Making the Play

Swimming Past the Buoy

I kept hearing our guides’ admonition as I put one foot in front of the other, my right ankle twisting painfully to the outside each time the crampon hit the glacial ice: “Don’t swim past the buoy.” The warning was clear, and as I understand, it’s one of the mantras of mountaineering. Yes, summiting is important. But it’s optional. Saving enough physical capacity to get back down is not.

I was pretty sure I was past the buoy long before we hit the last rest before the summit. My mobility and ankle strength was an issue that had been plaguing me for hours, and I was pretty sure I was not going to be able to walk on it in the morning. I didn’t want to say anything to the guides (Ben, Dominic, and Alan), but I was worried about being a liability to my rope team.

“Ben, I’m past the buoy.”

He responded simply and emphatically. “Get your pack on. Everyone is summitting.”

And that was that. Well, that wasn’t quite that. There was still an hour of climbing scree and patchy ice, on which I’d already fallen and couldn’t get up, and if it weren’t for Ben yelling instructions (and I think some curses), I might still be stuck on Pico de Orizaba somewhere around 17, 500 feet. I am going to give Alan, JP, and especially Rich some additional credit for putting up with me falling and tugging on the rope that attached us all together.

Finally we made summit and celebrated, taking pictures and hugging, before starting our way back down, which was about six hours long on top of the eight and half hours we’d spent getting to the summit. And I fell again on the way down. Actually, I fell at least 3 times, once jarring my pole so far from hand it required a minor search party before we found it about 15 feet away.

Ben was awesome throughout. At the last stop he volunteered to carry my pack for me.

“Ben, I went up with that pack, and unless something drastic happens, I’m going down with it. But thank you. Let’s walk and hang out for this last stretch.” And so we did. It was a great time. This was my second climb with Ben, and I love the dude. Apart from great conversation about life, one of the highlights was my last fall. Really it was more of a slip than a fall. I don’t have much of a working left calf muscle due to a back injury 20 years ago, so when going down an incline I have to lean back a bit to keep from falling on my face. Leaning back is NOT the preferred technique for going downhill, but it’s what I have to do. Stepping down from a boulder on the path, some small rocks rolled under my left boot, my left leg went out in front of me, my right went behind me, my hand smashed into the rocks, causing bleeding that didn’t stop for an hour, and the aforementioned pole was flung far afield from the path.

Finally, blood still actively dripping from my hand, Ben and I walked into camp with Dominic looking on just sort of shaking his head but smiling too, happy to have all his charges back in camp, summits achieved by all.

As JP, Dominic, Erica and I sat in the airport awaiting our flights, I began the humbling process of evaluating what I needed to improve to keep climbing mountains. It wasn’t simply the ankle problems. When everyone else seemed to be taking it easy on the modest speed/modest incline parts of the hikes and climbs, I was working my butt off at a high heart rate. I was dying while all the rest of the group seemed to be chatting and laughing. Now, to be sure, we had some folks in great shape. But it wasn’t even as if I could blame living close to sea level for my issues. Nobody in the group lived at elevation. I was in awe of them and incredibly humbled. If I was to continue this game, it was time for change.

I do have some strengths. I can climb steep. I can use strength and power and sustain a high heart rate for a long time. But as Dominic explained, I only have that one gear. I don’t really have a big floor, meaning I can’t do much in an aerobic zone before the work becomes anaerobic.  I have always known I wasn’t a cardio athlete. I’ve never been a distance runner. I like bench press and pullups and sprints (the last of which has been off the table for 20 years due to my calf weakness and me preferring to fall on my butt instead of my face), anaerobic stuff. It fits my physiology. But I couldn’t let that be an excuse with a buddy trip to climb Mount Whitney just a few months away.

When I got back home I contacted my buddy Jim who is a former high level strength and conditioning pro. Truth be told, I usually contact Jim multiple times on a daily basis, but this time I was coming as a client. Together we figured out that I was committing some cardinal sins of training, the same sins I’d be reading about for 18 months but thinking they didn’t apply to me. I was working my butt off daily, but my hard days weren’t hard enough and ironically my easy days were way too hard. I thought I knew what I was doing. My preparation and performance for summitting Mount Rainier had gone so well, so why did I struggle so much in Mexico? I didn’t know. So I had to take the humbling step of admitting I needed help training.

So my first order of business was to get a VO2 max test. Not fun, and my results were terrible. The next order of business was less fun: Aerobic work, expanding the floor, which for me mostly meant relative slow walks without a pack.

The next order of business was mobility work. Thankfully, I have found some good programs that I like, but excellent mobility work (for someone like me who has turned to stone) can take up to an hour a day on most days of the week and truly takes 6 months to a year to make massive changes. So be it. I need to improve, and that means I need to do it the right way.

Lastly in this next phase of training, I needed to address how absolutely atrocious my self-talk was on Orizaba. I had doubts, and that’s not a problem. Doubts happen. We can deal with them. I mean, I’m a professional sport psychologist. I know this. But that’s what was humbling about this adventure. As a sport psych I know doubts aren’t a problem: Feeding doubts is the problem. On Orizaba I turned a sore ankle into a catastrophe that had not yet occurred. I was certain my chances of getting back to camp were in jeopardy, and even if I got back to camp, I was certain I was not going to be able to walk the next day. Here’s what actually happened. I summited. And I could walk the next day. What I couldn’t do was continue to feed my doubts. Heed doubts, sure, to an extent. But there’s no need to feed them with rumination. I needed to do something for my own psyche…..and self-respect.

Three months into a new program I have turned what used to be a workload requiring a heart rate of 130 beats per minute into something around 100 beats per minute thanks to timely and appropriate easy workouts designed to expand that aerobic floor. My mobility is improving. And today on a max anaerobic test with 65 pounds in my pack, my self-talk was on point. I actually apologized to a lady with a stroller sharing my workout path because I was certain I sounded like a bit of a raving lunatic, but as the doc, I know better. A little self-encouragement goes a long way.

I am sharing this humiliating experience of swimming past the buoy because humility is good. Learning our weaknesses and accepting them can be essential for improvement. Making them public is good for accountability to self, and accountability is good. Mostly I’m sharing this because making humility and effort public can be inspiring. I hope it helps you on your own journeys. But for goodness sake, use this tale of caution to do hard stuff without actually swimming past the buoy.