Above the Clouds

“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.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.