Ahead of Paris Olympics, climber Jesse Grupper overcame a chronic health condition that left him on 'death's door'
U.S. climber Jesse Grupper remembers when he was 16 and experienced pain in his abdomen for the first time.
U.S. climber Jesse Grupper remembers when he was 16 and experienced pain in his abdomen for the first time.
“I thought it was either food poisoning or just a reaction to stress from finals period,” he said on NBC’s “My New Favorite Olympian” podcast. “When the first one ended, I was like, ‘OK, that’s it. I’m not going to have these symptoms again.' But then when it came back, I realized that there was something more fundamentally wrong.”
Grupper was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation and ulcers in the large intestine. Symptoms, including abdominal pain and fever, can unexpectedly flare up under stress, which caused Grupper to reflect on his competitive climbing.
“I was really nervous about how this condition would affect my climbing career,” he said. "It made me kind of reassess my relationship with climbing in some way. I’ve always done climbing because it’s super fun, enjoyable. It feels really physically and mentally challenging, but I never really thought about if it could really affect me, because [it] never had in the past. I had to figure out ways to mitigate the causes of stress with climbing, as well as change my daily habit.”
Three years after his diagnosis, Grupper persevered by winning the 2019 USA Climbing Sport Open Nationals. But in January 2021, he was hospitalized for a week following a colitis flare-up when his medications stopped working.It left Grupper on “death’s door,” his father said.
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