of personal beta, jamming a foot in a crack beneath the roof. “I never expected to find a foot jam on this boulder, but it helped quite a lot, it took the weight off my biceps and lats,” he said. This was a game changer, because the upper section was the redpoint crux for him. (The day he sent, McArthur fell from the top of the problem eight times in a row, before succeeding on his ninth attempt.) “I quickly got to a point where I didn’t feel like I needed to change much about how I was climbing it,” he told me. “I just needed to unlock a headspace in which I was able to actually get from the start to the top.”

In an Instagram post a few days after his send, he offered an enigmatic account of his experience working the problem, writing, among other things, that to solve Megatron, he needed to “become invisible, letting the world move through me like I’m made of glass. It sounds difficult, but it’s the ease of it I struggle with. The question now is not how much can you give, but how much can you bear to be given.”

He told me that his words, at least in part, were intentionally cryptic—intended for readers to interpret however they wished—but also that he wanted to convey the elusive, detached headspace that he had to enter in order to solve the problem on that fifth day, at a point when he knew he could link the moves, but had fallen off over, and over, and over again at the same section, so close to the top out.

As McArthur was describing his headspace, he sounded eerily similar to some of the Zen practitioners I studied under during college. “It was about sitting quietly, and openly, and being still enough that your sense of identity kind of disappears,” he said.

(This sort of meditative detachment is hard enough when you’re sitting at home, smoking a joint, and listening to Khruangbin. When you’re climbing one of the hardest boulders in the world, throwing every cell in your body at a rock face with raw effort and concentration, I imagine it’s a bit harder.)

“I had to get out of my own way, with the mental battle of getting to the top section so fatigued, having doubts, all this stuff that meant I wouldn’t try at my absolute limit,” McArthur explained. “I needed to be in a state where I wasn’t asking myself questions; ‘Am I too tired for this? Is this the right position for this move?’ I needed to forget all of that, and become invisible to myself.”

It seems many of his followers were uninterested in McArthur’s experience. As of Monday afternoon, the most-liked comment on his Instagram post is not the praise he received from Ruana (“Nicely done beast ”) or Adam Ondra (“Next level”), but the words of a person called @rossclayton__, who wrote, “What’s lil bro yappin about.”

“Nice send,” another commenter offered, “but that’s the most cringe pretentious garbage I’ve ever read in my life.” Another wrote, “I’d prefer if the caption was just ‘17.’”

McArthur said he expected as much, and was unfazed. “I’m not saying what I wrote is anything special,” he added, laughing. “Like, I’m not submitting it to some poetry competition. It was just supposed to be a representation of my experience, and a hard one to put into words. I wanted to put something out there, something honest and vulnerable, that people could question a little bit.”

In recent months, McArthur has revealed himself as a skilled painter, posting oil, acrylic, and watercolor work on his social media in addition to his climbs. I asked him if he found any direct parallels between the experience of projecting a boulder and painting a work of art. At first he said there weren’t any, but later added that, “How you do anything, is how you do everything.”

He elaborated: “How I climb is how I paint is how I interact with the world in every way. Or at least, that’s the way I want it to be. I don’t want to compartmentalize climbing and life like I used to.”

Megatron, he said, was the perfect opportunity. “This problem is one of the first times I feel I’ve been able to be genuinely expressive with my climbing,” he told me. “In competitions, you only have five minutes. It’s hard to pour your heart and soul out in five minutes. Sometimes you get lucky and have those moments, because of the pressure and intensity, but it’s rare. Outdoor bouldering is different, and Megatron gave me the opportunity to express my determination, my ability to fight.”

In the climbing world, Redditors and journalists and forum yahoos are constantly talking about progression. The idea is that our sport is “progressed” by people climbing harder problems. But it is also progressed—perhaps in a more important dimension—by the people who climb those problems discussing what they’re doing, and why, and how.

A few weeks ago, McArthur posted a video of himself launching from rails three to nine on a campus board, and called it V15. The post was clearly a tongue-in-cheek joke, poking fun at some of the paradoxes inherent in high-level grading, but social media (predictably) lost the plot. “You can’t slap a grade on this ” one person wrote. Another, “Grading this? Nah bruh.” Others took the bait in even more mind-numbing ways. “What would you grade 1-6? Do you think going further is possible at your height?” someone asked. “A dyno always favors tall people,” another wrote, “Please avoid giving dynos […] a climbing grade just because it seems easy for you as a tall climber.”

But McArthur does not seem particularly concerned with grades at all. When I asked him if he thought Megatron was V17, he said yes, then gave the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “I mean, I think so,” he added. “I’m not an authority on outdoor grades. The V16 I did took three sessions, and the V15 I did took one session. This problem took me five sessions, but I could imagine a world where it would take me double or triple that. And there are probably V12s somewhere that I could never do in my life, just because I’m the wrong shape or size or whatever.”

McArthur spoke to me at length about the “absurdity” of climbing, and said he finds it funny that some people believe professional climbers are at their best when understated, tight-lipped, and self-deprecating, merely posting green-check emojis and route names in the caption of hard sends. “The climbing community, in general, has become quite close minded,” he said. “It feels like everyone has to be in a box, ticking numbers and grades … It’s almost not okay for climbing to be meaningful. It has to be understated. I think a lot of people climb because it’s a way of beating themselves up. They get release and relief only [if and] when they finish a climb. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

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