Part V: Elegance.
This is a series of journal entries from my recent trip to the mountains...which I fell in love with originally when I first visited K2. Read about that here.
Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 came before. This is Part 5.
I realized today that one can spent years at the gym, and months preparing for a climb, track every metric there is to track, eat all the right things — and yet still come up short and be humbled by the mountain.
Today I slipped, fell, crashed, and ran out of steam enough times that I eventually lost count. There is not a muscle in my body that is not screaming. I’ve got new bruises, including one on my head from my own ice axe.
Ali Jaan (the guide) is a wonderful coach. Ali is 65, and has the kind of face that crinkles when he smiles. He’s a deep introvert — so doesn’t say much, but when he does, it feels like he’s giving me the outcome of hours of processing that he’s been doing. He has the kind of patience that only comes after training a generation of mountaineers from all over the world. I love having him around.
Midway into the climbing session today, I was spent. Ali pulled me aside and told me I was a) trying too hard and b) letting doubt creep in. He told me I looked like I was ‘attacking’ the mountain. And when I did that, I spent more energy than was necessary.
It was true. I’ve generally considered myself a fit person, but this is a different world. I was abusing my capacity and brute forcing the mountain.
The second thing Ali Jaan pointed out had to do with my fear. I would be doing well, humming along an ice wall, and then suddenly I would drop a carabiner or miss a grip. Ali asked me to watch myself when this happened. It was less that the slip was exhausting - it had more to do with how my mind punished my body after perceived failure. My heart rate would shoot up, more fumbles would follow the first one, and soon I would come crashing to the ground.
Ali Jaan told me to stop worrying.
I went at it again. My crampon slipped — and sure enough, there it was — a doom spiral. Within seconds, I was on the ground on my back again.
I realized that soothing your mind out of a doom spiral is easier said than done. Even if you notice it, it’s hard to not be scared.
When Ali Jaan found me on the ground again and hastily hurried over to pick me up, I told him I was done and that perhaps this wasn’t for me. My bruises at this point were stinging, my arms and legs were stiff, and I just wanted all of it to be over.
Ali Jaan kept postponing it. Got me busy in some stories about Japanese climbers as I ate some fresh snow. And then gently, he began to ask me why I was so scared. What is the worst that could happen? He told me to rest as long as I wanted and then go again.
Reluctantly I did. And as I went, Ali Jaan kept looking from down below and saying ‘what’s the worst that will happen?’
And so that’s where my falling became a feature instead of a bug. I fell so much that I began to stop treating it as the end of the world, and started treating it like another attempt.
And then soon enough, I got better, and climbed the whole route across multiple ice walls. I loved how happy Ali Jaan was.
He was so happy in fact, that he recommended that I lead a whole route — which involved fixing screws and going up on a wall to build the rope route that others would follow. And this time, no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t succeed. I was surprised to see that this time It was Ali Jaan who said we should pause and go back to camp. There was something about my mistakes that signalled to him that it was less to do with what I was thinking and more to do with the state of my exhaustion.
I found myself realising: this is why they categorize mountaineering as an endurance sport. Our camp was nearby today, but had I been halfway up a mountain, this exhaustion would have been fatal.
On the way back, Ali told me that the best mountaineers are elegant. And by this he meant that these people are never in a hurry. They pace themselves, and never ‘attack’ the mountain. They also spend their energy wisely, so much so that you would look at them and think all of this was very easy. And finally, they treat failure as failure, and move on pretty fast.
That kind of elegance, Ali Jaan said, was my goal.
I realized today that controlling ones mind — in mountaineering and in real life — is hard.
And once one learns how to do this, everything automatically follows.
You can climb both literal and figurative mountains elegantly.