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Trail Running Series: Hillary Gerardi and the Legacy of Mountain Athletes
11.1k Plays1 year ago
Steve is joined by the Chamonix Fit master himself, Neil Maclain-Martin, to interview the legendary mountain athlete, Hillary Gerardi. Among her accomplishments as a skyrunning series champion and Mont Blanc 90 km winner, Hillary most recently set a new Fastest Known Time summiting Mont Blanc in 7 hours, 25 minutes and 28 seconds. Steve, Neil and Hillary discuss Hillary’s introduction to mountain running and how she has combined her elite running with ski touring and alpinism. Hillary and her husband Brad, share a deep passion for conservation and climate activism which factors greatly into her mountain pursuits. The three continue with a discussion on Hillary’s route choice for her FKT and the impact these decisions have on setting safe examples in the mountains. Hillary also brings up the relationship she has with her coach and the deep trust and collaboration the two have to help Hillary be her best. This is an inspiring and thought provoking episode sure to get you excited to head to the mountains.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast. Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve Halas and I will be your host today. We're coming to you from the iconic town, the heart of the mountains, Chamonix, France. Alongside me, we are thrilled to welcome our King of Chamonix Mountain Fit.
00:00:28
Speaker
Neil McLean Martin onto the podcast today to help me interview an incredible guest, the legendary Hilary Girardi. Hilary hardly needs an introduction, but she, among many other accomplishments, is a sky running champion, Mont Blanc 90 kilometer winner, the first woman to set an FKT on the Haute Route, and most recently, a FKT record holder on Mont Blanc, which is
Hilary's Athletic Journey
00:00:57
Speaker
a way the occasion for our talk today. Hilary and Neil, thank you for joining me. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. It's great to have you. Thanks, Steve. Nice to be back. Neil, I feel like maybe you should introduce Hilary for us since you two have a working relationship as physiotherapist and athlete that goes back some time and
00:01:19
Speaker
She has kind of a frequent flyer pass here at the clinic. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk about Hillary. Yes, she's been in the door a few times, but so have many other athletes. She kind of goes behind her hand with being full-time, which has been a recent thing for you. You've moved from being very much the passionate runner, discovering the runner, and transitioning into making this your actual profession. And you've made it more than just running. And that's what's so cool. I think everyone knows you in Chambly for not just being a runner.
00:01:49
Speaker
You started off with the research for the environment and lots of other things. You've got so many strings to your boat and that's what's really cool and that's why we could probably fill three, four hours of podcasts today. But we're going to talk about a few great specific things you've been working on, some of your projects and see how that evolves. We've got a nice little organic chat to happen and I'm excited to get into it, so welcome.
00:02:12
Speaker
Well, thank you. You know, I was actually going to say that it's funny. Neil and I have been working together for several years, and I like to think of him not just as this year. I think for a lot of his patients, probably the role is also partially psychological. So I remember having a lot of conversations when making that decision, whether or not I was going to go sort of pro athlete and
00:02:35
Speaker
Neil was right there, right there in the discussion. Like every good coach is like part psychologist. Exactly. Yeah. So what brought you to Chamonix, Hillary? Well, so I've been living in Chamonix for seven years now. And before that I was six years down in Grenoble, France. And I moved over here from Vermont with my then boyfriend, now husband, Brad Carlson. And
00:03:02
Speaker
It definitely was his passion to come, you know, his project to come and live in the Alps. And I sort of tagged along and in the years since then.
00:03:13
Speaker
have definitely turned my full attention to building my own projects here. So he's a mountain guide and I did a lot of sort of the run-up to his guiding program with him in the mountains and then discovered trail running about, I guess, 11 years ago now and just totally fell in love with it.
00:03:40
Speaker
And we moved up to Chamonix from Grenoble to work for a nonprofit research center called the Research Center for Alpine Ecosystems here in Chamonix. I worked there for five and a half years. He worked there for six and a half and just wrapped up his stint there. And had just there's so many things to do here that like used.
00:04:00
Speaker
You intend to come for six months and then 13 years later, you're still here. Indeed.
Climate Change and Mountain Biodiversity
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm curious, and I'm sure listeners are curious, you just mentioned it in passing, but what happens at the
00:04:15
Speaker
Alpine Environmental Research Center. Did I get it right? Well, the name is, you can't really get it wrong in English because the name is in French originally. But so at the Research Center for Alpine Ecosystems where we worked, they basically study the impacts of climate change on
00:04:34
Speaker
mountain biodiversity, so sort of both at a species level and at a landscape level, looking at how the environment is changing over time. They run a lot of citizen science programs and are kind of trying to just understand how different species are being impacted. So you get a lot of glaciologists and geomorphologists who are working here. What we were looking at, and I was mostly doing some
00:05:00
Speaker
program coordination and fundraising, whereas Brad does research. But we were really looking at the plants and animals. Where the area around where I live in Austria, we're close to the highest mountain of Austria, the holy towering mountains. And there's a huge impact right now that's very, very visible of the effects of climate change in the spruce beetles.
00:05:27
Speaker
the bark beetles that have killed a lot of trees that have occupied a certain niche in the ecosystem there, and they've all died in a couple of years. It's creating big problems. It's probably not the reason why people are listening to this podcast, but the European bark beetle is a huge problem.
00:05:49
Speaker
see particularly that as climate change means that like the summer season the warm months are longer so they can make more generations of beetles whereas before you know maybe it was two or three generations some years they can do like five or six so it's pretty can be pretty detrimental to the to the forests yeah yeah that's uh the area around us is have like i'd say 40 30 between 30 and 40 of the
00:06:18
Speaker
The Forest is Bruce and it's all all dying below 2,000 meters. So yeah, very interesting. So let's go back to To trail running, you know you kind of at least in for me as a coach and you know Not not a trail runner on any kind of competitive form that as an observer, you know, you kind of came into
Sky Running Success and Challenges
00:06:43
Speaker
my awareness through the sky running world series a few years ago. And you know, this happens, right? Like maybe, and I never know, is, am I just not paying attention or where did this woman come from? Like she all of a sudden is like out there just crushing and seems to have come from nowhere, right? Like tell, tell, give me a little bit of backstory about the sky running world series and how you came into that. What attracted you to it, baby?
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's certainly true that in some ways, you know, I did come out of nowhere. We are starting to see something that's really exciting in trail running and sky running, which is sort of these crossover athletes that are coming from, say, Nordic skiing and, you know, our total powerhouses already. But that was not necessarily the case for me.
