This is why I’ve always considered myself an amateur. The word is a Gallicism that comes from the Latin amator, meaning “one who loves.” And there’s no doubt that I’m in love with the sports I practice. If today I’m a professional, professionalism for me isn’t only about competing and getting good results but also about doing events, movies, and photo shoots, giving talks, and helping design equipment and teams with sports brands.
I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED WHAT I WOULD’VE DONE IF I HADN’T CHOSEN sport as a way of life. The truth is that I have no idea. I guess competition has played an important role in my life for different reasons.
I grew up in a sparsely populated rural area and began my education at a school where the parents and teachers were hippies. I went to high school in a small city, though it was large enough for social stereotypes to be more pronounced and differences less accepted. Until then I didn’t know that I was a shy, introverted child who understood little of other children and who was, in turn, little understood by them. I learned the contrast between what was considered normal and what was seen as abnormal. I belonged to the second group. The only concern I showed to anyone was my passion for mountain sports. That’s why the song the other kids greeted me with when I passed them spread like wildfire all around me: “Tra-la-la, jumping over the mountains, skipping across the valleys, here comes Kilian, la-la-la-laaaa.” The tune was from a TV show that was apparently popular at the time.
I guess I began to compete because of a need for recognition and to find myself during my teens. I had to try to put myself on the map, to know who I was, so others would know me, too. Since I never liked to lose, even as a child, my shyness presented no obstacle and was in fact an advantage for fighting backbreakingly hard, if necessary. That was my way of saying, “Here I am! This is me!”
In the early years, my wins took me by surprise and brought me fulfillment because no one expected anything from me, and I had fun trying to compete in this or that race. Almost before I’d realized, I started getting invited to events, and people asked me to progress. It wasn’t a game anymore. Though my mother—who went everywhere with me—and my trainers were all happy to see me win, luckily they did not attach much importance to the results and didn’t have any expectations. I believe their attitude saved me.
Once I was out of my teens, my need for recognition vanished. I could have stopped competing because I could tell I had an aversion to the podiums, the hierarchy the results imposed, the mythification . . . but when it’s fairly easy for you to win, it’s hard to stop. In all honesty, every victory feeds your euphoria, you feel strong, and you feel loved. If you could choose euphoria, would you be content with just happiness?
In the end, when I come down from the crest of this wave of feelings, I can see clearly what competition really gives me: it always challenges me, making me doubt my abilities and ask myself what shape I’m in at the time. I never know if I’m training hard enough or slacking off, and when I want to be the best version of myself, I look for and analyze every small detail, to progress and explore my limits. And when I have other famous competitors to contend with, it’s easier to motivate myself to train hard. What really drives me is to try to win races in which the uncertainty of the result is as high as possible.
Yes, I like winning—there’s no doubt about it—but I also like losing. I like spending time with new runners who are more motivated than me, better trained, and have a stronger desire to reach the top. Competing by their side recharges my batteries, motivates me to learn from and battle it out with them, if I can. Then the competition becomes, in part, a checklist I use to test whether I’m capable of keeping up the level I demand of myself, and whether my training or the changes I introduce get the results I’m hoping for. Apart from all that, does anyone know a better high-intensity training than participating in a world championship, or competing in the UTMB or the Sierre-Zinal?
Everest in
Fall
As the rains arrive in Europe, and the days get shorter and become shrouded in gray, in the Himalayas, the clouds bid the peaks farewell with bated breath, and the sun settles in to stay. Fall is a beautiful season in Nepal. With just a small backpack with the four basic things you need, you can run from valley to valley, eat and sleep in the villages, and climb mountains every day.
We left Tibet in early September, and I spent the fall of 2016 at home. After running a couple of races to ask my body if it was still working after a monthlong expedition, the fall embraced me. These are the gray months in the north, a period when people shut themselves inside to wait. Outside, it rains and snows. The darkness lengthens, but the nights seem short when you go out to climb mountains. For me, this is the time when the year begins and ends, when I think about and analyze the season. What do I do? Train, train, train. The simple, difficult work routine that gets disrupted during the rest of the year, when I’m always going from race to race or from mountain to mountain.
