Reflections on Everest 2024

It’s 8 a.m. on Wednesday, May 17. I should be summiting Mount Everest about now. The last 36 hours went in a direction I was not expecting.

On Monday, May 15, early in the evening, I was sitting in my tent at Camp 3 with my guide, Tomi Ceppi, and the head western guide, Quique Clausen. It’s hard to describe Camp 3 (approx. 24,000 ft), but imagine terracing on a steep slope like you might see in Asia, but these terraces are covered with ice and snow, are only 15-20 feet wide, and are very steep. There are tents stacked on them to provide protection from the elements for climbers heading to Camp 4 to rest for half a day and then proceed on to the summit. Camp 3 is the last place one will get meaningful sleep before attempting the summit.

For the past four to six weeks, I have been dealing with bacteria, including Giardia, that are common for trekkers in the Khumbu Valley. My primary symptoms were severe diarrhea and dehydration. I took several different types of drugs my team members generously offered, including Imodium, Azithromycin, and others, but nothing would impact the little travelers who seemed intent on joining me in my attempt to summit Mount Everest.

During my first rotation up the mountain, I had many bouts of diarrhea, but I was able to perform pretty well. After that rotation, Ellie and I flew to Kathmandu to recuperate for a few days, which is fairly common for Everest climbers.

While there, I decided to go to the hospital to see if they could do anything to eradicate these now annoying, but not yet debilitating, fellow travelers. The doctor prescribed two pills, taken at the same time, that target Giardia. I was amazed. The Giardia was GONE! All was normal.

We returned to base camp and several days later I began my summit rotation. On my trip through the ice fall, I reduced my time by an hour, which was an indication of improved acclimation and performance. The next day, on the way from Camp 1 to Camp 2, I could feel the diarrhea starting again. In fact, at one point, I told Tomi – likely one of the more patient guides on the planet – that I needed to go to the bathroom NOW. He said we were in a dangerous spot and could I wait one or two minutes. I responded, “too late” and the whole cycle started again. As before, team members started generously handing out meds, with one even giving me something similar to what I had received at the hospital in Kathmandu. None of it was working and my symptoms were getting worse. At camp 2, for the third time, I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Fortunately, I was wearing down pants beneath my down suit. Those down pants are sitting beneath a pile of snow near the bathroom. Somebody is going to be initially excited by their “find”, but will likely reject the find on further inspection.

Back to the tent at Camp 3. I’m in a tight space, in my down suit, using my unzipped sleeping bag as a cover. Outside, the winds were intermittently blowing what seemed like 50 mph or more with fairly heaving snow. I felt the tug of diarrhea coming on. I could wish it away until a break in the weather or I could put my boots on and head out to the “bathroom”; a 4-5 foot hole in the snow a few feet outside of my tent. I chose the former, which, in retrospect, was not the best choice.

As I tried to hold back the force that was churning below, I realized it would not be controlled any longer. I quickly put my boots on as Tomi and Quique urged me on, and I literally propelled myself through the tent door that was not meant for a person who is 6’1”/205.

I hit the snow, stood up, looked at the makeshift bathroom and began trying to unzip the rear flap zipper that is supposed to make maneuvers like this easer. And then, boom, it hit all at once. My pants and downsuit were filled liquid poop that I was feeling all over my backside and legs. I went back into the tent and told them what happened, but my smell entered before me and told them everything they needed to know. Suddenly our tent smelled like a sewer plant. Fortunately, we were all on supplemental oxygen, which masked the now “natural” smell in the tent.

I did my best using an extra shirt to clean myself up. That shirt is somewhere in the snow on Camp 3.

Our plan was to go to sleep early and wake up at 3:00 am to prepare to leave for Camp 4 at 5:00 am. My mind was spinning. I knew that being sick and losing all that fluid – much less climbing for seven hours and likely having to go to the bathroom again in situations where you can’t unclip from the fixed lines – was problematic at best. But I started thinking about four people (or groups of people).

I thought about Ellie. I wanted to make her proud, but I also knew she wanted me to be smart. Where was the balance, from her perspective in this situation? Next, I thought of Randy Burkhart, my 45 year best friend from Corpus. During the playoffs our junior year, Randy caught a pass over the middle and was knocked out by a linebacker. He got up, went to the opposing team’s huddle and was quickly escorted to the sidelines. There were no concussion protocols at that time, and was one of the best players (if not the best) on the team and he was back in the game a play or two later. That’s toughness. I wanted to be tough in this situation. I also thought about Taylor Sommerville and his wife, Caroline. I was a pacer for Taylor at the Leadville 100. During my time with him, he missed the final time cutoff and appeared to me to be very ill and possibly have pneumonia. As he sat there with one of our friends, Matt Haaga, who had a pretty significant lower leg injury, Caroline and her brother Cole, the leader of DiversiFit, which is an amazing fitness community in Tennessee, told Taylor he needed to finish the race. At first, I was little shocked, but Taylor got up and finished the race. I was truly inspired by Caroline and Cole, but mostly by Taylor, who had guts to get up and finish despite being truly spent. Finally, I thought of Caroline and Cole’s brother, Carter Giovannetti, who sent me a piece called “Don’t Quit” several times over the course of time I was in Nepal. I wanted to honor Ellie, Randy, Taylor, Caroline, Cole, and Carter by not quitting.