00:07:32
Speaker
I started really trail running after I moved to Europe, but I had worked in huts in the White Mountains for five seasons before moving over here and to do one trail race, the Great Adirondack Trail Race, which is
00:07:50
Speaker
run by the mountaineer i don't know if you know that shop in key valley i know it well shout out to nick the manager exactly yeah and and so i did get my star really in the northeastern us um more from like a adventuring perspective just like oh you know can i go from here today or whatever you know can i sneak over to uh to green leaf hut and steal all their spoons tonight and still get back in time for breakfast but
00:08:18
Speaker
I would say that the crossover in terms of why in some ways I wasn't coming out of nowhere after moving here is because the trails of the Northeast are so technical. If your listeners have not been there, it is rocks and roots and
00:08:38
Speaker
I've never seen a switchback before, I think. And so I came to the Alps with a lot of baggage in terms of moving efficiently through technical terrain. And then after I moved here, actually there's a bit of a longer story, but I actually back in 2012 had a ski accident here in Chamonix. And
00:09:04
Speaker
I realized that I really needed to change my approach to the mountains a little bit. I was in over my head. I would say, you know, rappelling into a 50 degree core and then having a gear malfunction left me in a pretty vulnerable position. So so in any case, after that, I really kind of needed to refocus and think about how did I want to move through the mountains? What was going to be my relationship?
00:09:32
Speaker
And at that point, my husband said, hey, remember that time you did trail running back in the Adirondacks? That seemed like it went well. Do you want to try that again? And that's how I started. And it relatively immediately went pretty well. And I got specifically into sky running, again, sort of by accident, and went to a race at the suggestion of a friend. And there was just this great ambiance.
00:10:02
Speaker
wonderful party afterward and the trail was like wow you know this reminds me of the trails from home you know there's like roots there's rocks to kind of scramble over and that really made me go like wow i i really like this kind of sub-discipline of trail running and that was back in 2016 i guess um 2017 was the first year i did the world series with the goal of getting a ranking i was just like i would love to be ranked and that year i finished fourth
00:10:31
Speaker
Um, and so it, you know, went on from there, but I definitely found the niche. Yeah. Yeah. He found it strong too. Neil, how have you observed this over your years of interacting?
00:10:44
Speaker
Well, you know, it's horses for courses. We know about where you came from and the white mountains and everything else. But going back, I also know that you were a gymnast before all this. So we share that in common. I don't share the same running ability in common. However, I still love running downhill. And you know, that ability to be light on your feet, responsive, fun in the mountains. That's when
The Role of Gymnastics in Trail Running
00:11:08
Speaker
it comes down to you. You're really responsive.
00:11:10
Speaker
And that pays out in how you can be where your niche was. That's where you take and what you've taken to other projects as well. It's about being just being super agile on the mountain, being adaptive to the mountain. I think also to like rebound on that, like something that is really cool that comes from a gymnastics background is an understanding of where your body is in space.
00:11:32
Speaker
um and so whether it's on the balance beam or on the uneven bars you know you're gonna at some point you're going to be jumping or flipping and you've got to have a your body needs to know where it's going uh in order to land back on your not just back on your feet but on the
00:11:48
Speaker
piece of uh on the on the on the mark uh yeah and so i think that that's definitely something i know several other trail runners and sky runners are together with that with that baggage so and this can only be a good thing it's protective you've spent years actually developing strength and a lot of the basics that uh for movement that uh if you've if you've been a very sort of unilateral sports person you come from um you've always run through college you've run through school you run
00:12:16
Speaker
that you maybe haven't had that diversity in movement patterning. And I could get very geeky and I love this whole thing about talking about movement vocabulary, your ability to move, adapt and respond to terrain and what situations you get thrown, how things move under your feet when you put your foot on it, all these things. But no, it's a wonderful intro into the whole world of trail running and all these disciplines.
00:12:40
Speaker
And those reflexes do stay with me because there's a great little clip of film from the Glencoe Skyline Sky Race in Scotland in 2018 where I did not know there was a drone flying above me. And at one point I tripped and did a full somersault and then just carried on running. And I thought it was just like a secret between me and the mountain, but it got caught on the ground.
00:13:07
Speaker
Nice. Well, I want to stay on that a minute because I think it's super interesting and super relevant to our audience because this has come up on other episodes where we've had athletes who are excelling in mountain sports, but did not come from mountain sports, but came from something like maybe lacrosse, which, you know, I'm thinking of Alyssa Clark. She's a very good mountain runner, but
00:13:31
Speaker
didn't come from running actually like came from lacrosse which is and did a ton of strength training in her youth and you know hasn't been and actually doesn't really get injured too often these days you know and I think that there's there's something about like having a big strength base in gymnastics is obviously like
00:13:52
Speaker
you know, people think of it, I don't know what they think of it, but I think of it as a very powerful, you know, those, you know, those movements and what gymnasts can do is just incredible. I was a bit neurotic as a kid. When I was in track and field, I ran the 3000 meter, I was on the four by 100 meter and I pole vaulted. So like I did all totally different things just because they were fun, right? But
00:14:19
Speaker
I think that that's kind of translatable later in life to being able to do a lot of different things in the mountains. It sounds like you have a very similar kind of backstory there. And gymnasts also tend to be, I don't know what your rock climbing is like, but my experience with teaching gymnasts and dancers how to rock climb
00:14:36
Speaker
You look pretty good at it. I think it's fun to speak to the mid-packers as well. I think the representation of multi-sport, whether it's coming from a football rugby background, lots of these different ways across. I think a lot of successful mid-packers do come from that multi-sport background. And yeah, it does. Having that bit of strength when it comes to going wrong, you know, it is protection in the end. It's something you've heard me say before.
00:15:00
Speaker
I will keep saying it, strength is protection. And, you know, that's why it can be harder to transition from being a road runner, a successful marathon runner onto trail than it is to go from someone who's seen as a little bit of a four by four vehicle, kind of a bit of a family run around, but actually performs better when it comes to taking the knocks and boys. Yeah, that's so true.
00:15:27
Speaker
Um, well, maybe I can start off a nice, a nice one. That's always a good one to start with. What would you, what would you say has been your toughest challenge so far, whether it's been a race, whether it's being an FKT, what is, what has sort of left you really looking deep inside? That's a super interesting question. I think that in like some ways, um, I kind of have like the memory of a goldfish.
00:15:52
Speaker
Um, in that like, you know, usually what I'm thinking about is like the most recent thing I did. Um, so, I mean, I think that one of the things that, you know, and I'm going to go straight to the, the mop on project, um, that was very recent is that that was the, probably the first time that I had to make a very clear decision about whether or not it was time to go.
00:16:23
Speaker
on my own. When you're racing, it's like, well, the race is on this date. Or when we did the, um, the whole route with my friend, Valentin, um, who's also an uphill athlete, um, um, coach now. So that whole team and I did that and it was like, we were deciding that together, right? You know, okay, well, how are the conditions? Uh, it's time to go. And in fact, that time we had a, um,
00:16:50
Speaker
an external factor, which was that they imposed a curfew for COVID that was starting on Saturday. So it was like, oh, well, we got to get out of the country before 6 PM on Saturday. But anyway, having other people making decisions for me, and that also goes, I mean, my approach as well, like, is that I very much thrive on working with a coach and working with physios and having input from other people. And for the project on Lapland,
00:17:19
Speaker
It was entirely up to me to decide, is it time to go? And then activate sort of this network of people around me who, you know, had been willing to help me out with it. And that was something that was extremely hard for me to make that decision. I lost a bit of sleep and did, you know, look to as many kinds of help in making the decision as I could.
