# Above the Clouds

Kilian Jornet

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Originally published as Res és impossible in Spain in 2018 by Ara Llibres

First published in the US by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

This UK edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Kilian Jornet 2020

Cover layout design by Faceout Studio © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photographs © Lymbus Life (Kilian Jornet), PL Pictures/Paedii Luchs/Stocksy (sunset) and Shutterstock.com (foreground)

Title-page photograph: Sébastien Montaz-Rosset

Mountain icon: pne | Adobe Stock

Translation by Charlotte Whittle

Designed by Janet Evans-Scanlon

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Kilian Jornet asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008412128

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008412135

Version 2020-08-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Introduction

The Farewell

Training

My Home Is the Mountain

Everest in Summer

More Than Five Hundred Race Numbers

Everest in Fall

Partners in Dreams

Everest in Winter

Experiences That Changed Me Forever

Everest in Spring

Epilogue: The Welcome

About the Author

Also by Kilian Jornet

About the Publisher

Note to Readers

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> Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008412128

Introduction

It’s not like I woke up one morning with some transcendental resolution to start running.

I’ve been running mountains since the very beginning of my life, and since then I have spent my days counting the blueness of the lakes, the sharpness of the ridges, the length of the sunsets, and, well, some boring stuff like meters climbed and the miles behind and in front of me.

I wasn’t like most kids growing up. The posters in my childhood bedroom were of Matterhorn, the Toblerone mountain in Switzerland, and a panorama called the Roof of the World, showing the range of Everest and the surrounding mountains. Eventually I climbed Matterhorn, and sometime after that I climbed Everest. When I ran up and down Matterhorn, it was to break a record, but Everest was different. I approached Everest with the idea to try a new way of mountain climbing. Four years separated my climb of Matterhorn and Everest, but mostly what separated them was my realization that I was living a life of contradictions. I ran fast to live a slow lifestyle. I needed solitude to be myself and social interactions to make a living. I loved the adrenaline of a race and the calm of the world above 8,000 meters. I enjoyed discovering remote mountains, but to protect them, I now realize it might have been better if I hadn’t visited them at all. I am those contradictions, and how I deal with them is also who I am. There will always be consequences to my actions, positive or negative, and those consequences might affect only myself or affect a large amount of people.

As a teenager, I learned how to race in the mountains. It is all about training, getting in shape, executing the perfect movements, but beyond the physical, it is about how a runner or climber sees the mountains. Are they merely a playground to race on? Are they a stadium on which to perform your sport? Or are they something else entirely?

When I climbed Matterhorn, I viewed mountains as my playground, the source of my greatest joy and fun and pleasure, and as my stadium, where I competed. Then, after some encounters with a few special humans you’ll read about in these pages, the fury of the mountains emerged in my life, and my stadium started to fall apart. Competition in sports is about performance. The time on the clock. When you cross the finish line. When your competitors do the same. In federated sports, this performance is judged by rules and regulations. But in the mountains, these rules and regulations are meaningless. Mountains are (still) a space of freedom, where lawlessness reigns for the good of everyone.

Didier Delsalle has been on top of Everest. On May 14, 2005, he landed with his helicopter on the 8,848-meter summit. If he told you that he reached the summit of Everest, he wouldn’t be lying, although most of us in the mountain-climbing world would disagree. But where is the line we can draw between achieving the greatest feat—reaching the summit—and climbing the distance to get there? How many steps are considered effort enough to claim an ascent? What I’ve learned is that every shortcut is a personal decision you must live with, and every achievement is the same.

When it comes to climbing mountains, the reaching should never compromise the journey to get there. That’s why when I climbed Everest, I did it alone with no assistance—not to simply step on the summit but to see what I was able to endure in my journey getting there. Four years before, when I ran up and down Matterhorn faster than anyone before, I was obsessed only with the achievement, researching the past, emulating how the fastest person before me had done it, and using his rules, as it was a competition. I was racing him. On Everest, I raced myself.

When I started traveling far to do a run or a race or a climb, I considered it just a part of the job. But today I’m questioning how much of that travel is making a negative impact on the natural world I love so much. Does the answer “Because that’s just how it is” make it okay? In the long run, climbing Everest has likely been a very selfish and absurd activity, but what I understand from writing this book is that the path I have taken to climb it and the encounters I have had on that road have changed the way I see not only the mountain but also myself, and the connection between humans and nature has made me, I hope, a more committed human with those contradictions. Throughout these pages I try to explain this journey.

In the end, Above the Clouds is not about what I have achieved but about what I have experienced, about feeling at peace with my values when I do something and embracing the possibility of change and failure as a reward for my soul.

The Farewell

My lips said “I love you” when what they really wanted to admit was “I’m sorry.”

I kept forcing the words out, trying to make excuses: “Don’t worry,” “I’ll be careful” … but I knew no excuse would seem reasonable to her for setting out on an adventure that could lead to my death on the world’s highest mountain. Yet I need to climb mountains to feel alive, even if I risk death.

I managed to mumble, “Goodbye,” with an uneasy feeling that I was being selfish and narcissistic. I definitely am those things. I took my backpack out of the trunk, accidentally slamming the lid shut. Dazed by the sudden loud noise, and this strange silence between us, I finally tapped on the back windshield to let her know she could leave.

It was early August, but the air was brisk. The scent of the sea filled my lungs. Tromsø is a fishing port on a little island surrounded by fjords and mountains, above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. For a few weeks in summer, the sun doesn’t set; it’s always daytime. It’s as if time means nothing: grandparents go out for a midnight stroll, and you can see your neighbors fixing their balconies or tiling their roofs in the wee hours of the morning. A collective drunkenness seems to take hold of the region for a single, never-ending day. But the sun is gentle and never rises high in the sky, doing circles above the horizon, painting it with a thick layer of pastel colors, yellow and orange tones, sometimes flooded with intense red.

The airport, where I said goodbye to the woman I love, lies at one end of the island. As Emelie drove away, I blew her a silent kiss. I didn’t want to look back, so I walked into the airport, trying to let my eyes dry before I went up to the check-in desk. I was setting out on a journey that would take me to the summit of Everest, aware of the difficulties and dangers that lay ahead. Despite everything, at no point did I reconsider this decision.

A few hours earlier, Emelie and I had gone for a run together. Taking advantage of the continual light, we went out at night, after dinner, to stretch our legs and clear our minds after a tense and stressful few days of organizing a race for a few hundred runners. In the last few days, the phone calls, car rides back and forth, and hand squeezes had been near constant. Running together, just the two of us, would be a much-needed cleansing exercise.

