The good thing about me normally restricting myself to writing about my diving and dive trips is that there is rarely the opportunity to slide into those areas of discussion where people say "Oh, I did not need to know that" or hold a hand up and say "Oh, too much personal information."  However, this little blog is covering the lead up to my attempt to climb to the top of Mount Rainier in Washington, and, therefore, anything goes.

 

There are three sections to this blog:

 

 

 

 

As I said on the home page, the trip came about from a comment in a bar from a good friend of mine, Steve Huff.  "Let’s climb a mountain", "Yes" I said, expecting that in the normal way of the world, those bar-based conversations tend to be forgotten by morning.  However, Steve is made of sterner stuff than that, and before I knew it, we were signed up for a 3 Day Muir Climb on Mount Rainier.

 

This first section is going to run through some of my scattered thought processes and training leading up to the climb.  The second section will cover the climb itself which starts on June 15, 2011.  The reason for the warning at the start is that subjects that will be covered May (or may not!) include (click to go to the section if you really cannot be bothered to read all the drivel in between!):

 

 

For two weeks after the infamous "Let's climb a mountain" comment, I wandered blissfully through my normal weeks of work, travel, occasional runs on treadmills with little enthusiasm, because nowhere on the machine does it say - "reverses the effects of aging."  In fact, all the instructions say are that if you operate the machine incorrectly or have high blood pressure, it could actually kill you.  What's more, the hotel, well aware that some middle-aged dude is trying to run and could for any number of unseen medical complications drop dead at any moment, put up a sign saying that 'you exercise at your own risk' and that the 'hotel is not responsible.'  They even put rubber on the floor so that if your expiration happens to be messy in any way, they can wash you away quickly. 

 

The problem with traveling a lot for work is that I do have to use the inaptly named hotel 'fitness rooms' for my training, and once the fact that I was actually going to do this mountain 'hike' (as I thought it was at the time) sunk in, I had to start thinking about which of the hotels that I stayed in had decent running machines and weights. 

 

One thing that I have noticed about all hotel fitness rooms is that there is not a heart defibrillator anywhere in sight.  All the guys that are over 50 and plodding along on the running machines have been told to run by their doctors because (a) they have recently had a heart attack (b) they have high blood pressure or (c) they have a major cholesterol anomaly that they are fighting.  Note - stroke victims rarely use hotel fitness machines, because they have a tendency to keep falling off on the right hand side of the machine.  Someone really should invent a circular running machine so that stroke victims can get exercise without falling on innocent heart attack patients in Hampton Inn fitness rooms.

 

So based on the fact that over 50-year olds running on hotel treadmills are an accident waiting to happen, why isn't there a defibrillator, large first aid kit, and gurney lurking in the fitness rooms?  Even the emergency telephones are four feet above the ground.  How is a heart attack victim supposed to reach that?  Climb on the water fountain and leap?

 

 

For those of us who are not 50, but are on the wrong end of 40 and have not had a heart attack (yet), do not suffer from high blood pressure (yet), or have a major cholesterol problem....yet, we get to be there because:

 

 

So one guy is running and another guy walks in and starts running next to him.  Neither will look at each other, but both will run faster and longer than they would have if they were in there on their own - unspoken competition between men of a certain age is mandatory.  If, for some reason, a 20-something year old woman should walk into the gym to warm up for an extreme triathlon, both guys will forget about each other and have a better workout than they would have done, secretly competing with themselves.  The only difference is that now they will actually acknowledge each other long enough to show that they are interested in her - it's a man thing.

 

 

The last thing that I need to cover is my 'sweat bullets.  I sweat when I run and for some reason the sweat always starts by running down my arm and between my little finger and the finger next to it on both hands.  This means that in the normal process of moving my arms while running, I shoot little bullets of sweat from my hands over the running machine controls and out onto the floor in front of the machine.  This little 'problem' can be fun, because if I am running in front of a mirror, I can use the sweat bullets for target practice by hitting my own reflected image in various places or seeing if I can hit kids that are running around the gym unnecessarily. No parent can complain to me if a kid goes crying to them with an eye stinging from a direct hit from an Andy sweat bullet because (a) they know that the kids should not really be there and (b) it's a gym - people sweat there - even the 40-somethings! 