00:17:44
Speaker
whether it was Yves Marie Macquay who's a local meteorologist who was talking to me about like, you know, okay, where's the zero degree isothermal? You know, is there going to be a good refreeze? The hot caretakers who were giving me info about, you know, the snow conditions and the condition of the track or local guides who'd been out, but in the end kind of just sitting there at my house going, all right, is it time?
The Mont Blanc Project
00:18:08
Speaker
You know, no one's going to give me the answer to this one. And so it's not a physical challenge. It was a real mental challenge for me. So I guess that's my answer. I think it's easy to underestimate. We know this wasn't just the Spare of the Moment project. This had been the making for how many years? So I've been thinking about this since 2020, really. And I had gone. 2020 was actually it was a really
00:18:37
Speaker
neat year for me. A lot of runners had a lot of struggles with 2020 because all the races were canceled. It was COVID and, you know, people didn't, they lost their objectives, essentially. But I had kind of, you know, 2018, 2019, I'd done full sky running years, seasons, and it was really neat to do that. But in the end, training for a race that is really, you know,
00:19:06
Speaker
to be under four hours long. To prepare for that you're doing a lot of short and punchy training and so I wasn't getting a lot of mountain time because at the end of the day if you want to perform really well in a 25k doing a 10 day 10 hour or 15 hour day in the mountains is actually kind of detrimental to your training. So I've been kind of you know and following my accident I kind of like left the high mountains and
00:19:35
Speaker
And so 2020 was really neat for me because I was reconnecting. I had time and space to do that and to start combining this skillset between endurance and mountain stuff because all of the lifts were close in Chamonix. So the, you know, all of, if you wanted to go climb, you had to sort of necessarily go up 1500 meters on foot with a heavy pack. And so it was like very neat.
00:20:00
Speaker
for me to be able to start combining that. And that year I was up with a good friend, Mimi Kotka, who's an incredible trail runner. And I brought her up Mont Blanc and she said, you know, Hillary, have you ever thought about the Mont Blanc FKT? And I was kind of like planting this seed, which she then watered over time, you know, just like reminding me about it. And so starting in 2021, it was like, OK, well, could this be this year? Could I go for it?
00:20:27
Speaker
And 2021 and 2022, we just did not get enough snow in the winter. We had drought years, precipitation was falling more as rain than as snow up high. And there's this critical passage, which is the junction
00:20:46
Speaker
And it's really a labyrinth of crevasses. And it always has been. When you look at, you know, historic photos of it, it's always been quite a labyrinth. But there's this window of time in the spring when, you know, it's kind of filled in enough that you can safely, quickly get across it. Except in 2021 and 2022.
00:21:08
Speaker
we just didn't get the conditions we needed. Yeah. And so that's kind of like the project was building. And this year I thought it was going to be the same. We had a huge drought in February, January, February. And then in March it started to rain and snow. And I was like, okay, I think it's time. I think maybe I'm going to be able to do it. So then I blocked out essentially two months, mid May to mid July saying,
00:21:38
Speaker
I'm not agreeing to anything. I could barely make an appointment here at the technique because I was like, what if it's the day? I don't want to miss it. So yeah, it's been a, it was a big, big project for me. Yeah. So take us through it a little bit. Like just for those that aren't aware, like what is, give us, I guess, maybe first of all, just a little history of the FKK of Mont Blanc.
00:22:07
Speaker
I actually am going to prove myself as woefully ignorant of the early FKGs on Mont Blanc. I was admittedly... I have to give us a full history, but that's a little bit like, we're in the stars. Yeah, I mean, she was the first woman to climb, no. But yeah, I mean, people have been trying to go up Mont Blanc for centuries and then trying to go up Mont Blanc quickly for, you know,
00:22:34
Speaker
at least, you know, since the 80s, I think, is when it was really starting to get some record attempts. And then in 2013 was the year that Killian Drennett and Matteo Shakmoud went for a big run. They got up to the top together and on the way down, Matteo stuck his leg through a snow bridge and sent Killian off on his own. And that's when Killian's record was established. And then in
00:23:02
Speaker
2018, Killian's partner Emily Forsberg set the first women's record and she was roped with Killian on the upper section of the mountain. And then that record sat for the last five years. Again, you know. And what is the record? Where does it where does it start? Yeah, so the tradition, as is the case for so many of these things in the Alps, is church to church.
00:23:27
Speaker
you start at the church in the center of the of the town and you go to the top of the mountain, you go back, which is also the, you know, original format of sky running as well. You know, you take Marino Giocometti, who is, you know, kind of starting that, you know, with like Montrerosa sky marathon in the early years. And it's like, you know, you start outside the church and you go up as high as you can, you come back now. Incidentally, I don't know if you knew this, but back and I'm not going to get the year right, but I
00:23:56
Speaker
I think it was one of the Vadoes had a race that only guides could do in Chamonix, going from the church, the Sammichel church in Chamonix, up Brevent and back down. We're talking like late 1800s, I think.
00:24:10
Speaker
So, that's true. That sounds like a good time, right? Yeah. There's been some tradition with inguides, a lot of competition on that time. Yeah. I didn't realize it was actually something formal, but there's a lot of local guides who will refer to what their time, their best time was on that course. Okay. So it's definitely something to do there. Yeah. So anyway, the Chamonix record, the Mont Blanc record starts in Chamonix at the church, and then you make your way through town, head up, basically past the tunnel.
00:24:41
Speaker
And then up towards where the old Agrédémie d'Cablecar stations were. So you go past one, and then there's another one higher. And at that point, you actually have a decision to make because there's kind of a cut, a faint trail that's been made over the years that cuts you up to the Boussaint Glacier a bit faster, or a bit more directly, I would say. And then from the Boussaint Glacier, you traverse the junction past the Grand Roulet hut.
00:25:10
Speaker
Um, and then again, you've got a choice to make and I'd love to get into that. Um, where either you're going to take the plateau, petite plateau and bon plateau, which is the route that, um, Emily, Matteo and, and, uh, Killian all took, or you can take the North Ridge.
00:25:26
Speaker
Joining up at the code you don't I hope everybody's following along with a map right now Visually now I'm looking out the window and I can see all of this It is such fun to be talked right way through this from Yeah, and then so you get to the code you don't
00:25:44
Speaker
just below the top of the Dom de Côté, pass the Valot hut onto the Arete Bose, so that's the regular route, and you go over the Bose, the bumps up to the summit, and then back down. And so, yeah, I mean, I had you both day of and beforehand make some route decisions. So what factored into the route decisions?
00:26:11
Speaker
So the first big one for me was a question of, um, so going up the choice of the Petite Plateau versus the Northridge. And initially, and I would say the last two years, I didn't really, I wasn't asking myself the question, well, which route am I going to take? I just figured I was going to take the, you know, the standard record route. That's what everybody else has done. You know, so that's what I'm going to do.
