Blog
Training for Everest 2015
Training For Everest 2015 Climbing Mount Everest demands that you train the hardest you have in your whole life. No matter what climbs and training you have done in the past, every aspect of your conditioning must be harder, higher and farther than ever before. During...
I’M CLIMBING EVEREST!
After 37 years of dreaming, training and preparing, I’m going to attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest. When I read my first Everest book back in the 1970’s, I was awed by the adventurous spirit and passionate lives of high-altitude climbers. By the 1980’s I...
FIGHT GRAVITY
To make the most of your life, you must fight gravity. I studied geology in college for seven years and I even passed physics and astronomy, so I know that gravity is relentless. In the halls of the science building, I saw a t-shirt which said “Gravity: it’s not just...
HANDLING MORE
In physical conditioning, there is a concept called “progressive overload”. The idea is that you gradually add more and more of whatever exercise you want to do. By increasing the load you expect your body to handle, it adapts and becomes stronger and more capable. ...
ENDURING DISCOMFORT
Life is uncomfortable at 24,000 feet. I could barely eat or sleep. I couldn't sit up without getting a headache. Sprawled out across my smelly sleeping bag, my pulse throbbed angrily at 100 beats per minute. My blood, thick with an excess of newly forged red blood...
STICK TOGETHER
Vicious cold burned my gasping lungs as I strained to pull oxygen from the mountain air. Rescuing this unconscious climber from the upper slopes of Mount McKinley (20,320 feet) would push us to our physical limits, and maybe far past our safety margin. The risks...
Making an Episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive
The Animal Planet TV show "I Shouldn't Be Alive" is very popular, so after the "Killer Crevasse" episode about me and my friend Mike Price began airing in January 2011, I have been contacted by lots of interested and interesting people. Recently, I was asked to appear...
Resilience, not Resistance – Filming ‘I Shouldn’t Be Alive’
The cavernous room was dark. I struggled not to squint at the bright stage lamps streaming light against my face and eyes. From the twilight edge of my vision, just left of the huge video camera, the interviewer's voice thrust forth question after question, each one...
By truck from Tingri – A long and dusty ride
We arrived yesterday by truck from Tingri after a long and dusty ride. Base Camp is well organized and IMG is doing a great job of running the logistics. Food is good and there is plenty of it. My teammates all speak English quite well (much better than my Polish!) so English is the lingua franca of Base Camp. And everyone has been on adventures around the world, including both poles.
Back to Training
Tomorrow we move to the last town along the road – Tingri. We will rest there for two more days while our bodies build up even more red blood cells. We’ll need them to trap more oxygen from the ever-thinning air. Each day we inch closer to the mountain,Cho Oyu, where the real test of our training begins.