Darby Allin is AEW’s resident daredevil.
Inside the ring and out.
During his appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet on Tuesday, the AEW pillar reflected on a big daredevil undertaking he went in 2025.
Climbing Mount Everest.
The following are some of the highlights from the interview where he speaks on this subject.
On how only 7,000 people have climbed Mount Everest: “Yeah, I don’t know. It just puts things into perspective, kind of how small your problems are, what you think is so big really doesn’t mean a thing. It’s very humbling when you’re up there, because it’s hard to have an ego when you’re fighting for your life on a daily basis. Because you don’t care about how you look, you don’t care about how you smell. You just want to survive. So it’s pretty cool to be in that type of energy.”
On how there is a real possibility you could die up there and if he said his goodbyes before you went up there: “Yeah, absolutely. I climbed with my mom and my brother to base camp, and the base camp hike, to a lot of people it’s no joke, it takes like 10-12 days. The elevation is like 17,000 [feet]. But the reality hit me when my mom and my brother were leaving base camp, and now I had to stay behind to actually go for the summit, and I was going to be there for another month after they left, but when I saw them walking away, the reality hit, oh sh*t, this might be the last time you see them. Then it just thought about, this might be the last time you’ve seen anybody. I was like, Oh crazy. So I went in my tent and I cried, and I filmed a little vlog about it and stuff, being like, there’s no way I’m gonna die on this mountain. I’m gonna summit, then I’m going to come back down and see a lot of people. So it was a commitment I made to myself when I was up there.”
On the reason he wanted to do it: “What I said earlier, I wanted to tell myself I was capable of anything, because you find yourself on this hamster wheel in wrestling. There’s no off-season. It’s all year long. And sometimes you feel like you’re living your life for somebody else. I wanted to really find out who I was going to be on the other side of Everest, and I didn’t want to live my life for somebody else. I wanted to really prove to myself what I was capable of. Because it goes back to the politicking and everything like that and the egos. I can’t stand it.”