00:26:39
Speaker
And then this year in spring, I guess it was in April, I was ski touring up there, checking out, you know, which passage through the junction because there is also a decision to be made there because there's multiple different places that you can cross the junction and based on conditions, you'll choose one or another. And so I was up there with my friend Elise Ponce, who's another
00:27:04
Speaker
phenomenal mountain athlete and and we were just skiing up to gondolais to check things out and we crossed paths several times with a bunch of skiers who were going up to ski Mont Blanc and particularly one german couple that we uh we saw several times and then i actually had an appointment with uh we feel i think and i skied back down and um didn't didn't think anything of it until
00:27:30
Speaker
the next day when I saw on the news that two skiers had been killed in Serac fall going up the Petit Plateau in the morning and the wee hours of the night and you know the news kind of came through and it turned out it was the couple that we had crossed paths with several times and I remember just you know reading the news articles being you know pretty shaken up by that and looking at what the local rescue
00:27:59
Speaker
organizations and safety organizations were saying, they were saying, please do not go up the plateau route. There's an alternative route, it's the Arhebnur, and you don't pass below these giant Suraks there. And my husband, Brad, who's a guide, and always has my safety in mind, and is also very practical, said,
00:28:20
Speaker
Why don't you take the neuron?" And I was kind of like, oh, I'm really hesitated about it because it's steeper, it's more technical. Whereas the plateau, when it was able to be done, you know, you can really run most of it. You can do it in micro spikes. Emily, based on the photos I've seen, I don't even think she had an ice axe with her.
00:28:41
Speaker
Um, or at least I haven't seen them. I don't want to, you know, say that, uh, say that for sure. But so saying, okay, well, I'm going to need steel crampons. I'm going to definitely need an ice axe. You know, there's like, it's in boots that you take crampons. There's repercussions to that choice. But as I thought about it, and as I saw photos of the rescue teams doing the body recoveries up there where they were stuck.
00:29:10
Speaker
on that glacier below the cerax for the whole time that it took, you know, I just started to feel like I don't think that I can, you know, with a good conscience take that route. Whether or not I could probably get through there safely because I'd be going so fast, you know, maybe, but on the ascent anyway, you're just, you're under there for a lot, a lot of time. And so for me, for my entourage, for potential rescuers. And then the other thing I was thinking about was,
00:29:39
Speaker
What is the impact that imagining, if I do manage to set a record, what impact does that have on everybody else who says, oh, that's really neat, I'd like to do the same thing? At the end of the day, an alpinist can only make a decision for themselves. You have to make the choice based on the route and conditions and your fitness and your gear of what you're going to do. But I do think that as somebody with a bit of a platform,
00:30:07
Speaker
I have a responsibility to, you know, communicate about the decision making that I'm going to do and encourage people to at least give it some thought. And so that's sort of how I approached it.
00:30:20
Speaker
there's no way I'm going to beat Emily's record. She made it up and down in seven hours and 53 minutes. And I'm thinking, you know, okay, it's a little bit longer. It's got different, you know, much heavier gear. And I was like, no way I'm going to make it. But I was still ready to essentially make an argument, put it out there and make an argument in the world of like, here's why this should be the reference itinerary for this room.
00:30:46
Speaker
I know that when I thought about an FKT, I didn't think about the root. I thought about, well, what's the existing itinerary?
00:30:53
Speaker
I think it's interesting that you say this and one of the things that I've always done in my own alpinism is I always said that I'm not climbing roots under Cerax. I never did. My point, which sounds very similar to yours, my thinking was like, hey, there are a lot of great roots to do that are not under Cerax. If that's really the only idea you have for a root,
00:31:18
Speaker
Maybe you should look around. Maybe you're lacking creativity. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, there, there are, I mean, and, you know, you know, I remember a friend of mine, you know, dying right up here, but, you know, climbing a route under this, that are on the Sarax underneath the new Agudimidi or the current Agudimidi cable car, you know, one of those old ice routes, like losing him, like,
00:31:43
Speaker
You know, part of what I'm really passionate about at this stage of my life is an openness and is, I think, really connected to what you're saying is creating this community and this narrative around in our community that the most important thing is longevity and being around for our friends and family through our whole lifespan.
00:32:09
Speaker
You know, some of these risks are inevitable, of course, but there, you know, you can, you can make a lot of, a lot of choices. And I know like all of us in this room have lost a lot of friends in these mountains. And so, you know, we've missed them every day. Right. And so I think that it's time to really lean into this narrative of like, Hey, like,
00:32:31
Speaker
we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves for our communities, our friends and our families. And if that means taking along the route because it's safer, then that's what we should do. That's the right thing to do. Like it's not necessary to take unnecessary risks. But I think this is a great illustration of when you look at what this sort of, uh, what this challenge, what, what this actually involves, because you come from a running background and you think, okay, runners,
00:33:00
Speaker
A lot of people will be quite capable of running that kind of distance, but then you put it into a fact that, well, actually you've also got to be a technical help list as well. And you've got to be fit enough to do altitude. You've also got to be able to make good decisions. And actually, when you were talking about the difference between a lot of people running races and actually when you got to the moment where it's actually, this is on you.
00:33:21
Speaker
I think it's very hard for the average person to kind of let you go, okay, well strip away all the race organization, strip away all those sort of support structures that are in place. And that she gets the point where you say, well, I'm going to take all of this on. I'm going to try and make the decision. Have I got all my skillsets up to the necessary standard for this? And that responsibility of people not just doing things off because they've seen, they've seen something on Instagram or they say, oh, that would be amazing to do. And we do here, it's, it's so pertinent what you say because
00:33:51
Speaker
I mean, we always joke about with the guys who work up at the Agri Dumidi, they say, oh yeah, I caught another couple of guys walking down the arrest and trainers thinking they were going after Mont Blanc. And it's so easy to be flippant about it, but people genuinely see these things and believe it is just a day's excursion. Or they think, yeah, we can do that. Someone's managed that in that many hours. It can't be that hard. So then it is great to have people who are leading them correctly. And I think that's also,
00:34:20
Speaker
we maybe talk about but I think it's resonated really more in the town here that this is when you when you look at how things can be done you can do things very fast very light but also you can do things in the correct way discussions that we've had with with local guys with people from the town you know
00:34:40
Speaker
people are interested in this sort of thing. And actually, it's just that respectful not that you've done it the right way. And I think that's a very, very cool thing. And I think that will have links beyond even just the time. It's like, for me, it's hats off just saying, look, very cool. Keep doing these things lightly leading the way like that. I mean, I will say that one of the most meaningful things for me has been the positive response from people in our own community about the style in which I chose to do it.
00:35:11
Speaker
For me it was kind of like evident, you know that that's how I wanted to do it um, and you know, I will say that I do think you know, there are a few days a year right that like you could get up mom walking trainers, but like The reality is is that some people? But the reality is is that in order to do that is
00:35:35
Speaker
you have to be there at the exact day and time and you have to really know what you're doing. You have to have done it a bunch of times before. And so I think that that is, you know, where we've come a long way. And even a lot of other people who've been doing, you know, speed ascents in the mountains have progressed a lot as in talking about, well, like, no, I didn't just go up there like that the first time I came with a whole bunch of baggage, a whole bunch of other experience behind that. Um,
00:36:04
Speaker
But I think sort of generally to, to also remind on what you were saying, Neil, that one of the things that I have found myself explaining to people who are interested, really strong runners who are interested in going into the high mountains or really strong endurance athletes that, you know, when you're doing a run on a trail, there are a lot of things, you know, you, you focus on the things that you can control, right? It's like your physical fitness.