We set off along a narrow path, leaving the noise of the city behind. We wanted the mountains to shelter us. The wind’s soft murmur replaced the radio programs floating out of the houses and shops in town, and a pure, fresh breeze replaced the stifling air among the crowds and the smoke. Gradually, our legs began to feel lighter and lose the stiffness of the last few days. We climbed to the top of the first peak and ran on without stopping. We left the dirt path for the fields, climbing a new route. The frosty grass soaking our feet contrasted with the hard, dry surface of the black asphalt. Little by little, our hearts began to beat at a shared rhythm, echoing the thump of our steps.

We ran side by side, steeped in a feeling of peace and serenity that contrasted with the whirlwind of the previous days. But happiness can’t continue forever; this calm was the prelude to our farewell. Though from time to time we opened our mouths to try to say what needed to be said between us, sound didn’t emerge.

Later, when we drove to the airport, neither of us could express what we’d both been feeling for a long time: fear and regret. And leaving it unsaid, we made a pact of silence that would last until I returned from the expedition.

Through the airplane window, the city shrank until it disappeared. I stared through the glass at the plane’s shadow as we flew over fjords and still-snowy peaks, mountains and valleys. I knew many of those paths and crests, but I saw new paths from the air and imagined myself running along them on my return. At that moment, though, I was leaving them behind, too, and I hoped they would forgive me for going in search of another.

I thought of the things I should have told Emelie while we were running together, to relieve the suffering she was sure to experience while we were far apart. A subtle joke or a clever comment, but I’m no good at thinking of quick things to say on the spot. I feel at peace in the mountains because, as Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner said, they are not fair or unfair; they are just dangerous. And, in danger, you can apply a certain logic when it comes to making what you think will be the right decision. In the mountains, I never waver, but in the more jagged terrain of relationships, I am paralyzed.

The Earth disappeared as we entered a cloud, and the turbulence made me snap back into the present. Leaving always brings a wave of contradictory feelings: the fleeting freedom of escape mixed with nostalgia for the warmth and familiarity I’ve left behind.

In the plane’s hold was a suitcase weighing exactly fifty pounds. I had scrupulously calculated how to pack for this trip, with all the equipment I would need to conquer a high peak. There was no room for anything else, not even a pen.

The preparations had gone almost perfectly, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I had spent the last month in the Alps, most of the time above 4,000 meters, preparing my lungs and body for Everest’s impossibly high summit. I felt comfortable at a high altitude and was ready for the technical difficulties of the mountain.

Before an assault on a summit, there is a moment that is impossible to quantify. It goes beyond the miles you’ve covered and the inevitable circumstances you’ve overcome. This is when you realize you have the necessary calm for the ascent. The sense of safety that takes hold when you feel comfortable in a terrain where, if you had more sense, you ought not to feel so safe. I had noticed I was in that exact state of mind as I finished my training in the Alps, and I still felt this way on the plane ride to Everest, where my risk threshold would be higher than usual. On the one hand, this was comforting, but on the other, it filled me with a fear of myself, since I didn’t know for sure what I would do if faced with a choice between my desire to climb the mountain and my sense of self-preservation, which keeps me calm and protects me from crossing boundaries with no return.

The flight attendant pushed the dinner cart to the row where I was seated. She smiled and asked me to choose between the chicken and rice and the vegetable pasta. I decided on the pasta. Like clones of one another, all the passengers on the flight began the same dance at once: we opened the tiny cardboard package, removed the foil protecting the food, burned our fingers to confirm that it was too hot, then tore open the transparent cutlery wrapper and took out a fork to spear the four lettuce leaves. We inspected the pudding on the left of the tray with a sidelong glance. Is it chocolate?

Without knowing very well how, I had ended up with a tub of processed macaroni and was now stirring it around with a disposable fork. I decided I was full. I placed everything in a pile as best I could, left it on the corner of the table, and waited for the flight attendant to come back and take it away.

Intercontinental flights are like a long trip to a mall in a large city. There are always children crying and teenagers whispering, letting out the occasional scream or guffaw. Bad food, shiny offers for products you’ll never use, and movies, music, or games—it doesn’t matter which—to pass the time.

I tried to escape the productivity traps these kinds of environments set by opening the notebook in which I was planning to journal my expedition and write down important things like daily activities, measurements of the slopes and the altitude, a record of how I felt while acclimating, meteorological data. And I gave it a try, but amid all the people crammed together in such a claustrophobic setting, I couldn’t make a single mark on the blank page.

Angry with myself, I gave in to temptation and searched for a movie on the little screen on the seat back in front of me. Luckily, I fell asleep soon after the opening credits.

In the dream, I entered a forest. The trees were large but weren’t the enormous sequoias you see in the United States. They belonged to a traditional forest, like in the Pyrenees, but were disproportionately large. It was like seeing everything from the height of a child or a small animal.

Despite my calm, I was scared. Deep in the forest, everything moved at a dizzying speed. I began to walk. I wanted to get out, but everything was spinning around me, preventing me from finding or choosing the right path. I began to run, but the forest kept spinning and moving just as fast. My legs wouldn’t obey me and felt like they were made of lead; they were frozen to the mossy ground carpeted with pine needles. When I finally seemed able to free myself, the forest lurched like a boat in the midst of a storm and I fell.

I could make out the shadows of animals passing between the trees. There seemed to be dozens. They were giant and began to surround me, the circle in which I was trapped closing in around me. When the animals were finally so close that they seemed about to crush me, I realized that in fact it was only one animal, a kind of long-legged mammoth running with enormous strides. But when I looked closer, I realized the beast that had cornered me wasn’t a mammoth but an enormous rabbit or hare.

Suddenly, I heard a knock on a tree as if someone was chopping it down with an axe. Chop, chop. The sound was right next to me. And I felt the hare, or whatever it was, grab me by the shoulder. Chop, chop.

“Excuse me, would you like something to drink?” the flight attendant asked, waking me up with a start.

I let her know with a sleepy gesture that I didn’t want anything, and she pushed the cart loaded with drinks to the row behind me. That’s when it dawned on me: It was Petita! A hare I had found as a child, on a stormy day, in the forest behind the mountain refuge where we lived. In my dream she was huge, but when I rescued her she was an injured baby. That afternoon, all those years ago, I took her home, gave her some food and water, and laid her in my bedroom to sleep with me. But after a few days, she had recovered and filled the room with droppings, and wouldn’t stop moving under the sheets while I slept, and my parents asked me to let her go. I didn’t want to. She was mine! I had found her and rescued her, had built her a big pen outside the refuge for her to run around in, and fed her each afternoon when I got home from school.