 

But I digress as always!  As I said, Steve set up the climb and the first (and last to this point!) set of discussions took place at Steve's apartment over a glass of wine.  Steve paid the deposit, so we had a square up on that and then looked at pictures of the mountain.  Clearly nothing was clicking in with me, because I was still of the view that this was a hike, even though, looking back on it and looking at the pictures today, all evidence pointed to the fact that it was going to be more than a 'hike'.

 

 

My attention may well have been distracted by the fact that Steve's girlfriend Vickie was feeding their dog 'pizzles'.  For those of you that are not educated in such matters, pizzles are dried penises.  It has never ceased to amaze me what people feed dogs - pig’s ears, pig’s feet, cow’s hooves; cattle skin based chew toys and....dried penises.  My biggest concerns with this practice are:

 

 

Needless to say, I was acting like a 12 year old kid with all the pizzle jokes, and once again did not really comprehend or understand the fact that I was actually going to do this and that it was going to be a little more involved than I had anticipated at the time.

 

 

So here are the phases that I go though on most all of the larger projects that I get involved in.  They are 'the blind eye' phase, the 'squinting' phase, and the 'radical extremist' phase.

 

The 'blind eye' phase lasts the longest, and it is the time when I know that I have to do something, but there are other more pressing things occupying the available spots at the front of my brain; these generally being a work project or work travel related.  I know it is there, and it is lurking in the back of my brain screaming for attention, but like a person stuck at the bottom of a deep well, the scream is pretty quiet when it hits the listener at the surface.  I may have cursory thoughts about it, but it is only to reinforce my own idea of what it is and not under any circumstance explore it in such a way as that it will/could disrupt what it is that I am working on, thinking about, or stressing about.  This is characterized in this case by reading nothing about the upcoming trip! 

 

The 'squinting' phase occurs when something, normally a sense of a time line pressure, makes me look at the problem or process. I do not really want to change my current opinion that it is nothing to worry about, that the course that I am on is fine, but I am starting to realize that the screaming is getting louder and that the project is creeping up on my front brain slots.  It is similar to those days at school when you have a midterm, but it is not for 3 days - plenty of time to study - right?  You can rationalize that you can still work on another project today, get a beer tonight, sleep in tomorrow morning, and then have plenty of time to focus on studying for the midterm on the afternoon and evening of day 2.  Right?  The success and the thoughtful time applied to my projects is directly affected by the time this phase lasts, because when I slide out of this phase - all hell breaks loose

 

The last phase is the 'radical extremist' phase.  This is the one thing about me that can cause even my mother to break the chains of unquestioned parental love to want to beat me to death with my own freshly amputated pizzle.  When that low screaming thing in the back of my thought processes finally makes the last leap into a front brain slot and yells loud and long into that shell-like, gaping cranial space that I have - step back, because I have catapulted myself from the squinting phase, through a momentary 'deer staring into the headlights', wide-eyed focus to an utter mayhem of activity in a split second.

 

Don't misunderstand one thing - the quest for knowledge about the process at hand is still highly tainted by the preformed thoughts in the mid section of the blind eye phase, and now as I enter the wild-eyed, radical extremist phase, I actively don't want to know all the details, but I will assume the worst!  In the case of this climb, it meant that I went from plodding along, running three times a week and managing my general fitness to a training regime that a marine drill instructor would be proud of.  I have no concern whatsoever about the guy on the running machine next to me at the Hampton Inn.....death or glory.......RUN, ANDY, RUN, sweat pouring off me, bullets flying, and to hell with the fact that this machine could kill me and that the hotel will not accept any responsibility for either my personal possessions that are left in the fitness room or my life! 

 

This is the phase that I am in today, the radical extremist phase largely driven by a fear of failure, the small amount of knowledge that I have about the task ahead other than to assume that it will be second only to a full blown ascent on Everest and the sneaking egotistical hope that I (a) really will get younger or (b) that I will end up with the body of Adonis. 

 

Ok, Andy - Stop right there!  Getting younger is simply not an option - however, snapping a leg bone because of osteoporosis or throwing a hip out is - but getting younger is not.  As for the Adonis thing, the sculptor chose a young hunky thing.  He clearly did not head over to the local Hampton Inn, walk into the fitness room, look at the running machines and asking (in Latin or Italian) "When you are done, would one of you guys mind sitting around for a couple of months while I carve you in marble?

 

Also, he did not come back 25 years later to find his Adonis to do a '25 years on' kind of 'Where is he now?' sculpture, because if he did the discussion would go something like this: 

 

 

So the point is that for all the radical training that I do, there are some things that time can do to a man that last minute, intense training cannot undo!  