00:36:33
Speaker
You can control what gear you have. To a certain extent, you know, you can pick your day when you're doing it. But when you're going into the mountains, you have to be ready and willing to essentially seed control over a bunch of other things. So like, you know, the weather, the conditions, what other people are doing. Even if you have all of the technical
00:36:58
Speaker
background and all of that and you're extremely fast and you've managed all of that part that you can control, that still doesn't mean that you can do it. Right? And like you above all know, Steve, that like, you know, sometimes the mountain is just like, not going to let you do what you want to do. Oh, for sure. Well, most of the time. Yeah, exactly. Most of the time. I mean, you know, I mean, I think that that's, I think I'm sometimes
00:37:27
Speaker
People are surprised. I'll tell people, I went to the Himalaya five times a row without standing on any summit. That's kind of my success rate over there on those mountains was probably somewhere around 20%. 80% of the time you're going on these huge expeditions investing a year of your life and you're not.
00:37:49
Speaker
quote-unquote successful, but you know that's the process and the learning that you come back with and the partnerships and the friendships that are formed and the memories and Hold my breath for the train All of those things are what you know are really what what make it so I think that you know
Leadership in Setting FKTs
00:38:12
Speaker
This is just that, that same thing. And then, you know, I want to go back to something you said that I thought was really wise, which was you said that it was evident to you that you, I think you said wanted to do it that way. And I think that that's really worth kind of dwelling on because I wanted to say that that's real leadership is like you saw that and you were like, this is the way to do it. And then you actually did it.
00:38:41
Speaker
Right? Like, you know, conjecture and talk is just conjecture and talk, but actually like working through the whole problem and executing the solution in the way, you know, that was aligned with your values and your risk tolerances and, you know, what you saw as the way, I mean, you might not have thought about it that much at the time that you were going to sort of redefine the FKT route on Mont Blanc. Time will tell, right? We'll have this conversation in 10 or 20 years and see what happens.
00:39:11
Speaker
But I have a feeling like it's going to be pretty hard for somebody to go and take the shorter, but obviously in many important ways, disadvantaged or less safe or less prudent. I don't know. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to impose my judgment on future FK tiers, but you know, and I think that that's what leadership is, is putting all that together, executing it, seeing it through the end.
00:39:39
Speaker
And then you're probably already on mentally to the next thing. Everyone else is just sort of like, including me, is just sort of still digesting what that means. I don't know. I assure you I'm still digesting. I actually have very, because I think probably this will be like the sumo of my career. I'm trying to milk it out as long as I can.
00:40:00
Speaker
But I mean, I do think it is interesting. I am super thankful and proud that I was, in the end, able to go 28 minutes under Emily's time with all these sort of self-imposed constraints. Like that was something so that people can't make the argument like, oh, well, it's faster that way. Like you can't make that argument.
00:40:23
Speaker
at least at this point in time. I do think that we also happen to be living and operating at this time where we have super light safety gear in the mountains.
00:40:40
Speaker
you know, like so many people who want to do things in the mountains. Yes, I'm like, you know, doing my little like tinkering and seeing where I can shave off grams and stuff like that. But the gear that you buy off the shelf is already super light. And I was looking at, you know, my crampons even from 10 years ago or my ice axe from 10 years ago. And we've come leaps and bounds technologically. And so I think that to a certain extent, it's harder and harder to make the excuse like,
00:41:10
Speaker
Oh, I didn't take safety gear because it weighs me down so much. And even when you look at the ropes we have, you can get these 5.5 millimeter static ropes for glaciers that you almost can't say, oh no, I couldn't put that in my backpack.
00:41:30
Speaker
We were talking last night, Steve, weren't we? We were talking about people making choices to take between two people, taking one helmet, and you give that to the belay. And would you take a harness on them? Just crazy decisions that you just think, how can you do that? But you're right, it's because now there's essentially there's no excuse. Yeah, I know specifically, like, um, um, Wojciech Kurtica and Alex McIntyre on the west face of Makalu, so very, very high, very difficult objective, which is they still have a high point, 1981,
00:42:00
Speaker
whether or not they tied in with a bowline to the end of the rope, because yeah, harness was super heavy in 1981. And yeah, helmet was probably weighed three or four pounds, you know, compared to that. And then there's like, who do we give it to? We give it to the belayer, not the leader, because if the leader falls like they're screwed anyway, but at least the belayer might not get hit.
00:42:22
Speaker
way down like just the whole logic is has shifted right like and it's fascinating to to think about that I mean even micro spikes didn't exist not very long ago yeah well it's funny because I was actually thinking about that not not enough
00:42:37
Speaker
particularly for the Mont Blanc thing, but like, you know, this winter kind of like running and hiking in the sort of in between season. And I was like, what did I do before my fresh moneys? Like, my God, these things are so handy. And I ended up using them as well on Mont Blanc.
00:42:55
Speaker
You know for the steeper and icier section steel well hybrid crampons because that's another you know Innovation to have steel front points and aluminum in behind but then on the flatter stuff with micro spikes because you know They're easy. They're light. They're effective
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah, I would say we improvised that stuff back in the day. We used to put aluminum heels on our steel crampons for high altitudes, especially, objectives. And it was a real compromise. The aluminum heels were really bad. Those points were not... You could not face out and climb down to send something on your...
00:43:37
Speaker
French technique that had any pitch to it, it forced you to turn in and front point a lot more. So there was these massive trade-offs and that gear is significantly better, that is true. But what is also better, I think, is the, and I think that I actually want to draw a really clear distinction because we do often get focused on the gear, but the real engine that drives all of this is your engine.
00:44:03
Speaker
Right. Like it's from these years of training and racing and working on your fitness to be a better or a better uphill athlete for whatever that meant for you. And that's evolved over, over time, but, uh, uh, seven and changed our event. It's like a massive endurance event, right? Like with, I don't know what the stats are and the distance and the vert and all of that, excuse me, if I don't, I don't tend to geek out on numbers, but, um, you know, that, that is the interesting
00:44:33
Speaker
part, I think, and that is also the part that we have the most control over. It's easy to just throw money and buy lighter ice hacks, but it's another thing to really engage in a multi-year project of, you were talking earlier about the skills and the judgment, and you were talking about that being the most difficult part, when to pull the trigger, when to actually go. Those things are... And I think knowing when to pull the trigger also
00:44:59
Speaker
I had to make that decision and I informed myself as much as possible because we do have incredible ways to get information from other people. But then I knew, for example, what I needed in a refreeze because I'd spent a lot of time in the mountains. I knew I needed a cycle of several days of refreeze so that
00:45:16
Speaker
it wasn't just superficial. So there was like sort of that experience. I also spent a lot of time this spring, like going up to the Meredith glass and just like running up and down in crampons and, you know, working on building my anchors and my crevasse rescue skills. So like I had years of sort of accumulating that. And then when you're getting closer to the objective saying like, okay, what do I, what do I need to know? I need to know the root inside out and I need to, you know,
00:45:46
Speaker
hone a skill set that I kind of already have, but like, I want it to be reflexes. Yeah. So can we go back to just one really important thing here? Can we give a shout out to your coach? Because you guys have been working together for how many years now? Yeah. So my coach, Antonio Gallego, he and I have been working together since 2018.
