Above the Clouds Read online

  Though I acclimated well on my first trip to the Himalayas, I would have liked to be able to climb faster. Then, in 2014, I went to Denali, Alaska, and I burned out. Despite feeling good at the end of the first few days—we were there two weeks—after going up and down the mountain quickly, I had no energy left. Later that same year, I went to Aconcagua. I wanted to do an acclimation exercise in the Alps, and it worked out well. After four days in Argentina, I reached the summit of Aconcagua, but later, my desire to train faster and faster had a negative effect, and the day I broke a record, I suffered a cerebral edema, completely losing control of my legs in the first half of the descent. They seemed to be made of Jell-O; I lost my balance and kept falling onto the ground.

  Over the next three years, I went to the Himalayas and tried out various strategies: low activity, high activity, gradual or rapid training . . . In the end, when it came to the expedition to Everest, my acclimation and high-altitude performance were perfect.

  I KNOW THE WAY I TRAIN CAN BE DANGEROUS. FOR ONE REASON: MY method is oriented toward figuring out my limits. In the worst-case scenario, and depending on what I’m trying to accomplish, I could end up overstepping those limits and risking my life. It’s different from preparing your body to be at its peak and in the best possible condition on a given day to take on a challenge or break a record. Very different.

  Had I kept running without eating after having passed out, during that experiment in Font-Romeu—which I don’t recommend anyone try—I have no idea what the consequences might have been. If, on another occasion, I hadn’t hydrated after aching all over and noticing that my urine was blacker than coal, I would have suffered acute kidney damage. These are extreme cases—there’s no doubt about it.

  The purpose of my experiments wasn’t just physical; they also allowed me to gain confidence in myself. I knew firsthand what I was capable of, and I learned to suffer and get the most out of my body, squeezing every last drop of energy from it when I lost my strength or my motivation dwindled. You have to be fast to win races, but that alone isn’t enough to make you competitive. You must be aware that you can’t overcome your body’s physiological limits. On the other hand, if you want to do as well as possible, what you can do is build up an armor made of different pieces: mental preparation, technique, the kind of equipment you use, and your strategy. Your body possesses immense knowledge and, when necessary, sends signals asking you if you want to keep going or not. Those warning bells are called fainting, leg pain, hallucinations, and vomiting. Whether you want to break the final barrier depends on you and you alone.

  There is one more limit, a psychological one. This one is called fear. It’s a great travel companion and has two sides. On the one hand, if you ignore it, you can overcome all your psychological obstacles and gain a true understanding of how far you can go. On the other, if you don’t learn how to listen to it, it can end up leading you into an abyss. You must assess which is the better partner to dance with.

  I LOVE PHYSICAL TRAINING. YEARS AND YEARS OF WORK AND ALMOST total abstinence in search of the ideal, fleeting moment that ends in a sigh. It’s different from intellectual activity, in which the knowledge you constantly acquire and accumulate stays with you. When you work with the body, nothing you win ever belongs to you or lasts forever, since you always have to keep training just as hard, to keep the bar as high as you want it to be.

  Many athletes train from childhood to compete and be champions, but only a very few chosen ones end up making it. Often the result is people with hugely inflated egos, carrying around a backpack full of frustration. I believe that children should be coached not to win but to train. If this were the general pattern, everyone would have their slice of delicious cake, and the competition would just be the cherry on top. I was lucky enough that this was the first thing Maite Hernández and Jordi Canals taught me. Training was necessary, competition was optional, and the time to compete would come when it came. This approach turned out to be very useful to me years later, when I was climbing Mount Everest.

  Maite and Jordi also taught me to be methodical and analytical, to note everything about my performance so I could analyze it later and identify anything that hadn’t worked out well. This meant tallying everything up: the time and kilometers I trained, the number of hours I slept—and whether I had taken advantage of them—and more.

  I wrote everything down, without missing a detail, in a notebook with square, ruled pages—I was meticulous. Every two weeks, Maite and I would get together to review it and talk about what I should do in the next two weeks. From her, I learned the importance of taking precise notes and not leaving out any detail that might be important later.

  I REMEMBER ONE DAY WHEN I WAS TRAINING AT THE CENTER. IT WAS very hot, and as usual I had no liquid with me. After a few hours of activity, I was dying of thirst, and Maite offered me some water. When I leapt forward to grab her flask, she suddenly snatched it away.

  “Haven’t you learned anything from what I’ve taught you? Imagine if I had a cold and you drank this water that I’ve been drinking, with all its viruses and bacteria. What about the week of training we have planned?”

  When I began to train alone, I continued with the methodical task of writing everything down. In 2006, I made an Excel document where I recorded everything: each activity, every day I was sick, every car or plane journey that affected my rest, every public event that made me lose concentration when training, every strange or pleasant sensation.

  Interpreting all this data is a complex task that requires me to keep my feet on the ground. I have to be as honest as I can in my notes. If I’m not, a few years from now, when I want to know why I did so well in a given week, everything I might extrapolate from these records would be wrong. Despite the fact that I’m the only person who reads this document, sometimes it’s hard to avoid falling into the trap of false modesty or overvaluation.

