Final Prep

There is a little over a week before I go. Lucky for me I love gear, because for Everest I need a lot of it.  The list is too long to duplicate, but needless to say there are duplicates of many items. Going through everything, checking it twice, takes time. But there is another process that is occurring.  I am about to leave the world for several months and I need to prepare everything else for the time I am away. Climbing Everest is not just a physical challenge, it is a mental challenge as well. Not a mental challenge like an extremely technical climb is, but one in which you have to keep a focused headspace. I leave Saskatoon in the last grips of a long cold winter, to go and climb up into a colder and meaner one, and when I return several months from now I...

Gearing Down

In less than twenty days I will be heading to the Big E.  As the departure date for Katmandu nears, I have been receiving many of comments about how I must be in a really high gear of my training.  It is exactly the opposite; I have been and will continue to be gearing down.  That said, I am still training 7 – 10 hours a week but along with the time, the intensity has been lessened. The fact is, with climbing as a passion I always train.  While it would be extremely trite to say Everest is just another mountain (because it is not, it is in a class all by itself because of its height), in some ways to me this is another climb on the list of climbs that I want to do.  I recently reflected about how many days I have been in the mountains climbing the past 12...

Road Warrior Training

As I write this, I know I have eight hours, one more airport and one more flight to go before I get home. Home…it seems like a foreign concept after staying in five different cities over eight days. This amount of travel can be quite disorientating. Moving around so much, you start to feel disconnected from your life. Zipping across the continent – first west, then east, then south – with the time zone changes affects your sleep cycles. As well, business travel is busy, you try to pack as much as possible in while you are there for the short time. Flying is not fast, it is a time sucker. So how do you train when travelling? You lower your expectations and do what you can. In the last eight days I only got in four cardio sessions (three runs and...

Minus 44 with the Wind Chill

  Part of my training for Everest is not just increasing endurance, cardio and strength. There is also gear prep and making sure the systems all work together the way they should. With that in mind, I have been marching around in my new high altitude boots to break them in. Further to that goal, I have left the outer boots in my garage overnight (they are a double boot system) to simulate putting on a frozen boot in the morning on the mountain. Trust me, it can be quite challenging – there have been times at altitude in which putting on my boots took 15 minutes alone! All that said, when a weather watch was announced on the radio that outside temperatures would be plummeting below -40, I got excited! Perfect! I can try out my high altitude system to see...

Back on Ice: Guinness Gully and Guinness Stout

At 5:00 am while driving out to Field, BC from Calgary,  I mentioned to my climbing partner Jeff Dmytrowich: “One of the these weekend climbing trips I want to roll into it with lots of sleep instead of none from travelling the week prior.” So that was the start of a long day –  I was already tired with ambitions to climb 5 pitches of vertical ice (Grade 4 and Grade 4 +)  with a bit of a grinding slog between pitch 3 and 4. We parked at the trailhead, read the route description and began slogging our way up through trees on steep terrain until we found a trail.  The route description indicated a 15 -20 minute approach,  so at 35 minutes we knew something was wrong, but felt we must be going towards the climb or at least the upper pitches.  The path...

Dealing With Old Pains

The week of training after a week on the road and a climbing weekend was not fun.  On Monday morning the yoga hurt and the noon hour cardio was terrible. Fast forward to Tuesday – the morning and noon workouts were exercises in mental will more than body and the Tuesday night climbing session was a lack luster showing at best. By Wednesday things turned around and life goes on. A week later, just when I thought I was getting back into the swing of things, old friends started popping up. My tendons in my arms ached a couple of nights. Over a year ago from mixed climbing (climbing on rock to get to ice) I started to get tendonitis. Was the tendonitis coming back? I also noticed my right hamstring was tight and beginning to throb a bit, just a bit during some of...