00:46:07
Speaker
um, my first real sky running season. And it's funny, I would, I'm so glad that you got to meet him at the, when I arrived down at the church, but he's so funny because he is not an alchemist. He is not a skier. He is, he does mountain running in the narrow sense of the word, which is, you know, the world mountain running association, like 13 kilometer fast races. That's what he did when he was an athlete himself.
00:46:35
Speaker
And that's kind of what he specializes in. He works with the French mountain running team for a world championships. And he just said, you know, I don't really know, you know what this takes, but I'm willing to experiment with you if you want to like take on that process together. And certainly over the years, it's been fun with him because we're both kind of like just testing it out. And he knows so much about training for,
00:47:05
Speaker
his specific thing and is looking for all these lines, how do I draw across and see how, you know, we can apply it in different ways. And then I would say that, and Neil knows this as well, but that like the way that I operate and I don't, I'd be interested in how many athletes you guys have that are like this, but is that if somebody's going to take the time to make me a training plan, I'm going to do it. And in the first two years we worked together, I missed one session.
00:47:33
Speaker
And I thought that was like normal. It was like, well, you know, like you give me a plan, like obviously I'm going to do it. And so I think that we've had this really collaborative approach with a lot of feedback cycles. You're definitely the exception. Like I don't know too many aspects. As far as people doing all the physio rehab exercises, I would say that would be exceptional as well. You're very diligent with those and not everyone is.
00:47:57
Speaker
But it's, you know, coming back some of the principles of coaching, consistency, you know, that's where these things build
Coaching and Collaboration
00:48:03
Speaker
from. That's a very cool sort of thing, just for us to really underline, you know, you just keep plugging away in the sessions. No, we hammer that all the time. Like people sometimes ask me, aren't you tired of answering the same questions? I'm like, no, because it's just on auto record now. Consistency, you know, and here you are saying like, yeah, consistency. But it's also interesting, Antonio,
00:48:26
Speaker
I mean, I think that is the spirit of a great coach athlete relationship because it's a collaboration and he knows stuff and you know stuff and you're kind of like, there's a push and pull there. And that's really important and it's really fruitful. And I want to add something else to that, which is that also in our relationship, I remember going into doing the the Hote route traverse, which was so that's a ski traverse going from Chamonix to Zermatt.
00:48:56
Speaker
about 110k, 8200 meters of her about, and no women had ever done it before. And as I said, I go, she doesn't ski. He doesn't really know the difference between a carbon boot and a four buckle, you know, alpine boot. And so like, we had to have a lot of conversations about this. And I have this moment as I was like, you know, setting that goal being like, oh man, like, I don't know if this, like, do I trust him, you know, to be preparing me for this because
00:49:26
Speaker
I don't know if he knows enough about what I'm doing. And then I really sat down with that and I thought about it and I said, this is never going to work if I don't trust the PIM and I don't trust the process. And I think that if you spend your time questioning whether, you know,
00:49:49
Speaker
your coach can prepare you well and you're online. Some people can really thrive on looking at plans online and comparing a lot of different things. I'm not one of those people. And I think that if you're working with a coach, trusting in that relationship and trusting in the process, because your coach has given it a lot of thought and comes with a lot of background and a lot of stuff you don't know. And so I think essentially from the moment I said to myself, like,
00:50:19
Speaker
I'm going to trust him to prepare me for this. And if it doesn't work, okay, next year we'll try it again. You know, we'll go for something else. Um, but I need to trust it. And it was like this mental weight that came off of me that then allowed me to focus on my training and all the things that were in my control. Um, and that was so crucial for me. That is, I mean, that is just music to my ears because you know, one of the things that I often
00:50:46
Speaker
questions I'm fielding often if someone comes in and wants a coach from a Palastian, you know, sometimes we get like, we have an adventure racer earlier this year. And she was like, you have any coaches do adventure racing? And I'm like, yeah, I think so. But I'm not sure. Let me check. And I talked to one coach and she
00:51:03
Speaker
coached a bunch of sport around that, but not actually adventure racing. I'm like, yeah, you know, Zoe Nance, she hasn't coached adventure racing per se, but she's coached like all of these, you know, components like cycling and so on that are involved in this. And, you know, she ultimately trusted her, but you know, it's really like, I'm thinking to myself, you know what? I hate to tell you, but it actually doesn't matter. Like if your coach has ever done the thing, like if they're a good coach,
00:51:32
Speaker
they'll know how to do, they'll know how to structure the training and they'll know it's cause it come always comes to first principles, like with a lot of, you know, knowledge-based things. And they're all just these mental models that we have for how training and human adaptation to training stresses work that, that generally are pretty reproducible. And we as coaches and as athletes have all seen it a million times, right? But for,
00:51:58
Speaker
that is so that is just for those athletes out there listening wondering whether or not to trust their coach i think hopefully you can lift that weight for them yeah i i would also love to add one other thing that my coach has taught me over the years and part of it has been through doing this together but so
00:52:18
Speaker
In 2018, that was the first year we started working together. And he had me working on my weaknesses, which was like speed. That was like one of the big things. And it really allowed me to kind of like, you know, evolve a lot in my running because I had been very good in the technical stuff, but like, you know, I was getting beaten on the speed. But I had fully decided on, you know, we started working together and I'd already set out my calendar. And I think in 2018, I did 17 races.
00:52:47
Speaker
And, you know, we're not, I'm not Ultras, but still. That's a lot. It's a lot. 2019, I had a bit of a, you know, lower point because I think I really used my, you know, this, these reserves of energy. And, and I, one of the things that he's been really clear with me about is let us set the objectives for the year. Let's do it together. And let's not set too many.
00:53:16
Speaker
You know, and it's like, I see one of the challenges in trail running, especially right now, is that like there are so many events, so many different things you could be doing. And yet, because of like these fast news cycles, whether it's in the mountains or in, in running, is that like, we're like, you know, a race happened and the next week we forgot about the results because we're on to the next one. And so people feel like they need to be doing another one and doing another one and doing another one.
00:53:44
Speaker
And it can work for a certain amount of time, like I saw in 2018, but then it doesn't. And so I have come a long way myself in terms of reducing the number of objectives I have and really working to prepare for a couple in the course of a year.
00:54:03
Speaker
So this is a great, you know, I love just talking through and you can hear how things, where we build our principles from. But you can see that you sit down and straight away you're saying we're looking at the year. We're not saying, okay, four months from now I want to do this. You're saying, right, okay, at the end of this year I want to be able to have done this, this, and this. And then we're already looking to next year. And it's this ongoing coach relationship. And it's, that develops over time. And it takes time whether it's,
00:54:31
Speaker
coach an athlete, whether it's physio an athlete, you can't just jump in there straight away. And it just speaks volumes for working with people for an extended period of time.