  For example, one day I wrote:

  “February 16, 2005. Pulse 42 when I woke up, 2 hours 30 minutes of ski mountaineering—2,300 meters. 30-minute warm-up, 6 sets of 15 seconds at maximum, and 5 sets of 6 minutes at 180 pulse with 1 minute rest. In the first rest periods I went down well to 130 pulse, from the third on I didn’t go below 150. Afternoon stretches. I have a cold.”

  And another day:

  “June 14, 2011. Morning: Les Houches, Mont Blanc (4 hours 7 minutes), a bit tired, but I can still force myself. 4,200-meter slope. Afternoon: gentle bike 1 hour 30 minutes, 300 meters, legs heavy but in good cardio shape. Interview and trip.”

  The notes were still important as far as races and goals were concerned, because I could see from them whether what I’d done had been of any use:

  “August 14, 2013. Sierre-Zinal, 20 miles, 2h 34m 15s: legs very heavy from the beginning, I feel good cardio-wise, but zero legs, pain in left hamstring and right calf. I can’t take the pace, not fast enough on flat ground.”

  “August 30, 2008. UTMB [Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc], 100 miles—32,808 feet: 20h 56m 59s (real time 19h 50m), feeling good. Out on my own at my own pace, in Fully, a little sleepy, didn’t eat well, awake and running well again in Champex. Later, the organization stopped me for an hour, and I finished at Mermoud’s insistence, very unmotivated, disappointed and angry.”

  “February 9, 2015. Ski Mountaineering World Championships in Verbier. 1,925 meters, 1h 28m 12s. Felt great going up and down, in control. Fresh and sprightly. Calm on the descent. Top form.”

  What seems important today, unlike when I started out as an athlete, is to become as fast a professional runner as possible, or proclaim the intensity of your training to the four winds so someone will believe in you. Before, you may have worked in the shadows and it was easy to be rigorous and honest and set yourself realistic goals that were appropriate for your level at a given moment. You trained and trained, and waited for your body to mature, so that maybe after a few years you could win a race. If you didn’t doubt yourself, your expectations could be too high, and if you didn’t give yo
urself time to do the patient, hard work of an ant, you could end up being mightily disappointed (las hostias pueden ser antológicas).

  These days, if you’re a beginner, you have to choose between being a professional, elite runner, belonging to the glorious top five percent in the world, or being a running influencer. If you don’t compete, training becomes a professional accessory, and you have to choose your activities for their visual, communicative, or inspirational appeal as well as their potential to grab the attention of an audience, even though they may have zero athletic draw. If you don’t take this path, you should be aware that the road is long and the results aren’t guaranteed. If you achieve success, it will be after many years of hard work, with no immediate gratification.

  Mind you, these are both valid and interesting life paths. The important thing is to know what you want and are looking for, because although the superficial layers of these two ways of life may be similar, they’re actually as different as night and day.

  If you want to be an elite runner, you’ll probably accumulate a lot of frustration along the way plus put in a lot of effort that will largely go unnoticed and result in few rewards. In the end, the most valuable prize will be bringing out the best in yourself. If this isn’t enough of a reward, then it’s best to leave it, because you won’t see the point of dedicating your life to difficult, endless training in pursuit of perfection. You won’t understand why you should suffer so many injuries, follow such a strict diet, and deprive yourself of so many things. And all this without being able to take a vacation, because the life you have chosen fills every hour of every day. For decades.

  This is the case for some European athletes who abandon the privilege of Western comforts when they’re still young to live a low-profile life, free from distractions, in a spartan room at a high-performance center in Iten, in the Kenyan highlands. There, they lead a monastic existence. And all to hang on to the possibility of one day being in the spotlight and dazzling an audience in some competition. The price of chasing this dream is living in a faraway place and dedicating years to achieving it—years that are impossible to get back if things don’t turn out as they planned.

  When I think of all this, the image that comes to mind is of the Font-Romeu Hermitage, which is, metaphorically, my Kenyan Iten, an old monastery converted into college accommodations with simple rooms, no internet access, and limited cell phone reception, at the foot of the ski slopes. Today, whenever I think about the speed of the modern world, the excess of information, stimulation, and stupid distractions, and how all this affects my body, I still take off in my truck and hide away somewhere remote, where no one can find me if I don’t want to be found, and devote myself for a few weeks to regaining control over the essential virtuous cycle of an athlete’s life: eat, train, eat, train, and sleep. Nothing else.

  In pre-internet society, it was still possible to seek long-term results in life. Today, it’s practically impossible to find anyone who sets themselves a long-term goal without the certainty of attaining it, since in order to survive, we need our basic needs met. And without knowing exactly how we got here, we have ended up believing that we have far too many basic needs. We live in an era when the memory of a self-sufficient past still endures, when people grew their own food or hunted, built their own houses, and figured out ways to stay healthy. In that context, money wasn’t much of a necessity. But this has no place in the unbridled capitalism of the present, when we are unaccustomed to distinguishing between the money we need for basic day-to-day survival and the money we want to use for pleasure. From this point of view, office or factory work isn’t so different from what an athlete does who trains by running up and down mountains; the economic goal is the same. That’s why we must decide if we want to earn a living with work that provides a dose of passion, or if we want to prostitute ourselves a little with some other job that we don’t like as much but that fills our pockets. We don’t generally think about this when we’re sixteen or seventeen and have to choose how we want to live and how much money we need to do so. This is too bad.

