10 December 2014

Obituary: Marietta Uhden 1968 - 2014

Marietta Uhden 1968 - 2014
Generation X, 



By 
Nicholas Mailänder

Marietta Uhden, Grande Dame of German Sport Climbing, died of breast cancer in the late hours of Sunday, November 23
th in Bad Tölz, Bavaria. 
Although a born climber, Marietta came to the sport relatively late – at the age of 21. But she made up for lost time fast: within a year the delicate young woman from Munich led the strenuous and technically demanding Rocky (7a+) at Kochel/Bavarian Pre-Alps and became a member of the national team, winning the German Sport Climbing Cup in 1993. Good sponsorship contracts enabled Marietta to follow a lifestyle of climbing, indoors and out, to her heart’s content. 

Wo die wilde Kerle wohnen
 at Kochel marked her rise to the 8b grade in 1995, soon to be topped by the highly selective Happy Bizeps to You (a today it would be 8c..climbed with a kneebar…marietta did without) at Schleierwasserfall/Kaisergebirge. Eight more routes of this grade were to follow. In this period Marietta dominated the German championships, winning the title ten times in the lead category and twice in bouldering.

It was the French training guru Gilles Bernigolle who enabled Marietta to achieve an even higher level of performance. This training involved regular visits to Fontainebleau, where the German lady 1998 did a flash ascent of the scary boulder La mur de lamentation (Fb 7B+) and sent Alta (Fb 7C+) in an afternoon.

She learned how to rest in the most improbable positions on lead, how to climb difficult sequences with unbroken momentum, how to relax even while making the most strenuous moves; and finally she learned that one should only give everything if absolutely necessary.

The Bronze Medal she won at the 1997 World Championships in Paris proved Marietta’s world-class standard. This was underlined by winning the Bouldering World Cup 2000 in Munich and reaching place three in the European Championships the same year.

Marietta had come into her own. Not only had she developed her characteristically fluent climbing style, but she had also realized that climbing well has a lot to do with living a happy and healthy life. By the turn of the century she found that happy and healthy life. Together with her then trainer and friend (and later husband) Peter Naumann, Marietta took up residence in the beautiful valley of Lenggries, in the Bavarian Pre-Alps.

Right at the beginning of their relationship Peter gave Marietta a special gift: a futuristic project in the nearby Jachenau. The savagely overhanging 
Sonne im Herzen (‘sun in the heart’) had been bolted for a decade, but had withstood all sieges. It involves two full-out jumps, one of them for a hidden, sloping pocket.

On May 21
st 2001 the stage was set: Marietta catapulted into the jump, hung in the air motionless for a split second, and then, in slow motion, her hand closed on the hidden hold. Never before had an 8c+ been first climbed by a woman. It was one of the happiest moments in Marietta’s life – and a world first almost unnoticed by the public.

After a severe shoulder injury in 2003, Marietta returned to the limelight in 2005, when she won the Bronze Medal at the World Games in Duisburg. Soon after, at the age of 37, the ‘Steffi Graf of German sport climbing’ announced her withdrawal from the competition circus. Marietta retired to a secluded and balanced life in the Lenggries valley to start a family and go climbing with her friends.

Deeply interested in functional kinetics, Marietta and Peter developed an innovative approach to climbing coaching, an approach that integrated elements of the Feldenkrais method and Qui Gong. They passed on their knowledge both to individual clients and to a team of young talents at the Bad Tölz climbing center. It looked like one of those ‘and so they lived happily ever after’ stories – until Marietta was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and had to undergo surgery. But within a year of her operation Marietta was climbing 8a+, seemingly without effort.

Their daughter Antonia was born in 2009 and grew up in a circle of family and friends that could not have been more caring. But Marietta’s health had entered an unstoppable downward spiral, in which hope was followed by despair, despair by resignation. That downward spiral ended last Sunday. We miss her dearly.
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