00:54:45
Speaker
really fostering that relationship. And you share those experiences together. They're rich because of it. And you end up totally achieving more because of it rather than sort of stopping, starting right here. I think that speaks more to the mid-packer as well. Again, it's coming back to trust in that process. And once you find your coach, you know, they've got you back. They're really good. And yeah, they'll see that through for you.
00:55:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, you know, you're absolutely right that I look at usually a year, but I also am looking at multiple years. You spoke before, Steve, to longevity in the mountains. You know, my dream is to be like an old mountain woman. I really, really want that for myself. And I think I'll keep running and racing as long as I'm loving it, as long as I'm enjoying it. And then I'll stop. And I want to have a body that works
Longevity in Mountain Sports
00:55:36
Speaker
not just this year that doesn't just get me you know results this year but that is going to keep doing when I ask of it over the long term. So that's that's my life goal. Yeah that's a that's a great goal and I also want to just shout out to the Midpackers you've mentioned that term a couple of times but like without that cadre group of
00:55:58
Speaker
you know, whether it's mountaineering or trail running or whatever, like there's not much of a sport left. I try to fly to my people. Yeah, good for you. You know, I want to just like do a little bit of a shout out to the sport of trail running that I think one of the really, really cool things about the sport is that the midpackers and the elite athletes
00:56:24
Speaker
all line up the same day on the same start line and do the same thing. And how many other sports do we have, competitive sports, where you're rubbing shoulders with the top of the sport? We just have the, it's having a tool. However many 10, 15,000 people who do one of the legs of
00:56:47
Speaker
um the Tour de France and like that's cool they get to do it did they get to do it when the Tour de France racers are doing it absolutely not like could you set foot on you know the court at Wimbledon like never in your life so like that's something that I think is so cool in trail running is that we're doing the same thing and we're doing it together and we talked about the the four by four making it round but I just find I just find it so brilliant that you find every size and shape
00:57:15
Speaker
managing to do these incredible events. There's no, it's not like running where you've got to be six foot four, you've got to have this. Or for some of these sports where you're so constrained by the specificity of the sport, try running every shape, every size, every age, you know, people can just get out there and do it. And I think that's
00:57:34
Speaker
where where it has it's it's just all the mountain sports have such a such a such a longevity it's not like the olympic sports where you you're lucky if you can get if you manage the time and so you can get three olympics maybe eight nine years out of your career and you can just cross over but then it's so hard you can't go for for sort of the same sports recreationally afterwards it's really hard
00:57:59
Speaker
I'm not doing a whole lot of pickup gymnastics. Yeah. I've spent a while since I've vaulted. I'm not going to discuss in the near future. But I mean, I guess, you know, then to just like go back to your guys's expertise, right? Is that like we do have this possibility to be doing this stuff for decades and decades and decades in our lives. But if you want to,
00:58:25
Speaker
you've got to prepare your body for it. Think about how do you get to that longevity? Part of it's making good choices about where you're going and when you're going and part of it is preparing your body to be able to stand up to it. I want to come back a little bit to a couple things we've talked about.
00:58:47
Speaker
the lightweight gear, the developing of the athlete over time, becoming an alpinist, being a responsible alpinist.
Safety and Humility in Alpinism
00:58:56
Speaker
There's a bunch of little threads here and it sort of feels to me like, you know, I say this to Neil just the other day.
00:59:04
Speaker
I sometimes feel a little guilty that I may have contributed in my own career to this sort of like extremification of alpinism because there is, of course, always an answer, which, you know, I can just not bring a rope. I can just not bring a nice screw. I can just have, you know, there's nothing lighter than not having it. Right. And there's, you know, now you,
00:59:33
Speaker
And people around you, I think really leading on this idea of, you know, what I would call responsible alpinism for lack of, maybe we're going to coin a term here tonight, but you know, I'm really in admiration of you and you know, I think that that's just so also not the first time and I'm sure not the last time that in the mountains that leadership comes from a woman.
01:00:01
Speaker
You know, this is also one of the things that I really like about trail running and about mountaineering is there's not really any gender segregation. Like Mont Blanc is Mont Blanc, the church is the church. You know, yeah, sir, we have like a time for Killian and the time for you, but like the courses you said, it's the same, the mountain is the same. Like, and.
01:00:24
Speaker
philosophically, you've taken the leadership position on this. And I think that that's something that everybody should kind of let sink in a little bit, including you. Yeah, well, as you're saying it, I'm like, you know, letting it sink in to, you know, have Steve Hasley admire me is like a pretty exciting thing. Don't blush. This is a podcast. I won't see my face this way. But, well, I mean, thank you for that. I think that, you know,
01:00:53
Speaker
I'm not in a, I couldn't explain, you know, why it is, but definitely I, yeah, my approach to it was natural for me. And I feel like, I think that there are a lot of people who are out in the mountains who don't necessarily take the approach that I do, which is like,
01:01:21
Speaker
Not just in my style, but like what impact does that have on other people as well? And I I think that that is something that I think about a lot not just with say like the style of a climb or run but also You know, well i'll say it like my relationship to my body and my food um and my relationship to the environment more generally and I think that I certainly think about
01:01:49
Speaker
the using, you know, what small position I have, a small platform I have to try to impact, you know, the next generation of people doing that. And I think about how lucky I was when I started trail running as well to have, you know, well, when I first started, I had no idea who was who, so I didn't even know who I was looking at. But then once I started getting more serious about it, having the Nuria Pecos, Anna Frost, Emily Forsberg,
01:02:16
Speaker
who had this really healthy approach and I feel really lucky to have had that because it really impacted how I was thinking about, you know, approaching the sport myself and it's with, you know, love and respect for myself and for the sport and for the mountains. And so, you know, I like to try to imagine any way that
01:02:40
Speaker
in my approach and in particular communicating about my approach, then that will, the next generation can, you know, enter that into their computations and say, oh, well, that's an option. I could do it that way. And I don't know if that's a distinctly female approach or. Well, so, you know, I think that, you know, I don't want to get into, you know, generalizations too much, but I will say
01:03:09
Speaker
Like the men and myself included are more likely to just try to like kind of, let's say, bowl over the obstacle without giving it a whole lot of, let's say, thought. And one of the things, the words that came into my mind just hearing you now is that I think is underpinning all of this is humility. And I think that one of the things that I really appreciated in my life in the mountains
01:03:38
Speaker
as I've met all my heroes through the course of my mountaineering career and this general life is, they're all just so humble. And that's actually what the mountains generally teach, right? Like how many people do we know that have been super successful in the mountains that are actually like arrogant and sort of come across in that sort of archetypal sort of type A
01:04:04
Speaker
boss person, like it's completely the opposite because you learn to, you know, you're not up there on your terms entirely. You're up there on some, on the mountain's terms. And, you know, that's, you know, if anybody can spend any time up there has learned that. I mean, I think that that's probably, you know, one reason why so many of us
01:04:28
Speaker
love to go to the mountains is because it makes you feel so infinitesimally small. I love going out into the mountains and just feeling like a speck of dust, you know, and I think that that's one of the incredible things. And so whether the mountains attract people who naturally have that disposition or if it creates that disposition in people, I'm not sure, but it's definitely something that I think so many of us share.
