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How did Steck achieve such an incredible feat?

On the surface, Steck's approach was staggeringly simple: he climbed light and he climbed fast.

Steck chose to solo the route fast, meaning he climbed without a climbing partner or team members. This enabled him to climb the entire face unroped (although he did carry a lightweight rope just in case), meaning he did not have to spend time belaying other climbers up each pitch. The benefits of this approach then greatly amplified his ability to travel light: the time he saved meant he was able to climb the entire face in one day, removing the need for heavy overnight bivvy equipment such as a sleeping bag, mattress and gas stove. As a result, Steck's pack was incredibly light. Steck was himself also extremely light. In preparation for this attempt he had trained particularly hard, with his aim being to strip all unnecessary fat and muscle from his body to improve his power-to-weight ratio. Renowned as a highly disciplined trainer, he shed nearly 10 kilograms in preparation for the climb, which was approximately 15 per cent of his body weight.

Steck also flipped the wider climbing community's prevailing beliefs about the best time of year to climb the Eiger. Most parties attempted the route in summer, when the face is relatively free of snow and ice. Steck on the other hand had chosen to climb the face during winter, when it was completely iced up. The benefit to this approach was that by using ice axes and crampons for the entire duration of the climb, he could skirt across the frozen winter ice much more quickly than he could if the rock were dry. In addition, the risk of rockfalls was significantly reduced as the rocks freeze in place during winter.

Describing his speed climb of the North Face, he said (with a rich Swiss accent):

You reach the point where you are into it … As fast as possible to the summit … your hands, your ice axe and your crampons, and they have to just move … You're progressing … that's what it's all about. You want to keep moving, having progress in your life.

Belying the apparent simplicity of his approach, underneath the surface was a very complex web of prior experience from which Steck was able to draw in order to achieve his record time. Steck was no one-hit wonder: he had begun climbing at an early age and by the time he was 18 he had already climbed the North Face of the Eiger as part of a team of four, an incredible feat in itself. By the mid 2000s Steck had built up an extensive résumé of difficult climbs in the European Alps, the Alaska Range and the Himalaya.

Starting out as a rock climber, he progressed towards technical mountaineering and then high-altitude mountaineering, before starting to further refine his specialty to fast solo ascents, initially on the relatively lower mountains of the Alps (such as the Eiger), before taking this approach to the ultimate mountaineering testing ground of the Himalaya. (In 2011 he soloed the south face of Shishapangma, an 8000-metre mountain in Tibet, in a record time of 10.5 hours, and in 2013 he soloed the south face of 8091-metre Annapurna, the world's tenth highest mountain, in a record time of 28 hours; it takes most parties at least one week to reach the summit after months of acclimatising).

In his book Outliers journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularised the work of Dr Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist whose research revealed that natural ability requires ten years, or 10 000 hours of practice, to be made manifest. Steck is the perfect example of the ‘10 000 hours rule', his lifetime spent in the mountains in preparation for the day that he could turn the sport of mountaineering on its head.

And that's what he did on that clear blue day in February 2008.