But one day after a few months of keeping her, when I went to see her after class, I found that Petita had died. I cried and cried, asking myself over and over what I’d done wrong. I didn’t realize that I had killed her by trying to take care of her. She had chosen to die rather than remain alive and imprisoned. Some animals are meant to live free.

Three days after getting off the plane, I felt far away from all that I’d left behind: the frosty fields that had soaked my feet as I ran with Emelie in the silence we both had wanted to break without knowing how. Why didn’t we say anything to each other? Her hugs were far away now. So were the city, the traffic, the noise, and my worry that the car in front of us would make me late to the airport. So were my notebook full of preparation notes and Petita, the hare in my dream.

Now I was here on Everest in the springtime, attempting to ascend and descend the mountain in the fastest time, and I was in a fine mess.

If I looked ahead, behind, or above, I saw only white enveloping everything. And below, my legs pierced the snow. And the silence was so intense and absolute that I could hear a distant, piercing whistle in my ears.

In fact, there was no silence: I breathed deeply; the wind blew in violent gusts; snowflakes fell from the sky, rebelling against the air, flurrying at me from every direction, driving against my coat, which made a rhythmic flapping sound. There was so much noise that it ended up canceling itself out. It was not silent, but I felt silence. In my eyes, my ears … a single shade of white that traced a diagonal path up ahead allowed me to see the steep slope I was tackling. But a few feet ahead, the slope disappeared in the midst of the storm. Behind me, the deep path I’d cut had vanished almost immediately beneath the snow. Let’s go, Kilian. One more step. The snow came up to my knees and would soon be compacted by the wind.

I could intuit with all my senses that in a few seconds this 2,000-meter wall, which had seemed inoffensive just two hours ago, was going to turn into an enormous unsteady sheet, a trap hiding an avalanche. I drove my ice axes in as deeply as I could. I’d lost track of my fellow climbers, who were somewhere behind me. I couldn’t see them. The thick fog had swallowed them.

I took another step on this fifty-degree slope on the northeast face of Everest, hoping the snowfall that had accumulated in the last few hours wouldn’t detach from the wall and sweep down the mountainside. And hoping it wouldn’t pull me down with it.

Before I attempted each step, I thought: Is this the last mountain I’ll climb? How the hell did I get this far?

It’s a long story. It didn’t begin when I first started training to climb Everest in the summer. Or when I went back in the fall and the winter of that year to train again. It didn’t begin when I said goodbye to Emelie in the spring of the following year, headed to Everest to finally attempt my goal. Or when I took the plane to Nepal, or even when I dreamed of exploring Everest when I was young. Though I might not have been aware of it, this story began long before, 6,000 feet above sea level in Spain. My home.

Training

There are people who train to compete, and there are those who compete to train.

I belong to the second group. The goal of competing can provide a source of motivation, but it isn’t necessary for the training—far from it.

I still remember the first time I found extreme and almost perverse enjoyment in the leg pain and breathlessness I felt as I ascended a steep slope and gave it my all. It happened one late spring day in my early teens, as I cycled around the French department of Ariège in Occitanie, with Joan, the father of a friend from school. The sky was blue, and the heat was suffocating. We were climbing one of the many mountain passes in the region; I can’t remember which one. We took a narrow road through abandoned villages and fields without livestock, and Joan yelled back advice to me as he pedaled ahead.

“You have to stop doing miles just for the sake of it, and climbing mountains with no rhyme or reason. You have to treat it like a job. Imagine you’re building up credit,” he said, “to use the day you really want to go fast.”

I pretended to listen to him, but all that really interested me was covering more miles each day than the day before, and going faster and faster. When the conversation dragged on too long and I didn’t want to keep listening, I sped up to provoke an attack so I would have an excuse to give it my all and end up exhausted. My legs hurt, we were going faster and faster, and I began to feel short of breath and a strange kind of pleasure, until I saw a sign that said we were only half a mile away from the highest point of the pass. I noticed a surprising sadness inside me.

“Come on, the best part is coming up,” Joan encouraged me, thinking of the descent.

“Yeah,” I answered, “but I think I’d like the climb to go on forever.”

I was twelve years old, and that summer I wanted to compete in the Three Nations Cycling Tour, which went from Puigcerdà to Andorra and passed through France, then back to the capital of La Cerdanya, covering a total of over 150 kilometers. I thought I should get ready to compete, not just sustain myself by cycling for hours and hours, so I started writing down in a notebook all the training and rides I was doing. Though I had been walking long distances and cycling alone or with my parents for years, for the first time I was consciously training for a concrete goal.

That summer, I participated in the Three Nations. In the fall, I did the 80-kilometer Caballos del Viento route, and I also entered the Centro de Tecnificación de Esquí de Montaña, the national youth team for mountain skiing, since my mother thought I should channel my energy in an orderly way. It was lucky that I enrolled, because that’s where I met two of the most influential people in my life: Jordi Canals, the center’s director, and Maite Hernández, my first trainer.

In the summer of 2004, Maite Hernández gave all of her young students a gift: a little stone. That spring, she had climbed the north face of Everest as part of a women’s expedition and had brought that little keepsake down from the mountain for us. I stowed mine away like the treasure it was.

Jordi had already been to Everest twice, as part of the first Catalan expeditions in 1983 and 1985, when Òscar Cadiach, Toni Sors, and Carles Vallès reached the summit. Jordi telling us about his experiences taught us to perform as well as we could in competitions, but also to be safe and fully equipped on a mountain. I have the impression he, in fact, doubted that any of his students would end up becoming professionals and contend for world championships, and that’s why he focused on making sure we first enjoyed the mountains and the effort.

During one of those trainings, as we were climbing the Tossa d’Alp for the second or third time that day, a few feet before reaching the highest slopes, those of us who were up ahead, making a huge effort to catch up with Jordi—who was climbing calmly—stopped to take off our skins to go down and do another ascent. He planted himself ahead of us with a hand on his chin, striking a thoughtful pose, and, in a sarcastic tone so as not to sound too important, he let slip:

“The summit’s up there, you know!”

We looked at him to see if he was being serious. We had come there to train, to cover the meters of that slope without wasting any time. Even if it would take us only twenty seconds to reach the highest point—taking off our skis, walking a little to the summit, then putting them back on—it would cause us to lose a couple of minutes on each ascent and disrupt the pace we had set.

Jordi was adamant. “Well, do we ski and climb mountains, or not? And mountain climbing is all about reaching the summit, right?”