Every time I finish an activity, people have varied reactions. There is incomprehension and rejection, because some people either can’t understand what I do or associate it with dishonesty, doping, and cheating. There are also those who react with admiration. Although not everyone can completely understand what I do, people are impressed by names like Everest and by the numbers—something everyone can comprehend and compare, even if they don’t know with what. There are also those who are indifferent—maybe they’re the smartest ones—plus, finally, a small minority who do understand and who come up with the nerdiest theories to motivate themselves or approach their own projects with a new perspective. After all, the world is a varied place.
Reintegrating into society after some time away isn’t easy. In my case, I have to go back to being Kilian Jornet—not the person, but the name, the figure. The life in which people recognize me freaks me out and makes me panic in a way that’s difficult to describe. The most antisocial part of me was very comfortable in the Himalayas, and I didn’t feel like going back to a life of community obligation.
When these ideas started worrying me as we were taking our tents down and packing up our equipment to leave base camp, I had an idea:
“Hey, Séb, listen. What do you say we send a message announcing my death? It would spread like wildfire on Twitter and become the truth. Then we’ll tell Emelie, my parents, and my sister it was a lie, that I just said it so I could get my freedom and anonymity back.”
Though it seemed like a great idea to me, Séb didn’t share my enthusiasm.
“Maybe you don’t need to be such a jerk, man. Have you thought of the fact that you’d hurt a lot of people’s feelings by accident?”
“To hell with people!” I blurted immediately. I pondered it a little and, after a while, ended the conversation, but I wasn’t completely convinced. “Well, okay, I agree, maybe this isn’t the time . . .”
With my head down, I went on picking up the last things scattered around the campsite, mentally preparing myself for the fact that I would soon have to be surrounded by swarms of people. Yes, you’re right: I’m going to be an unbearable old man. If I’m already like this at thirty, within a few years I’ll be one of those grandpas who open the curtain a crack to peer out suspiciously when a stranger walks by their window, or waits quietly inside when a friend knocks on the door, hoping the friend will think they’re not at home. Yikes, what a frightening thought. No one will be able to stand me!
JUST AS WHEN I FINISH A RACE I NEED A WHILE TO RECOVER, I NEED A while to digest and let things settle. But people, and the media, are impatient. They want to know right away what you experienced and how it felt. The truth is that I don’t like it when they come over to ask me questions, and sometimes all I can say is some bullshit that’s supposed to be funny, or something automatic and trivial, completely lacking in interest, which can even end up seeming disdainful. I feel as if they’re sticking their fingers down my throat to make me throw it all up before I’ve had time to digest it.
What I love most about going o
n expeditions is that I can disconnect from the world, from everything and everyone. I can just bond with the people I love and the mountains, with no eyes watching and analyzing my every word and movement. That’s why, when I reenter the real world, I need time to reacclimate.
I had another brilliant idea: I told Emelie and my agent that I wanted to disappear. Though they didn’t feign surprise when I mentioned it, they accepted it skeptically and told me my role was to motivate others to practice sports and get to know nature . . . In other words, let’s just leave it there.
I didn’t choose to be admired. In fact, there are moments when it disgusts me. I’ve never wanted to be a role model to anyone. I’m sorry, it’s just not something I chose. And at the same time, I don’t ever want to have to do or stop doing anything for anyone.
THE LEAVES DRIFTED FROM THE BRANCHES TO THE GROUND, AND THE snow took its brush to the mountains. Little by little, I grew used to people again, and, hiding out in Norway, I recovered my dreams of the mountains. These are the dreams only you yourself can understand, since in them you aren’t looking for difficulty, great heights, or beauty, but rather you’re searching for yourself. Each mountain is the shape of the person who wants to climb it; a solitary ascent isn’t the one you feel with your hands on the rock but the one that beats inside you, while on the outside your body is fighting. Far from the noise, where a mountain is just a geographic feature, you live a whole life because every mountain climbed, every friend lost, and every aborted ascent leaves you with a scar etched on your skin.