  As soon as I won my first world championship, sports brand representatives began to appear out of nowhere, offering me a range of products. When I kept winning competitions, those same people offered me money to keep training and competing. Logically, they made me happy and lifted a weight from my shoulders by solving the financial aspect of my life.

  With time, and with the influence of social networks, all this changed significantly. Results have stopped being the most important thing. Before, an athlete won a competition and appeared in the traditional media, or won the applause of other runners and of the audience attending the race. Today, added to all this is what’s known as, ahem, content creation and social communication.

  As an athlete, I have always been driven by the single goal of performing as well as I can, of planning projects and setting myself challenges to overcome. This is compatible with being such a hopeless case: I don’t know how to grow a garden, I don’t know how to hunt, and please don’t ask me to build a house. I’m too set in my ways and have interests that take me far away from that kind of utopian way of life. I travel, I pollute, I use the internet; I don’t really like clothes, but we have to protect ourselves from the cold with something. I didn’t have the balls to choose the life of a hermit, and I am willing to prostitute myself to a certain extent in exchange for the money I need to keep surviving and have a good time while pursuing my passions. This has distanced me somewhat from the virtuous eat-sleep-train routine, and I have done and continue to do other kinds of work, like appearing in audiovisual materials and various kinds of media and talking to people. But I’ve had the good luck to be able to choose whom I associate with, and I haven’t been forced to link myself to companies whose values and projects I don’t share or admire. I admit that today I earn more money than I need to live, but I can also guarantee that when the commitments that allow me to earn that money risk distracting me from training and improving my performance, I draw the line. Money won’t give me back the time that could make me lose.

  Though I may have pursued progress and constant exploration from the beginning of my career, I never stopped to think about what kind of runner I wanted to be. And this was essential for knowing what kind of training regimen I would have to follow in the long term.

  Did I want to be a long-distance runner? Would I rather be a ski mountaineer? Maybe one who competed every week? Or would it be better to be one of those who put themselves to the test a couple of times a year, but with impeccable training? Before anything else, I had to ask myself what kind of runner I admired most: one who can run a marathon in just over two hours, like the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, or one who can compete in over twenty races a year at an extremely high level, like the Japanese runner Yuki Kawauchi? Jeez. If I thought about total performance, Kipchoge; if I focused on recovery, Kawauchi. A big dilemma.

  I admire both of these runners; each of them is equally inspiring. But what about me? I like to perform to my full potential, but at the same time, I don’t want this to be detrimental to the other aspects of my activities. How much do I want to risk quality to increase quantity? This question makes my head begin to spin. On one hand, I want to keep fighting to win ski-mountaineering races, like the Pierra Menta, the Fully Vertical Kilometer, a 100-mile Ultra-Trail, or the Zegama marathon, and I don’t want to stop participating in some to focus on others. On the other hand, I can’t avoid the fact that today’s runners are more specialized, and I don’t know if I can stay competitive in all these areas at the same time. Despite everything, my mind wanders freely, and I have realized that for the time being, I’m not as excited about competition as I used to be. I see it as a kind of training. Yes, but what am I training for? And it’s tough to leave the throne explicitly so others can occupy it, because it’s really nice to occupy it yourself.

  AFTER THESE REFLECTIONS, I WENT BACK TO MY ROUTINE. ONE MORNING, just like I do every morning, I got up, put on my shorts and
sneakers mechanically, and drank a glass of water. I wasn’t especially excited for the coming Sunday’s race. Not enough to torture my body for the three or four hours I’d planned. I put on my headphones and selected a playlist I’d titled “Training.” I was mad at myself because I hadn’t given enough recognition to the fact that I do what I love, that I’m able to run, surrounded by stunning landscapes. I let the music take my mind off the passage of time, listened to the lyrics to a Sopa de Cabra song, and started to jog.

  Rivers of wounded

  People run alone

  Spitting their failure.

  I kept running just out of inertia, without any goal. The song made me feel worse and worse, because I recognized myself in its lyrics.

  As they cry

  Out of anger and love

  For a nonexistent name.

  I will turn back

  When I’m too far away

  I will turn back

  When it’s already too late.

  I reached the summit and stopped. I had planned to do three rapid ascents, since that’s what I usually did this time of year, but I no longer saw the point. I realized something wasn’t right: that clear vision I’d had of everything had disappeared. Even though I know that one life contains many, for me it’s a tragedy that we keep living just one, when its time is up.

  I descended calmly, moving my legs little by little, but my head moved too fast and it wouldn’t stop spinning. I wondered: What can give me the motivation to keep training so hard? My legs again sped up out of inertia. I began to think I should go back to my origins, that I should recover what made me tick before I knew what it meant to train and compete.