There is no equality in competitive sports. If, for example, I had wanted to be a basketball player, even if I had been passionately committed, tried with all my might, and broken my back with the effort, the truth is, I wouldn’t have gotten very far. Already, as a young kid in the admission tests for the Centro de Tecnificación, I showed the necessary qualities to forge a future in mountain endurance sports. Despite being at the lower end of the group for strength and explosive power, I felt comfortable when we ran uphill, and I could hold my own alongside those who were older than me. It must have been because I had a high capacity for recovery and a small, light body, which helped me a lot in the beginning. We can’t choose our genes or our build, and they’ll be with us for our whole lives. But they’re far from enough in determining who will be successful. Natural predisposition should always be accompanied by hard work and passion. I’ve had the good luck to be able to bring these requirements together—something not all athletes can do. There are those who approach their activity passionately. Maybe their body and their abilities don’t match their passion, and after years of stoical persistence they can achieve great results, but without the necessary extra factors, they can’t achieve full excellence. There are also people with immense ability but who don’t love their sport enough to have a successful career. They don’t put enough effort into it and end up unmotivated.

Though it might be hard to believe, I didn’t plan to practice mountain sports. It was my parents who introduced me to this world, when I was very little, as they also did with my sister. We lived in a mountain refuge at an altitude of 2,000 meters, and the shelves were filled with books by mountaineers Kurt Diemberger, Roger Frison-Roche, and Walter Bonatti. During school vacations, we always went somewhere in the Pyrenees or the Alps to do mountains.

It may seem like a paradox, but often such an intense immersion in an activity can lead a child, in adolescence, to do exactly the opposite of what their parents want. But I imagine both my sister and I still love the mountains because we built a much deeper relationship with them that went beyond the simple pleasure of practicing a sport.

I remember that when we were still little kids clinging to our mother’s legs, sometimes, after dinner, after we’d put on our pajamas and brushed our teeth, our mother would take us by the hand and lead us outside. We would go into the dark forest with no light to guide us. We would stray from the paths and walk on the moss and fallen branches until we could no longer see the light from the house, and then she would let go of our hands, tell us to listen to the sounds of the forest, and find our way back to the refuge alone. At first, we were afraid of the sounds and the darkness. “What if there’s a wolf? What if we get lost and can’t find our way back?” and then we would get frightened and run for our mother’s protection. But gradually we grew accustomed to the darkness and the night’s murmurs: a branch creaking because of the drop in temperature at night, the hum of the air stirred by a partridge flapping its wings as it took off, or the whistle of the wind through the trees. When we heard all this, we regained our calmness, greeted the wind and the animals, and followed the signs leading us back to the refuge. In this natural and almost unconscious way, we learned from our mother to be part of the mountain.

Years went by, and when I was a teenager, I discovered that I had masochistic tendencies. That was when I put the last, indispensable piece of the puzzle in place, completing the picture that would open the door to being a professional athlete. I had put the first piece in place the day I began to sculpt my muscles and tendons and to move naturally over uneven terrain, during trips into the mountains with my parents. The long hours on mountain trails had also trained my heart for stamina. Now my body was primed.

Despite being a good student, I was bored by the scene at school. I had zero social life and didn’t even try to make friends. I was interested only in learning. While my classmates waited impatiently for the bell to ring so they could go have a drink, play in the park, race home to play video games, or try to hook up with someone, all I could think about was putting on my sneakers to go for a run. I wanted to feel exhaustion in my heart and pain in my legs again.

I took advantage of any free moment to train. Before sunrise, if I could, I slipped out to ski with my mom, or just went out for a run, or slid the 25 kilometers from home to school on my roller skis. At lunchtime, instead of heading to the dining hall, I went out to bounce around on the outskirts of town, and on the three days when Maite Hernández had me do strength training, I went to the city’s gym. When I came home in the afternoon, I’d barely even put my backpack in my room before taking off on my bike or going for a run. If Maite told me to rest, I was glued to the TV, watching the DVD La Tecnica dei Campioni over and over again, in which the movements of the greatest ski mountaineers, such as Stéphane Brosse, Rico Elmer, Florent Perrier, and Guido Giacomelli, were analyzed in simple terms. I didn’t care if I had no friends or people called me weird because all I wanted to know was how far my body could go.

This dynamic continued in college. Apart from my classmates who were also involved in sports, my social life was limited to the people I saw at races. I never went on any end-of-semester trips, never put in an appearance at parties or dances, and never touched a drop of alcohol, except at times when I was, shall we say, forced. I avoided these kinds of situations because I had the impression that they were just a waste of time and energy, and that it would be more helpful for me to train or rest.

If you’re thinking right now that when I was young I tended to disconnect from my surroundings and had a closed outlook, you’re probably not far off. I had no doubt, from the moment I decided to dedicate my life to sports, that for some doors to open for me, others would have to close forever.

To me, sport doesn’t mean a life full of sacrifices but rather one full of choices. You make choices about where you want to go, and the secret lies in prioritizing what you really want to do and sticking to the plan you’ve made without hesitation. At the end of the day, what’s more important? Having friends and a girlfriend or striving to become the world champion of your discipline?

I began to train myself during my early years in college. For five years, with Maite as my coach, I learned the basic rules of training, like rationing my efforts and understanding the relationship between workload, rest, and overcompensation, and planning my training in the mid- to long-term according to my goals. In those five years, I managed to turn the masochist, thoughtlessly tackling ascents, into someone who could train to win important races. In addition to Maite’s patience as I incorporated these ideas and put them into practice, the other factor that helped me improve was an injury when I was eighteen, which kept me out of action for six months. The surgeon who operated on me noted that I might not be able to perform as well as before. The anxiety he instilled in me and the realization that an accident can ruin a career inspired me to study the factors that influence athletic performance as if I were possessed: biomechanics, training, psychology, technique, equipment, diet … It was a good lesson. Having to deal with a defective leg was not a hindrance but rather allowed me to open my mind to important decisions I would need to make on my journey. The questions I asked myself about the workings of the mind and body intensified in the years when I studied physical education in college. But I have always been impatient. I was incapable of waiting around to learn about conclusions that might be of use to me. Now that I was winning races and felt confident in my daily training, I began to experiment with my body.

My idea was to push a specific aspect of my body to the limit, such as my metabolism’s ability to work at aerobic capacity with no energy input, or the possibility to repeat anaerobic exercises at a high altitude and then recover, to mention a couple of things that preoccupied me. If I solved these mysteries, not only could I take advantage of the results and theoretical adaptations, but also I would feel the potential and the limits of my body, in all its rigor, with total precision.

