Ice climber who nearly died in fall reveals secret to comeback

A pair of Japanese fishing gloves nearly cost Martynka Wawrzyniak her life during a trip to the Catskills to climb frozen waterfalls.

The Brooklynite was waiting her turn on a very small ledge in Stony Clove Notch when she dropped one of her new specially insulated Showa gloves.

“I was very sad when I saw him go down the cliff, and I tried to save him and fell all over the cliff,” Wawrzyniak told The Post. “It was pretty dramatic because I did 360 spins in the air, upside down, hitting different parts of my body, trying to arrest myself, but everything was covered in ice.”

Wawrzyniak, who is in her 40s, landed on a tree which she climbed for about half an hour until her hiking companions rescued her. She was shocked to learn later that she had broken her tailbone in her ankle, her fibula in her lower leg and her calcaneus, also known as the heel bone.

What followed was a two-hour surgery at NYU Langone Health to reconstruct her left leg, weeks of learning how to walk again and months of physical therapy to make her stronger than ever.

Wawrzyniak had only been ice climbing for about a month before her accident in February 2022, although she had been rock climbing for about five years.

She is also a book editor, a mixed media artist and, now, a “tree hugger for life.”

Wawrzyniak estimated she fell about 200 feet into the tree that separated her from Route 214 by 50 to 70 feet.

“There was a lot of blood everywhere, but it was just from my hands that I hit the tree because I didn’t have gloves and I ran into the tree,” Wawrzyniak said. “I was very dizzy and I knew that if I didn’t hold on to the tree I might actually pass out.”

After she was helped, Wawrzyniak tried to take over throughout the day. She used walking poles as crutches, thinking she had just sprained her ankle.

A fateful trip to urgent care brought him to NYU Langone, where he put four screws into the ankle joint to hold the bones together so they could heal. She likes to be active, so she didn’t wait long after surgery to do a floor workout.

“I would go for walks in the park on crutches, around in circles until my hands almost fell off,” Wawrzyniak said. “I would hang a plank. I would do pull-ups.”

Gradually, she figured out how to walk again, albeit as a “zombie”. By May, for her birthday, she was able to slowly cross the beach with friends. By September, she was bouldering.

Despite all that progress, she was still limping a year after her fall — and it was cramping her style. She was told that people with tail injuries can be permanently lame.

“I said, ‘Oh, that’s not good enough. I will not limp. So what can we do about it? Because I need to stop limping,’” Wawrzyniak recalls. “‘My whole body is hurting, and I have to climb and I have to run and I have to do all these things.'”

She saw NYU Langone sports medicine specialist Dr. Lauren E. Borowski, who noted that Wawrzyniak had a compound fracture and had broken her bones into pieces.

“She could have died, and I think she’s done a lot of work to get back to where she is now,” Borowski told The Post. “That’s no small thing, to get back to running as much as she is and to get back to climbing and being as active as she is.”

Wawrzyniak credits her progress to Sarah Plumer-Holzman, a senior physical therapist at NYU Langone’s Harkness Center for Jumping Injuries and another climber.

Plumer-Holzman focused on Wawrzyniak’s left ankle, thigh, leg and gait to get him moving properly again.

“She had to learn how to get her foot to completely relax on the ground,” Plumer-Holzman explained. “As soon as she did a squat or just a step on that leg, her leg wanted to rotate outward and her toes wanted to curl.”

She described a series of exercises, including calf raises and standing on a balance disc, that Wawrzyniak still does at home.

She said she has become even stronger at climbing, finding tremendous success in the gym nearly three years after her horrific fall. Even if she’s not brave enough to step onto the ice this season, she’s “very happy” with what she’s achieved with her bionic wrist.

“When I had broken my leg and thought I would never walk again, it really helped me to believe that if you do these things, you will get better one millimeter at a time,” reflected Wawrzyniak. “You know, one tiny, tiny movement at a time.”