A coveted 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 to see it go down the cliff, and I reached to try and save it and fell down the entire cliff,” Wawrzyniak told The Post. “It was pretty dramatic because I did a bunch of 360 flips in the air, upside down, hitting various body parts, trying to arrest myself, but everything was covered in ice.”
Wawrzyniak, who is in her 40s, landed in a tree that she clung to for about a half hour until her hiking companions rescued her. She was dismayed to later learn that she had broken her talus bone 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 rebuild her left leg, weeks of learning how to walk again and months of physical therapy to get her stronger than ever before.
Wawrzyniak had only been ice climbing for about a month before her February 2022 accident, though she had been rock climbing for about five years.
She’s also a book editor, a mixed-media artist and, now, a “tree hugger for life.”
Wawrzyniak estimated she fell some 200 feet into the tree that separated her from Route 214 by 50 to 70 feet.
“It was a lot of blood everywhere, but it was just from my hands hitting the tree, because I had no gloves on and I smashed into the tree,” Wawrzyniak said. “I was very dizzy, and I knew that if I didn’t hold onto the tree, I might actually pass out.”
After she was helped down, Wawrzyniak tried to power through the day. She used hiking poles as crutches, thinking she had simply sprained her ankle.
A fateful trip to urgent care brought her to NYU Langone, where she had four screws placed in her ankle joint to hold the bones together so they could heal. She loves to be active, so she didn’t wait long after surgery to do a floor ab workout.
“I would go for walks in the park on my crutches, round and round in circles till my arms almost fell off,” Wawrzyniak said. “I would hang board. I would do pullups.”
Gradually, she grasped how to walk again, albeit like a “zombie.” By May, for her birthday, she was able to slowly traverse 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 talus injuries may limp forever.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s kind of not good enough. I am not going to limp. So what can we do about this? Because I need to not limp anymore,’” Wawrzyniak recalled. “‘It’s hurting my whole body, and I need to climb, and I need to run, and I need to do all these things.’”
She saw NYU Langone sports medicine specialist Dr. Lauren E. Borowski, who noted that Wawrzyniak had a complicated fracture and had shattered her bones into pieces.
“She could have died, and I think she has done a lot of work to get back to where she’s at now,” Borowski told The Post. “That’s no small feat, to get back to running as much as she is and getting 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 Dance Injuries and a fellow climber.
Plumer-Holzman focused on Wawrzyniak’s left ankle, hip, foot and gait to get her moving properly again.
“She needed to learn how to get her foot to fully relax on the ground,” Plumer-Holzman explained. “As soon as she got into a squat or just a step onto that foot, her foot just wanted to roll to the outside, and her toes wanted to scrunch.”
She prescribed a series of exercises, including raising the calf and standing on a balancing disc, that Wawrzyniak still does at home.
She said she’s gotten even stronger at climbing, finding immense success at the gym nearly three years after her harrowing fall. Even if she’s not “brave enough” to ice climb this season, she’s “pretty happy” with what she’s accomplished with her bionic ankle.
“When I had broken my leg and I thought I was never going to walk again, it would really help me out to believe that if you do these things, you will get better one millimeter at a time,” Wawrzyniak reflected. “You know, one tiny, tiny little movement at a time.”