Of course, to conduct those experiments I had to take advantage of periods when I wasn’t competing, so I had enough time to recover if things got out of control. I also had to conduct them on safe, familiar terrain that was nearby, in case I got hurt and had to rush home.

During my college years, I went to only one party, which a classmate tricked me into attending, after one of these training experiments. And even today, I still believe I let myself be convinced because my will was crushed by exhaustion.

It must have been the spring of 2008. I was in Font-Romeu and wanted to test my body’s capacity for action without any energy input. In other words, I wanted to know how many days I could spend training and running without eating anything. To find out, I went about my life as usual, running two to four hours in the morning and another hour in the afternoon, but eliminated all meals. I had to adjust the logistics ahead of time since I had no doubt that if there was food in the room, my hunger would take over. I emptied the fridge and the pantry, handed the contents to a friend, and gave him strict instructions not to feed me anything, even if I showed up begging in the wee hours. I only allowed myself to drink as much water as I liked.

I should clarify that all I wanted to find out through this experiment was how long I could run without added energy, with only the fat and muscle protein my body already had as fuel, and to study the stages of the process. I never for a moment thought of it as a weight-loss therapy or a way to discover if I could perform as well while eating less.

Unfortunately, in extreme sports, especially in disciplines in which weight is very important—and that includes ski mountaineering—many athletes are obsessed with losing weight, and for them, this is a recurring and highly relevant problem. I know athletes who have spent half a lifetime going hungry to maintain their target weight; others who get up at the crack of dawn to ransack the fridge because they can’t stand to train anymore without eating; and those who induce vomiting after they eat, to trick their hunger and keep their weight down.

If we have to accept that extreme sports are unhealthy because we take our bodies to the limit and run the risk of injury, we should also be clear that we must be the ones to manage our own bodies and that they should always be under our control. When we’re guided by our basic urges, we’ve already lost. If we’re not in control of what we do, the sport loses its beauty and leads us into a downward spiral that can plunge us into the darkness of depression or illnesses like bulimia and anorexia. In extreme cases, we lose our sense of the meaning of life and throw it away. Sadly, this continues to be a taboo topic in the sports world, but it needs to be brought out into the open.

Let’s get back to the experiment in Font-Romeu.

After removing all the food from my room and with the will to reach the end, I began to run. Since I was young, my body has been used to running for hours with my parents without eating anything, so the first day, I didn’t notice any decline in my performance. Well, to be honest, at the end of the day, when I was alone in my room, I was ravenous. After a night of hunger, in the morning I set off on my usual route, which took between three and four hours. I went out to the Font-Romeu Hermitage and up to the highest part of the ski slopes, down the other side, and looped around one of the lakes, climbing one of the peaks of the Bouillouses or Pic Carlit. On my way back, I headed toward the area above the ski slopes and then back down to the apartments. During the gentle ascent to the slopes, I could assess the effects of my experiment clearly.

My overall pace had hardly changed, since I was able to run at a moderate speed for hours with no great difficulty, but whereas I usually sped up as fast as I could during that climb to the slopes, after a second day without eating, it was impossible. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sprint. My body had become a tractor running on diesel that could move slowly across great distances but had lost its power.

On the third and fourth days, everything stayed more or less the same. But on the fifth, during my morning run, I fainted and collapsed on the ground.

Luckily, I came round by myself a short time later. I hadn’t been in any danger because the path was well traveled, and if necessary, someone would have been able to help. I went back to the hermitage, went to my friend’s room, and ate.

That same week, I was persuaded to go to an end-of-semester party. I spent a moment or two in the limelight, because I passed out drinking an orange juice.

Since then, I have practiced a method for getting to know my body and the benefits of better training. I have experimented with sleep, hydration, and several kinds of training, running at high altitudes, trying out different equipment, and practicing a hundred hours a week. Most of these experiments have ended up in disaster. I didn’t perform the way I hoped to, and I was so tired that I didn’t get much out of it. Despite this, through each of these experiments, I found clues and ideas for improving and pushing my limits.

My most recent experiment allowed me to explore how I adjust to high altitudes. When I began the Summits of My Life project in 2012, during which I sought to set ascent and descent records on the world’s highest peaks, this was one of my greatest concerns. And ever since my first trip to the Himalayas, in 2013, each year I have done at least one expedition or spent a period at high altitude trying out different methods of acclimation—always with the intention of not staying long, because there are more interesting things in life than spending three months at the foot of a mountain.

Though I acclimated well on my first trip to the Himalayas, I would have liked to be able to climb faster. Then, in 2014, I went to Denali, Alaska, and I burned out. Despite feeling good at the end of the first few days—we were there two weeks—after going up and down the mountain quickly, I had no energy left. Later that same year, I went to Aconcagua. I wanted to do an acclimation exercise in the Alps, and it worked out well. After four days in Argentina, I reached the summit of Aconcagua, but later, my desire to train faster and faster had a negative effect, and the day I broke a record, I suffered a cerebral edema, completely losing control of my legs in the first half of the descent. They seemed to be made of Jell-O; I lost my balance and kept falling onto the ground.

Over the next three years, I went to the Himalayas and tried out various strategies: low activity, high activity, gradual or rapid training … In the end, when it came to the expedition to Everest, my acclimation and high-altitude performance were perfect.

I know the way I train can be dangerous. For one reason: my method is oriented toward figuring out my limits. In the worst-case scenario, and depending on what I’m trying to accomplish, I could end up overstepping those limits and risking my life. It’s different from preparing your body to be at its peak and in the best possible condition on a given day to take on a challenge or break a record. Very different.

Had I kept running without eating after having passed out, during that experiment in Font-Romeu—which I don’t recommend anyone try—I have no idea what the consequences might have been. If, on another occasion, I hadn’t hydrated after aching all over and noticing that my urine was blacker than coal, I would have suffered acute kidney damage. These are extreme cases—there’s no doubt about it.

The purpose of my experiments wasn’t just physical; they also allowed me to gain confidence in myself. I knew firsthand what I was capable of, and I learned to suffer and get the most out of my body, squeezing every last drop of energy from it when I lost my strength or my motivation dwindled. You have to be fast to win races, but that alone isn’t enough to make you competitive. You must be aware that you can’t overcome your body’s physiological limits. On the other hand, if you want to do as well as possible, what you can do is build up an armor made of different pieces: mental preparation, technique, the kind of equipment you use, and your strategy. Your body possesses immense knowledge and, when necessary, sends signals asking you if you want to keep going or not. Those warning bells are called fainting, leg pain, hallucinations, and vomiting. Whether you want to break the final barrier depends on you and you alone.