 

Today I have two weeks until the actual climb and have really been in the radical extremist phase for about two months.  I am always impressed with myself when I finally cut loose, and I am going to tell you a little about that training, but I do have to admit that there is a small part in me that wants to keep it all secret. The reason is that if something goes wrong and I am not fit enough and do not make it, I could fall back on the 'not enough training' argument, but you will learn that although I started late, I have trained hard and feel like I am ready for the trip. 

 

With that sense of being ready comes excitement about the trip too - until something knocks you back, like emails about what other people in the group are doing for training, but we will get to that in good time.  I hit the fitness room almost every day and run.  I added upper body training to that when the 'trip hit the fan' for want of a better phrase. To get ready for the climbing, I have a backpack with 45 lbs of diving lead in it, and I use that to walk on an inclined treadmill that assumes that I have driven and not flown to my destination. 

 

 

Something that I mentioned earlier - Jesus appearing in my chest sweat.  Actually that was just a slightly controversial catch line to make you read on.  What I really see on my chest as I start to sweat in the gym is an elephant's head.  See - nowhere near as exciting as a vision of Christ on my chest.  It actually starts right in the middle, the dark stain of sweat then moves horizontally along the bottom of my man breasts (Well, I am over 45!).  Next the darkness slides down and up the middle of my chest forming almost a cross, but then everything starts to fill in and right at that point I have what looks like a big floppy elephant ear over each of my pecs and the bottom of the cross immediately becomes a trunk and just for a moment, there it is, an elephant's head!!  I would love to show people, but I have not plucked up the courage to shout at the guy on the running machine next to me, point at my chest and say "Hey look, it’s an elephant's head".  And then it is gone :-(. 

 

I also love to hike and have really stepped up my hiking by always wearing a 40-50 lb pack when I head out.  Unfortunately even the 'Hill country' in Texas is woefully flat compared to the rugged hills and majestic heights of Arizona, but I persevere and perspire in the 97 degree heat and 85-90% humidity of rocky trails in Texas parks.  I do love to hike hard, fast, and out of breathe and enjoy the quiet of the outside world.  If I find a steep hill, I will climb it twice just to make sure that I hurt enough.  This is really when the radical extremist stage is kicking in!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there I am sitting elbow to elbow with loud people at the bar, with two huge TV screens in front of me with some game playing and Alfonso the barman puts my beer down in front of me, shakes my hand and says "Hello, Andrew"  You can tell that he learns names from credit cards because nobody but my mother calls me 'Andrew.'  However, he may not go by Alfonso, but that is the name of my server on the check!!  I am impressed that he remembers my name given that I really do not go in there that often - really I don't!

 

But even with everything around me trying to assault my senses, tugging on my consciousness like a Hispanic kid that has dropped a toy under my chair and wants to get it back and is tugging on my sleeve to get my attention, I buckle down and finally click into the groove, and three hours later I have a paper written, one long stream of consciousness only broken into by two beers and a pizza.  I absolutely love getting into that groove, and I love to think and write.  I was so relieved to have the structure and bulk of the paper done.  The place was much quieter when I finally looked up, looked round, paid the bill and left!

 

So what about my training this week?  I guess that it was a little more intermittent than I might have liked, but I still managed to hit the fitness room and run.  It is often the case that when you start a run and within the first 5 minutes you want to quit and that the same run will turn out to be a good one by the end - that happened to me twice this week.  However, the stress of the paper and work that needed to be done and the heat and humidity slowed me down.  But I am guessing that the fitness needed for climbing a mountain is not found in cramming training into the last couple of days, like the studying in the final hours before a midterm, and I did want to slow down a little. 

 

I did have one moment of questioning during my training session; I was just finishing on the running machine, oblivious to my surroundings and piping loud music directly into my head via my ears.  I was aware that I had broken wind, loudly, and a few seconds after the off gassing I heard the door click.  Normally I would have kept looking straight ahead of me and ignore the moment. 

 

However, I was not aware that there was anybody else in the small fitness room, and I was intrigued to see if there was someone passed out on the floor or gasping for air.  I looked round - nobody - hmmm.  Did the person open the door at the very moment of my trouser cough and leave in disgust?  Clearly this was not a person that shopped regularly at WalMart where I am told that sort of experience is common place.