01:04:56
Speaker
You know, I have to share, I had like a almost sort of out of the body experience in that regard on Nangar Parvat when Vince and I were really high on the mountain. And it was in the evening after, or after we had summited and we were coming back down and we had to descend the root ball phase. And the summit area is relatively flat, you know, just low, gentle slopes. And then there's like an edge. And I remember like we were there for a while, like fidgeting, trying to figure out how to get down and belay each other and blah, blah, blah.
01:05:26
Speaker
and the sun was setting and you're really like, Nangar Parbat really sits kind of alone and it's kind of unique, you know, compared to other really high mountains I've been on. There's usually like, you could be on Everest, but Loti's right there, or Makalu and Barbinthe and Loti and Everest are right there, or, you know, Choryu, but Gaijin Kang, which is just a few meters less than 8,000 meters is right next door. But Nangar Parbat, like, you know, it goes away and there's just like,
01:05:56
Speaker
the plains of the Punjab. And I almost had this sense where I felt like I zoomed way out and just saw myself as this speck of dust on this massive mountain that was in this massive landscape that was much bigger than geopolitical borders or anything. It was just like
01:06:19
Speaker
Oh, okay. It really stuck with me. I don't know how long it took. I was probably just hallucinating, but it stuck with me for life, but that was almost 20 years ago now. I love that you have that precise moment. Yeah, it was a very precise experience of that, where I kind of came back in and I was like, what? Do you see that in movies, right? It was like in the movies, yeah. That's how it felt. It felt just like a script by Stephen Spielberg.
01:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, that humility aspect is key. I think just to kind of wrap that up, I would like to just hear about how you said something in the middle of this conversation. I think I've went aside, but I want to kind of
01:07:11
Speaker
drill in on it a little bit. You said something about how you thought this might be the apex of your career or something like that. And I think that's really interesting because I know that in my career as an alpinist, like I definitely had those moments too, where I'm like, wow, like, you know, after, after doing something, it meant a lot to me, right? Like me like, all right, that was, that was, I'm, I'm really kind of kind of,
01:07:39
Speaker
hang my hat on that. That feels really good. I accomplished this thing. I really wanted to do, but it's also a little terrifying. What if that's all I do kind of a thing? That was how I experienced it. How are you experiencing that right now? Yeah, well, I think I can hear like Neil kind of chuckling over there. You know, I'll probably come up with something else, but you know, there's part of me that it does find it scary, right? You know, and it's interesting too. Like there's something that's,
01:08:09
Speaker
inherently so satisfying about it because I think like so many athletes and so many female athletes have like you know kind of gone with this imposter syndrome for like you know years and years like oh well surely that was just like a one-off you know like and
01:08:25
Speaker
I'm, you know, I won't be able to accomplish anything again. And I finally actually do like feel like with this accomplishment, I'm so happy and proud that I'm like, I am not a one hit wonder. And yet there's also like this, okay, well, what if that is like the last, you know, or the highest peak I reach, if you will. And at least where I'm at right now is like,
01:08:51
Speaker
I'm so psyched about having accomplished that, that I feel satisfaction that allows me to say that in jest, but also that would be okay. I feel really good about it. It's a great question, but I don't feel panicky about it. I don't feel like I've got to pick the next thing really fast.
01:09:22
Speaker
If that was the last, you know, or like the biggest thing, like, I feel satisfied with that. That's what people know me for. That's okay. Yeah. That's quite actually more than okay. It's great. Yeah. Right.
01:09:37
Speaker
You know, I think that this is one of the things that in our cultural conversation so often gets lost is this kind of whole idea of it's not about the accomplishment itself. Like that is not what success is. Success is not the FKT on such and such a day when all the things came together or the RuPaul phase or whatever it is. Like the success is, you know,
01:10:04
Speaker
the longevity, the engaging, the being a part of your community, the, you know, the learning, the teaching, but all of these other things that we can do and be and become throughout our careers. And so, you know, I would say, or hazard to say, perhaps that, you know, this, let's say FKT at Mont Blanc. Yeah. Okay. That's a nice like bullet point or something on your resume. But,
01:10:35
Speaker
Actually, it's just more of an indicator of who you became. That's it. And I think the same thing is true in running a small business. Neil and I have talked about this as a small business entrepreneurial kind of guys. And it's like, it's damn hard. And you really grind and you work a lot and you do this thing. And at the end of the day, it's actually not about the money.
01:11:04
Speaker
I mean, of course you need money to survive and to, you know, accomplish the thing, but it's actually about like, you know, the process of figuring it out, learning, learning how to run a business, learning how to create awesome videos that teach people how to do strength training movements like Neil's done, or learning how to coach people in new ways, or learning how to communicate in new ways. And that's actually the fun part, right? Like the, you know, and I think that
01:11:34
Speaker
This is something that in our culture, like in the, in this sort of Instagram reels version of reality, it's just sort of highlight reels, you know, Hillary did this, Hillary did this like somersault men on her feet. I mean, that must have millions of views, but nothing about like, you know, well, actually like.
01:11:55
Speaker
How could she do that? Like, Oh, she did that was cause she did gymnastics for, I don't know, like a decade and a half, probably or whatever. Right. Like, you know, it's the same thing I used to say about like climbing up. I was like, yeah, how long did that take you? I'd be like, yeah, more or less 24 years. But how many days 24 years times, roughly 180 days a year in the mountains.
01:12:19
Speaker
You know, like that's what it took. That's what it actually took. It's not the answer people want. They want like, Oh, it took out with whatever seven hours and 28 minutes, but it's actually took like all of your lifetime and all of your experience and all of these inputs from all of these mentors and coaches and Neil psychology. Yeah.
01:12:41
Speaker
But would it be too cliche to wrap the podcast up? It's about the journey, not the destination. It might be too cliche, but there's a little bit of truth behind every cliche. Absolutely. It's a cliche for a reason. Yeah, it's a cliche for a reason. I think that that's really great, and I really look forward to hopefully getting to know you more in the future and following along with the rest of your
01:13:10
Speaker
you know, career and all the ways. That's one more thing to give us. You can't just finish up this one little trick. We need something else from you. One more, one more. I'd rate athletic. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, that's, that's where the goodness is. Yeah. Neil, any final questions or
01:13:40
Speaker
Now you've committed now to let me know you do all your, so rigorous with all your exercises, everything else, I'll be checking up and catch up next week. We'll be looking forward to the next instalment of that. But it's been great getting to chat to you again. We do always, you can't help, but yes, we do a bit of, the role of the physio is to look after people in lots of different ways. We do the physical, but also that's in the bigger picture. We have to make what we're trying to do fit. We can know it's maybe clinically the right thing to do, but that's not always going to be transferable to someone's actual real life.
01:14:09
Speaker
actually chatting through session, but chatting here is actually really nice as well, hearing it from a slightly different perspective as well. We can change the mindset, just a little bit of different view on and everything that we're talking about. The bigger picture is great, so it's been nice to spend a bit of time with you again. It's been a real pleasure, guys. Thanks so much. It's not just one, but a community. Together, we are uphill athlete. Thanks for listening.