There is one more limit, a psychological one. This one is called fear. It’s a great travel companion and has two sides. On the one hand, if you ignore it, you can overcome all your psychological obstacles and gain a true understanding of how far you can go. On the other, if you don’t learn how to listen to it, it can end up leading you into an abyss. You must assess which is the better partner to dance with.

I love physical training. Years and years of work and almost total abstinence in search of the ideal, fleeting moment that ends in a sigh. It’s different from intellectual activity, in which the knowledge you constantly acquire and accumulate stays with you. When you work with the body, nothing you win ever belongs to you or lasts forever, since you always have to keep training just as hard, to keep the bar as high as you want it to be.

Many athletes train from childhood to compete and be champions, but only a very few chosen ones end up making it. Often the result is people with hugely inflated egos, carrying around a backpack full of frustration. I believe that children should be coached not to win but to train. If this were the general pattern, everyone would have their slice of delicious cake, and the competition would just be the cherry on top. I was lucky enough that this was the first thing Maite Hernández and Jordi Canals taught me. Training was necessary, competition was optional, and the time to compete would come when it came. This approach turned out to be very useful to me years later, when I was climbing Mount Everest.

Maite and Jordi also taught me to be methodical and analytical, to note everything about my performance so I could analyze it later and identify anything that hadn’t worked out well. This meant tallying everything up: the time and kilometers I trained, the number of hours I slept—and whether I had taken advantage of them—and more.

I wrote everything down, without missing a detail, in a notebook with square, ruled pages—I was meticulous. Every two weeks, Maite and I would get together to review it and talk about what I should do in the next two weeks. From her, I learned the importance of taking precise notes and not leaving out any detail that might be important later.

I remember one day when I was training at the center. It was very hot, and as usual I had no liquid with me. After a few hours of activity, I was dying of thirst, and Maite offered me some water. When I leapt forward to grab her flask, she suddenly snatched it away.

“Haven’t you learned anything from what I’ve taught you? Imagine if I had a cold and you drank this water that I’ve been drinking, with all its viruses and bacteria. What about the week of training we have planned?”

When I began to train alone, I continued with the methodical task of writing everything down. In 2006, I made an Excel document where I recorded everything: each activity, every day I was sick, every car or plane journey that affected my rest, every public event that made me lose concentration when training, every strange or pleasant sensation.

Interpreting all this data is a complex task that requires me to keep my feet on the ground. I have to be as honest as I can in my notes. If I’m not, a few years from now, when I want to know why I did so well in a given week, everything I might extrapolate from these records would be wrong. Despite the fact that I’m the only person who reads this document, sometimes it’s hard to avoid falling into the trap of false modesty or overvaluation.

For example, one day I wrote:

“February 16, 2005. Pulse 42 when I woke up, 2 hours 30 minutes of ski mountaineering—2,300 meters. 30-minute warm-up, 6 sets of 15 seconds at maximum, and 5 sets of 6 minutes at 180 pulse with 1 minute rest. In the first rest periods I went down well to 130 pulse, from the third on I didn’t go below 150. Afternoon stretches. I have a cold.”

And another day:

“June 14, 2011. Morning: Les Houches, Mont Blanc (4 hours 7 minutes), a bit tired, but I can still force myself. 4,200-meter slope. Afternoon: gentle bike 1 hour 30 minutes, 300 meters, legs heavy but in good cardio shape. Interview and trip.”

The notes were still important as far as races and goals were concerned, because I could see from them whether what I’d done had been of any use:

“August 14, 2013. Sierre-Zinal, 20 miles, 2h 34m 15s: legs very heavy from the beginning, I feel good cardio-wise, but zero legs, pain in left hamstring and right calf. I can’t take the pace, not fast enough on flat ground.”

“August 30, 2008. UTMB [Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc], 100 miles—32,808 feet: 20h 56m 59s (real time 19h 50m), feeling good. Out on my own at my own pace, in Fully, a little sleepy, didn’t eat well, awake and running well again in Champex. Later, the organization stopped me for an hour, and I finished at Mermoud’s insistence, very unmotivated, disappointed and angry.”

“February 9, 2015. Ski Mountaineering World Championships in Verbier. 1,925 meters, 1h 28m 12s. Felt great going up and down, in control. Fresh and sprightly. Calm on the descent. Top form.”

What seems important today, unlike when I started out as an athlete, is to become as fast a professional runner as possible, or proclaim the intensity of your training to the four winds so someone will believe in you. Before, you may have worked in the shadows and it was easy to be rigorous and honest and set yourself realistic goals that were appropriate for your level at a given moment. You trained and trained, and waited for your body to mature, so that maybe after a few years you could win a race. If you didn’t doubt yourself, your expectations could be too high, and if you didn’t give yourself time to do the patient, hard work of an ant, you could end up being mightily disappointed (las hostias pueden ser antológicas).

These days, if you’re a beginner, you have to choose between being a professional, elite runner, belonging to the glorious top five percent in the world, or being a running influencer. If you don’t compete, training becomes a professional accessory, and you have to choose your activities for their visual, communicative, or inspirational appeal as well as their potential to grab the attention of an audience, even though they may have zero athletic draw. If you don’t take this path, you should be aware that the road is long and the results aren’t guaranteed. If you achieve success, it will be after many years of hard work, with no immediate gratification.

Mind you, these are both valid and interesting life paths. The important thing is to know what you want and are looking for, because although the superficial layers of these two ways of life may be similar, they’re actually as different as night and day.

If you want to be an elite runner, you’ll probably accumulate a lot of frustration along the way plus put in a lot of effort that will largely go unnoticed and result in few rewards. In the end, the most valuable prize will be bringing out the best in yourself. If this isn’t enough of a reward, then it’s best to leave it, because you won’t see the point of dedicating your life to difficult, endless training in pursuit of perfection. You won’t understand why you should suffer so many injuries, follow such a strict diet, and deprive yourself of so many things. And all this without being able to take a vacation, because the life you have chosen fills every hour of every day. For decades.

This is the case for some European athletes who abandon the privilege of Western comforts when they’re still young to live a low-profile life, free from distractions, in a spartan room at a high-performance center in Iten, in the Kenyan highlands. There, they lead a monastic existence. And all to hang on to the possibility of one day being in the spotlight and dazzling an audience in some competition. The price of chasing this dream is living in a faraway place and dedicating years to achieving it—years that are impossible to get back if things don’t turn out as they planned.

