Tom Randall Establishes World’s Hardest Offwidth—Under a Concrete Bridge
British crack specialist Tom Randall has come out of “offwidth retirement” to smash the hardest wide line of his career (and perhaps the hardest in the world).
Autobahn, a horizontal crack running for 200 feet on the underside of a north Berlin bridge, was an exercise in pain tolerance and endurance as much as a feat of athleticism. “It’s a hard mental zone to get into,” Randall told Climbing. “As much as climbing is often fun, being on this route was not enjoyable. Initially, I wasn’t even sure I wanted it.” He tackled the parallel crack via a series of shuffling bathangs and hand-fist stacks between one’s feet, a technique known as a “wide pony.”
Randall was reluctant to propose a grade, but said the route is essentially four 50-foot pitches of 5.13b with no rests, and that the grading calculator Darth Grader used this estimate to come in at 5.14c. He admitted it could be a stiff 5.14b, but regardless, it’s definitely harder than Century Crack (5.14b). (This 120-foot Utah roof crack, to date, is generally touted as the world’s hardest offwidth. Randall and frequent collaborator Pete Whittaker freed the line in 2011.)
Now 44 and more than a decade past his ascent of Century, Randall is no young gun. He and Whittaker still come together to climb a 5.13 offwidth every year or so, but he hasn’t tackled anything remotely close to Century in the intervening years. This resulted in some reluctance in the early stages of his training, but Randall soon found that his muscle memory (and pain tolerance) hadn’t diminished with age.
He laid eyes on the underbelly of the bridge in early 2024, after being tipped off by a local climber. “Generally when people tell you they found an offwidth bridge, it’s not that good,” Randall admitted. “They don’t form as often as people think. But this one was absolutely perfect.”
Another reason Randall was inspired to rip the offwidth throttle again for Autobahn was the connections he formed with the Berlin climbing crew. He based himself partially out of the city for the last year while working on this climb, and quickly fell in love with the local scene. “Getting to know all these other really psyched crack climbers, trying the project with them, seeing the scene develop over the last year, I started having this desire to leave something here in Berlin, for other climbers to aim for and work towards,” he said. It was also a matter of legacy on a larger scale, as before this, “Century [was] the only proper hard offwidth. It’s nice to have something in Europe, too.”
From his first try in February, it only took six or seven actual sessions to take the line down this week. The bulk of the process wasn’t on Autobahn itself, but countless long nights running laps on the infamous “crack machine” in his cellar. (Randall has a 10-foot horizontal training offwidth in his basement in Sheffield.)
A typical workout entailed two to three sets of 10-minute reps shuffling back and forth along this hand-fist crack. He estimated that in each 10-minute session, he’d tackle around 125 to 150 feet of horizontal climbing. The other component was a lot of corework—sit ups, V-ups, and knee raises—and low intensity, high volume bicep curls to build endurance.
Diving back into the hard offwidth game so many years after Century wasn’t easy. “The first few months of training were really painful,” Randall said. “I’ve already had a really good run of climbing, so I was questioning if I really wanted to go down this path again.” Not having a dedicated training partner, as he’d typically had in Whittaker, was also challenging. “I can do stuff alone, but I climb better as part of a duo or trio,” he said. But after a few months, it quickly became apparent that his body “remembered” how to lock into an offwidth. “Regaining standards was a much faster process than I’d expected, despite all the years that have gone by. Maybe my knees and ankles were a bit more cronky than when I was younger, but not massively, to be honest.”
Like many offwidths, Autobahn was as much a mental game as a physical one. The key was retreating into what Randall described as a “weird autopilot.”
“You have to be present in your mind,” he explained, “but not too present. You have to stay focused on what you have to do, but not think about the distractions, the risk, the pain. You have to distance yourself from how your body actually feels, because it’s just so unpleasant.”
Severing this natural connection between mind and body is key to tackling a sufferfest like Autobahn, Randall said, comparing the experience to running an ultramarathon. The move is the same one, over and over, so if you’re fit enough, the mind doesn’t have to play a role. There are no problems to solve, other than those of pain and fear and brute force. Randall doesn’t do any meditation or other specific mental techniques to get himself in the mindset, but this is one muscle he didn’t have to retrain. “It’s a pretty practiced, evolved mindset for me at this point,” he said.
It’s a good thing Randall’s mind remained sharp, as his climbing tactics were rather bold. Randall essentially completed the 200-foot line free solo. He tried Autobahn on a rope at first, but struggled both to acquire (and carry) enough Friend 5 cams to protect the full 200 feet of climbing. He tried to bump the cams along, but this ended up being extremely tiring. “I realized I would never do the route if I had to bump a cam the whole time.”
After experimenting with a few other configurations, he elected to simply full-send it without protection, eschewing a rope but bringing a couple of cams and a few feet of 6mm cord if he needed to pause or bail (which never happened).
In photos, this method doesn’t appear too heinous, as the route is only 25 or 30 feet above a stream that runs below the bridge. But the water is extremely shallow—less than knee deep in some places, maybe shoulder height at the deepest point—and a fall would be unpleasant, to say the least. “If I’d had way more time, I potentially could have learned how to eject from the crack and throw a pancake shape so I’d splat into the water,” he said, laughing. “But to be honest I was more focused on climbing and not falling.”
By the time he was 100 feet along the crack, Randall’s feet had gone completely numb from the heel-toe jamming. This meant he couldn’t get enough feedback in his feet to continue using controlled bathangs. He put the pedal to the metal, “going full on it the whole time,” shaking feet and hands to get feeling back into them when he could, moving constantly to keep blood flowing and battle the numbness.
Photos of Whittaker after finishing the route, taped and bruised and blooded, evoke shell-shocked combat veteran far more than celebrating athlete.
“It’s not always fun,” he said, “but the hard work paid off.”
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