 

Certainly the widespread use of the iPhone and headset has made the airport toilet stall experience more bearable.  I am embarrassed on behalf of those people that, apparently suffering from dysentery, sit down in a stall and generate such a cacophony of grunts, groans and general close to the porcelain sounds that I used to want to dial 911 or scream for a medic.  A similar experience can be endured at any freeway truck stop.  However, these days I just plug in and turn up the volume and hear NOTHING. Here are some things that I have learned about airport toilet stalls:

 

 

 

The squeal of my running shoes on the still spinning rubber road, like the sound that tires make as you start to skid towards the oncoming truck, brought me back to my senses as I swerved my hips to avoid a potential roll off incident and got back on track with my running.  The other thing that you might be able to do on a running machine, but I cannot, is to close your eyes while running to try and find that zen state of running - the squeal of my shoes normally brings me back to my senses, but it is kind of fun trying anyway. 

 

So the big question of the moment - with my paper done I decided to go diving on Saturday morning out of South Padre Island with American Divers to the Texas Clipper.  Does spending 2 hours underwater at depths varying from 60 to 100 feet negate all the altitude work that I did the weekend before in Colorado????  I guess we will find out next week. 

 

On the ride back on the boat I laid on the top of the back cabin in the sun and relaxed.  I absentmindedly smeared some sun oil on myself, over my chest, the tops of the wrinkles on my stomach, backs of my arms.  I then proceeded to roll my wetsuit down a little, wiggled into a comfortable spot between some gear bags and fell asleep.  Unfortunately I fell asleep with my arms above my head and totally exposed an area that had neither seen the sun or been protected from the sun.  Laying out flat after applying sun oil in the sitting position results in rolling hills and deep shady valleys of flesh becoming one open rolling plain of skin variably protected from the sun.  I really do not need to explain what I looked like the next morning but 'stripey' would be a good word.

 

The drive back to Austin started with the normal nerve racking drive along 281 out of McAllen.  In the outside lane are the high-speed cars of the drug lords and gang bangers, low sprung, tinted windows and traveling fast weaving between the rest of the traffic.  In the inside lane are the old pickups full of melons or tires and jalopies of all types but all traveling well below the speed limit.  This is the group that has no insurance and no driver’s licenses - and nothing to lose!  And there am I, white knuckled in my white pickup trying to drive down the middle lane at the speed limit caught in the scissor action of being overtaken at speed on one side and over taking cars at apparently high speed on the other side.  Don’t ask what happens when the road narrows!

 

My last stop on the way back to Austin is the border patrol check point just north of Harlingen.  When I finally get to the front of the line and the drug sniffing dog has done one trip round the truck the guy looks at me and says "American Citizen", "Well yes sirreee" I say with the best American twang that I can do.  I am a citizen but while you are a legal alien with an accent you have a green card (pink actually) to prove your ‘alien-ness’.  When you are a citizen with an accent, you have nothing to dispute your ‘accent-ness’ with (unless you carry a passport - which I do not).  So to keep things simple I pretend to chew gum and use my best American accent to save the hassle of explanations!   

 

One thing that does make me smile is that most of the border patrol guards are Hispanic and there is a big sign, in Mexican, with several smiling Hispanic people and one Asian person (there is always an Asian person on almost every sign for happy employment somewhere).  It even says ‘Se Habla Espanol’ in a star under the smiling faces.

 

So my idle mind thinks that maybe people crossing the border at night just want to make it to a border patrol station and drop off a resume.  Can you imagine the interview? “And Mr Esperanto, what experience do you have of the ways and means that people use to enter this country?”………………

 

But with that done I am on my way back to Austin and home – only to find out that the death toll on 6th Street during the ROC motorcycle rally was up to three.  Best to stay at home this weekend.

 

Actually it was the weekend of the last trips to REI, wants overcoming needs, last bits and pieces, and the REI bargain rack.  Steve kept telling me of the good deals that he had found, and I was striking out.  But then on Saturday I found a pair of hiking poles at an REI used equipment sale for less that I was planning to rent them for - SCORE! 

 

I really did my best to find things that matched, but there is a good chance that on the actual climb it will look like seven professional climbers taking one guy up the mountain who got his wish granted by the ‘Make a Wish’ foundation!  

 

But as I sit here on Tuesday evening, with my flight to Seattle leaving at 6.05 tomorrow, I am happy to report that my bag is packed, and I am as ready as I am ever going to be and rather excited to boot!