When I think of all this, the image that comes to mind is of the Font-Romeu Hermitage, which is, metaphorically, my Kenyan Iten, an old monastery converted into college accommodations with simple rooms, no internet access, and limited cell phone reception, at the foot of the ski slopes. Today, whenever I think about the speed of the modern world, the excess of information, stimulation, and stupid distractions, and how all this affects my body, I still take off in my truck and hide away somewhere remote, where no one can find me if I don’t want to be found, and devote myself for a few weeks to regaining control over the essential virtuous cycle of an athlete’s life: eat, train, eat, train, and sleep. Nothing else.

In pre-internet society, it was still possible to seek long-term results in life. Today, it’s practically impossible to find anyone who sets themselves a long-term goal without the certainty of attaining it, since in order to survive, we need our basic needs met. And without knowing exactly how we got here, we have ended up believing that we have far too many basic needs. We live in an era when the memory of a self-sufficient past still endures, when people grew their own food or hunted, built their own houses, and figured out ways to stay healthy. In that context, money wasn’t much of a necessity. But this has no place in the unbridled capitalism of the present, when we are unaccustomed to distinguishing between the money we need for basic day-to-day survival and the money we want to use for pleasure. From this point of view, office or factory work isn’t so different from what an athlete does who trains by running up and down mountains; the economic goal is the same. That’s why we must decide if we want to earn a living with work that provides a dose of passion, or if we want to prostitute ourselves a little with some other job that we don’t like as much but that fills our pockets. We don’t generally think about this when we’re sixteen or seventeen and have to choose how we want to live and how much money we need to do so. This is too bad.

As soon as I won my first world championship, sports brand representatives began to appear out of nowhere, offering me a range of products. When I kept winning competitions, those same people offered me money to keep training and competing. Logically, they made me happy and lifted a weight from my shoulders by solving the financial aspect of my life.

With time, and with the influence of social networks, all this changed significantly. Results have stopped being the most important thing. Before, an athlete won a competition and appeared in the traditional media, or won the applause of other runners and of the audience attending the race. Today, added to all this is what’s known as, ahem, content creation and social communication.

As an athlete, I have always been driven by the single goal of performing as well as I can, of planning projects and setting myself challenges to overcome. This is compatible with being such a hopeless case: I don’t know how to grow a garden, I don’t know how to hunt, and please don’t ask me to build a house. I’m too set in my ways and have interests that take me far away from that kind of utopian way of life. I travel, I pollute, I use the internet; I don’t really like clothes, but we have to protect ourselves from the cold with something. I didn’t have the balls to choose the life of a hermit, and I am willing to prostitute myself to a certain extent in exchange for the money I need to keep surviving and have a good time while pursuing my passions. This has distanced me somewhat from the virtuous eat-sleep-train routine, and I have done and continue to do other kinds of work, like appearing in audiovisual materials and various kinds of media and talking to people. But I’ve had the good luck to be able to choose whom I associate with, and I haven’t been forced to link myself to companies whose values and projects I don’t share or admire. I admit that today I earn more money than I need to live, but I can also guarantee that when the commitments that allow me to earn that money risk distracting me from training and improving my performance, I draw the line. Money won’t give me back the time that could make me lose.

Though I may have pursued progress and constant exploration from the beginning of my career, I never stopped to think about what kind of runner I wanted to be. And this was essential for knowing what kind of training regimen I would have to follow in the long term.

Did I want to be a long-distance runner? Would I rather be a ski mountaineer? Maybe one who competed every week? Or would it be better to be one of those who put themselves to the test a couple of times a year, but with impeccable training? Before anything else, I had to ask myself what kind of runner I admired most: one who can run a marathon in just over two hours, like the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, or one who can compete in over twenty races a year at an extremely high level, like the Japanese runner Yuki Kawauchi? Jeez. If I thought about total performance, Kipchoge; if I focused on recovery, Kawauchi. A big dilemma.

I admire both of these runners; each of them is equally inspiring. But what about me? I like to perform to my full potential, but at the same time, I don’t want this to be detrimental to the other aspects of my activities. How much do I want to risk quality to increase quantity? This question makes my head begin to spin. On one hand, I want to keep fighting to win ski-mountaineering races, like the Pierra Menta, the Fully Vertical Kilometer, a 100-mile Ultra-Trail, or the Zegama marathon, and I don’t want to stop participating in some to focus on others. On the other hand, I can’t avoid the fact that today’s runners are more specialized, and I don’t know if I can stay competitive in all these areas at the same time. Despite everything, my mind wanders freely, and I have realized that for the time being, I’m not as excited about competition as I used to be. I see it as a kind of training. Yes, but what am I training for? And it’s tough to leave the throne explicitly so others can occupy it, because it’s really nice to occupy it yourself.

After these reflections, I went back to my routine. One morning, just like I do every morning, I got up, put on my shorts and sneakers mechanically, and drank a glass of water. I wasn’t especially excited for the coming Sunday’s race. Not enough to torture my body for the three or four hours I’d planned. I put on my headphones and selected a playlist I’d titled “Training.” I was mad at myself because I hadn’t given enough recognition to the fact that I do what I love, that I’m able to run, surrounded by stunning landscapes. I let the music take my mind off the passage of time, listened to the lyrics to a Sopa de Cabra song, and started to jog.

Rivers of wounded

People run alone

Spitting their failure.

I kept running just out of inertia, without any goal. The song made me feel worse and worse, because I recognized myself in its lyrics.

As they cry

Out of anger and love

For a nonexistent name.

I will turn back

When I’m too far away

I will turn back

When it’s already too late.

I reached the summit and stopped. I had planned to do three rapid ascents, since that’s what I usually did this time of year, but I no longer saw the point. I realized something wasn’t right: that clear vision I’d had of everything had disappeared. Even though I know that one life contains many, for me it’s a tragedy that we keep living just one, when its time is up.

I descended calmly, moving my legs little by little, but my head moved too fast and it wouldn’t stop spinning. I wondered: What can give me the motivation to keep training so hard? My legs again sped up out of inertia. I began to think I should go back to my origins, that I should recover what made me tick before I knew what it meant to train and compete.

Preparing the Attack on Everest

It’s hard for me to think of climbing a mountain as heroic. I know it’s easy to make it look that way. When you’re at the foot of a great mountain with glaciers towering above you, rocks that come loose in the heat, and distances that seem unconquerable, it’s easy to convince others that climbing it is a titanic feat requiring superhuman physical abilities and the courage of the gods. But—sorry to disappoint you—this isn’t the reality. Climbing a mountain is just putting your life in danger to try to reach the summit, and then coming down again. Clearly, this puts you in a category closer to stupidity than to heroism.