Maybe that’s what old age is: a body with no room left for any more scars. Is that when I’ll be able to climb mountains with the true freedom of maturity? When I’ve understood that to love is to give up my freedom, and that freedom is the acceptance of unconditional love? By then, my body won’t be able to follow the pace set by my mind, and my scars will long for a younger body. I want to be an eighty-year-old boy who senses the urgency of the moment without needing to create a future. I want to experience every phase of my love for the mountains with total madness, with my eyes shining brightly, my heart beating wildly and out of control, my legs shaking from having just climbed up a mountain. Until, when I’m truly old, my body stops working for good.
Partners in Dreams
It was the summer of 1938. Anderl Heckmair, Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg, and Heinrich Harrer reached the summit of the Eiger, in the Swiss Oberland, after completing the first climb of the north face in history. This meant that the last challenge in the Alps had been overcome, just as Heckmair would write in his book Die drei letzten Probleme der Alpen (The Last Three Problems of the Alps). The other two had been cracked during that same decade, and like the Eiger, they also came in the form of ice and rock: these were the north faces of Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses. The first was conquered by brothers Franz and Toni Schmid in 1931, and the second by Martin Meier and Rudolf Peters three years later. The pioneer who ascended the three north faces was the great French guide and mountaineer Gaston Rébuffat, between 1945 and 1952. Later, they would be climbed in winter, solo, and at high speed—all three in just a few hours.
These days, climbing those walls is no great achievement, and they’ve been tackled with a whole range of combinations. But those cold rock faces of uncertain quality still inspire the dreams of thousands of mountaineers, year after year. Sometimes I wonder what drives these fantasies, and I’ve concluded that when you move through this terrain, imagining yourself at the top of the Eiger, you feel the attraction of not only the immense black wall but also all its history, the memory and fascination of everything you’ve read or heard. You’re not just conquering walls of rock and ice; inside, you’re accompanied by Heckmair’s experience, too. You see Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbing in just ten hours, revolutionizing mountaineering and the Alps. And you remember many more feats that you’ve dreamed of since you were a child. You don’t really know if you climb mountains because of their beauty, or if they are extraordinary for what they represent, always filtered through what you’ve read or been told.
In the liturgy of mountaineering, few walls have been praised as much as those three in the Alps, conquered in the 1930s. Even though I had already imagined climbing them when I was a boy, I had never decided to write in a notebook what it meant to fulfill this dream. Until one day by sheer coincidence I ran into Simón on Mont Blanc.
Simón
Chamonix is the only city in the world where you can walk down the street calmly in ski boots and Gore-Tex in the middle of August when it’s thirty degrees Celsius without feeling like an eccentric. It’s even occurred to me that there must be people who go to work at the office in jeans and a T-shirt, then put on their mountain boots after dinner, wrap a coil of rope around their shoulder, and go out for a few beers at the bar.
The first thing you see on arrival when you approach by road is a sign saying CHAMONIX MONT BLANC, with a second line below, LA CAPITALE MONDIALE DE L’ALPINISME (THE WORLD CAPITAL OF MOUNTAINEERING). It is also known by other names, like the one invented by the American climber Mark Twight, who called it “Death Sport Capital of the World.” We could also name it the world capital of ego per square meter, since the city is home—either permanently or for long stretches—to the best specialists of all mountain-related disciplines, from downhill cycling to climbing, not forgetting BASE jumping, parachuting, trail running, ice climbing, extreme skiing, and a long list of etceteras.