No matter how many athletes pretend this isn’t the case, coordinating their expeditions with fundraising campaigns for charity or raising awareness about a rare disease, there’s nothing heroic about climbing a high peak in the Himalayas. In fact, it’s a selfish enterprise. A dangerous and expensive leisure activity.

I’ve always been drawn to high mountains, but the classic expedition dynamic doesn’t appeal to me. Having to spend two to three months in a tent at base camp, waiting for a window of good weather that will allow you to undertake the ascent, seems to me like a pointless waste of time. Boredom and idleness are the two words that best summarize life at base camp. To make things worse, your physical condition deteriorates and your motivation gets buried beneath the snow. Life at base camp is like being trapped in a mountainous paradise, a prisoner of rest between the walls of your tent. In an ocean of gray stone and a desert of white powder, surrounded by dry air and beneath a blue sky. Flanked by rocky mountains, with a river of cold water crossing this desert of powder and cutting its snaking path toward lower terrain, to feed the grass and a few bushes.

If I go upstream, I will find the slope marked by mounds of stone that rumple the terrain like a tattered blanket, and farther up, I will glimpse the ice of an immense glacier. The wind is constant as it rushes down from the mountains, escaping from the white peaks along the same route as the river. During one visit to Everest, there were four small tents and another larger one at the edge of the slope, all a sun-bleached shade of yellow. Inside the largest one, it was like being at a regular campsite, with four chairs and a thermos of tea. I listened to the wind whip the walls, and a movie image of a helicopter came to mind, its propellers turning as it approached and retreated in turn, but it wouldn’t leave, like in a nightmare.

There was a book in front of me that I’d already read a couple of times, and I regretted having left all the others at home. The clock only told two times: six in the morning, when we would meet for breakfast, and six in the evening, when we would get together again for dinner. In between, there were no hours, there were no minutes, no seconds, only time that dragged on indefinitely. So fucking boring. I stared into the distance, hoping to find any distraction. I no longer had the keen, restless gaze of the first few days; now my eyes had been dried by the wind and reacted only to a previously unseen mountain I dreamed of climbing, a black dog roaming around with the same look in its eyes as me, a cloud formation that reminded me of the outline of another, identical cloud I had seen one fall afternoon at home.

Soon after arriving, I had seen Vivian Bruchez take a Coca-Cola can and scratch some figures onto it with a Swiss Army knife, and I’d laughed at him; a few days later, I had spent hours looking over the enormous pile of silvery sculptures growing higher and higher. There were simple ones (a face, a mountain with ski tracks) and more complex ones (a climber abseiling down a rock face with a rope, a harness, and even some ice axes cut out of the tin). As he sculpted in silence, our absent gazes forgot the passage of time.

I watched Vivian in the throes of artistic creation, and suddenly I noticed my clothes were making me itch. My merino wool underwear was starting to get worn out. They were almost new when I arrived, but in a few days, they had become frayed. When I packed only a couple of pairs for the expedition, thinking of keeping the weight under the baggage limit, I hadn’t realized that washing them in highly mineralized glacial water and hanging them in the dry air would weaken the fibers. Yes, the hole in the crotch was inevitable, and now one of my balls hung out when I walked.

In my tent, I grabbed a pen and held it above the blank paper like a weapon. I had no ideas. In fact, I had only one: everything has been written, everything is plagiarism, we drive ourselves insane by repeating things over and over and over; it’s impossible to say anything new. I flipped through the pages of the notebook that had been with me for years on my travels and expeditions. I looked at the sketches I had done of prototypes for climbing boots, tents that would give better protection against the wind, and lightweight ice axes. I read my annotations on the calendars, times and dates with details of activities, a few thoughts, and phone numbers and contact info for people I’d met at some camp, whom I never ended up contacting. I paused at a page I had written in Alaska, when I went to run the Mount Marathon race, only 5K long, which leaves from Seward, at sea level, and goes up and down the peak behind the town, with an almost 1,000-meter slope. I remembered that on my way there I had wondered if it was worth it to take such a long trip for such a short race, about forty minutes. But it had ended up being one of the most interesting races I’d ever run.

I’m sweating and the sweat streams down my face, gets into my eyes and makes them sting. I can only see my hands resting on my knees, pressing my legs to climb faster, and if I look up, Rickey Gates’s ass. I know there’s a steep slope of black dirt up ahead, and beyond that, the summit, which we’ll go halfway around. My heavy breathing forces me to keep looking down at my hands on my legs. Hey, Rickey, what’s the rush? Couldn’t we let up a bit? I think. But we don’t slow down, and when it’s my turn to set the pace, I try to challenge him by going even faster. I breathe hard and I run. My calf muscles will never love me; I’ve been abusing them for years and now they’re more tense than a set of guitar strings. Between each breath, I wipe the sweat from my brow and eyes with my hand. I’ll need to be able to keep my eyes wide open when I run down at full tilt among all these rocks. I reach the summit and only have time to open my lungs and take a gulp of air. And then the rock and roll begins. And it won’t stop until the finish line. And I don’t want to go down head over heels. And it will go on all night. They say here that laws exist but they were written in a far-off place. I’m from Europe, where trail running is just called trail for short, and is drunk on its own success, and now the fresh air of Alaska penetrates the whole event. You have to run up and down until you bleed, and celebrate it intensely. That is all.

When someone pontificates, they clearly do so to protect their work, and they do so perpetuating the standards by which it was shaped. This someone tries to convince future generations that in order to achieve excellence, they should follow the same rules. But it’s 4:30 in the morning—it’s always 4:30 in the morning, just like Charles Bukowski said. We’re so absorbed in our own path, in our effort to concentrate on doing everything well, with a religious passion for our discipline, and a fear of the unknown, that we keep our eyes on the road, on our hands pushing our knees. And we don’t realize we’re following the rules of a man who ran a horse race on foot, or of one who climbed higher than 8,000 meters alone without oxygen, or one who decided to leave his pitons, ropes, and safety harness at home, to become one with the face of the mountain. We’re following the rules of those who broke them. Maybe it’s time to break the rules and erase the pages we’ve written, though sometimes the ink is so dry that it’s hard to see the blank paper. The backpack of our experiences should be a tool kit full of resources, but all too often it’s nothing but a dead weight that doesn’t allow us to fly freely.

I got up and went out, ready to climb one of the nearby peaks. I didn’t have permission to do so, and it was possible that I’d be so tired when I finished that my chances of reaching the summit I’d come there to conquer would be reduced. But I had no patience, and I hated wasting time.