Chamonix was the departure point for the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786, the feat that gave birth to mountaineering. It was also the town where the mountain guide profession first emerged. With time, Chamonix has adapted to cater to every imaginable mountain activity. Chairlifts, cable cars, and shelters have been built in the city center, so you can plant yourself in just a few minutes on any rock, snow, or ice wall, or in areas where you can fly off in any direction. A system has been created for accessing weather and topographical information on routes that’s unique in the world, and the rescue service is flawless.
Evidently, all this has made Chamonix the world university of mountain sports, and the city attracts countless people ready to practice at the highest level possible, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Here, unusual sports are people’s daily bread, which results in a mixture of creativity, inflated egos, and cemeteries full of dreamers.
And among these enormous egos was mine, living for years in a valley where last names like Charlet or Terray were more famous than Kennedy, where social hierarchy was determined by the difficulty of the routes you climbed, and the distinguished elite could be spotted by the silver badge always pinned to their Gore-Tex or the visor of their baseball caps on the hottest days, when it was okay to leave your jacket at home.
In this parallel world of chosen ones, where the valley’s real problems, like its enormous pollution, were swept under the carpet of the circus of daily activities and records, I lived and had carved out a space for myself, though I was far from the city’s center and social life. In the almost ten years I lived there, I can count the number of friends I made on one hand, and I might only need one more finger to count the days I went into the mountains when I wasn’t alone. In any case, in that mountain paradise, I had all the space and desire I needed to progress.
In late June 2013, when the days were long, and the anticyclone that had been with us for weeks seemed to be happy where it was and to have no intention of leaving, I was grateful to be spending more time above 4,000 meters than at home. And of course, every day I ran into hundreds of mountaineers, and those ineffable guides who accompany their clients and help them achieve their dream. Since I’d been living there for years, the hostility I’d first encountered as I ran up Mont Blanc or climbed one of the ridges of Bassin du Tour, when they looked me up and down disdainfully and sometimes even insulted me for my way of ascending their mountains, was becoming a thing of the past.
One of the guides I ran into often was Simón Elías Barasoain. He was from La Rioja a
nd had been based in the valley for years, where he alternated the whirlwind of the tourist season with the months when Chamonix became a ghost town, when he fled to remote mountain ranges and tried to open up new climbing routes. For example, the north face of Meru in the Himalayas, or the east face of the Cerro Torre in Patagonia. I’d known him awhile, and not just from what I’d read in magazines about his well-deserved recognition. I met him after running my first Pierra Menta (though I was in the junior category then), when I went to spend four days with other members of the Centro de Tecnificación de Esquí de Montaña, the national youth team, in Chamonix, learning four basic safety concepts, such as what to do if a companion falls into a crevasse or how to rope yourself up to ski on a glacier. We were a dozen excited teenagers, some with our vanity through the roof after stepping down from the podium at Pierra Menta. You know, teenage endorphins . . .
As chance had it, Simón was our guide and coach. On the first day, we took a cable car to Aiguille du Midi, at 3,800 meters. To begin with, it was a mistake not to force us to go on foot, since this would have worn us out a little and given us some lactic acid in our legs, and lowered our endorphin levels. We left the cabin like famished lions who’d just spotted a herd of wounded gazelles. Once we reached the snow, as we put on our skis, Simón tried in his well-intentioned way to explain the key points for skiing a glacier. But we thought we were so smart, and we didn’t listen. We just waited impatiently for him to give us a starting signal and competed among ourselves to see who got down first. As soon as Simón gave the order, the stampede began. All of us set out downhill in a straight line, leaning back to keep our balance and feel the snow going by a few centimeters below our asses. And yes, we threw all the safety rules the instructor had explained just a few minutes earlier to the wind. We went down the Vallée Blanche glacier without making a single turn—very good, all parallel—entrusting ourselves to God each time we approached a crevasse, and instead of braking, we tried to pick up more speed to jump over it, watching our companions out of the corners of our eyes and waiting for them to separate, brake, and get left behind. Meanwhile, Simón watched that embarrassing spectacle in terror and astonishment, following us at a distance and begging us loudly to stop acting like idiots.
Above the Clouds Page 11