But I was sick and I knew it. And I knew that in the death zone, which I was heading into if I moved on to Camp 4, death by dehydration was certainly a real possibility, depending on how sick I was, which I really couldn’t ascertain. For six hours I sat and ran all of these people, their perspectives through my head. And of course I prayed for guidance.

By 2:00 am, I had decided I would tell Tomi,  my guide, that I was done. When he woke up and I told him my decision, he encouraged me to at least try. I thought about Carter and Taylor. Could I try? I tried to contact Ellie, who was now in Kathmandu, on Tomi’s InReach, but she was asleep. I decided I could honor myself, Taylor, and Carter by trying.

We headed out at 5 am. The route was packed and very steep and relentless. After two hours on the very steep upper part of the Lhotse Face, I had to go the bathroom again. Tomi told me I couldn’t unclip from the rope and would have to take of business right there on the climbing route. So, with 100 of my new friends on the climbing route, I went to the bathroom. At least this time, I was able to pull down the rear flap on my downsuit and do things properly. By this time, the dehydration had taken it’s toll and I told Tomi I needed to turn back.

Hours later as I sit in Kathmandu showered and preparing to enjoy a nice dinner, I think I did the right thing by trying to reach Camp 4 and turning back, but the main thing I learned is that there is nothing more important than relationships and community in this life. Thank you all for love, support, and encouragement. Your thoughts guided me through the tough times.

A couple of final thoughts. I’m so grateful for my guide, Tomi Ceppi. Tomi is the most skilled guide I have ever worked with. Besides technical skills, Tomi spent many weeks trying to teach to be more organized. Like most things in my life, that’s a work in progress, which will continue.

A Few Changes in My Diet and Fueling Strategy

I leave for Everest in about a month. I’ve made changes in my diet and fueling strategy over the last year. First, after working with a functional medicine doctor in Boulder, I began eating meat again at his recommendation after reviewing my blood work. Additionally, I have focused on eating a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. While I believe that people can be healthy and succeed athletically on a plant based diet, returning to eating meat and eating LCHF, has worked well for me in my last few months of training. Second, I have changed my fueling strategy. My two primary fuel sources are two products developed by SFuels — Train and Race+ — and ketones from DeltaG.

To understand the rationale for my changes in fueling, some context will be helpful. Growing up as a less natural athlete, I realized early that if I wanted to succeed in sports, I needed to train smarter and harder and I needed to fuel my body as effectively as possible. Fortunately, I grew to love the gym and I enjoyed learning about the most effective ways to eat and supplement in order to become stronger and more fit. Being focused on training and fueling worked for me. I was able to become an effective high school offensive lineman and earn a scholarship to a Division I school.

After football ended and I began practicing law, I continued to lift weights, but I eventually gravitated to mountaineering after hearing an opposing lawyer in a deposition in San Antonio, Texas talk about going to climb Mt. Rainier the next summer. In 2002, I climbed to the summit of Mt. Rainier and I was hooked, but I also realized that, if I wanted to get better at climbing for many hours and on higher peaks, it would be important, as it was in high school, to learn how to train and fuel my body as effectively as possible.

About the time I started preparing to climb my first serious mountain – Denali, the highest peak in North America – I learned about a book that had just come out called Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete. Prior to reading this book, my training had been random, which likely caused my first ascent of Mt. Rainier to be such as suffer fest.

When I read this book, I was immediately taken back to the approaches to strength that had been so important to developing my body to be an effective offensive lineman. But, I was also introduced to the new concept, for me, of becoming “fat adapted”. Put simply, one trains the body to burn fat as fuel by doing “fasted” workouts in zone 2 (there are very scientific ways to measure where a person’s zone 2 is, but the easy method is that you are probably in zone 2 if you can you nose breathe and carry on a conversation comfortably). Becoming fat adapted is preferable for endurance athletes because it allows the body to effectively utilize fat and carbohydrates. As Sfuels, the leader in supporting fat adapted athletes to perform at their peak, explains:

For the past 30 years of carbohydrate-led fueling guidance, athletes have been asked to start taking carbs, the night before, the morning of, at the start of the race, and through the race.  As underlined above, any intake of carbohydrate, particularly the refined types pre-training, or pre-race, will instruct the fat-oxidation machinery to switch off.  This effectively blunts your physiology, making the athlete far more dependent on carbohydrate stores and intakes to perform best in their training, or racing goals.

Furthermore, research papers have highlighted that fructose and maltodextrin consumption (in many energy drinks, gels, and bars) suppresses Glut-4, the very muscle transporter you need to bring glucose into the muscle cell. So stay way clear of those two ingredients in your fueling, and diet.

https://www.sfuelsgolonger.com/blogs/whats-top-of-mind-at-sfuels/the-1st-hour-setting-your-body-up-for-the-next-5-10-20-or-more-hours-of-endurance-exercise

At least two famous climbers have experienced first hand what SFuels describes above. In Rethinking Your Energy Supply, Dr. Chris explained how Cory Richards summited Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen in 2016 due, in part, to being coached by Uphill Athlete to become fat adapted while his climbing partner, Adrian Ballinger, who had not become fat adapted, but, rather, relied on carbohydrates for his fuel, was unsuccessful. In 2017, however, Ballinger adopted the fat adapted approach and was successful.

When I began training to climb Denali in 2017, I worked with Uphill Athlete, which opened a whole new world for me. By the time I left for Denali, I was in the best shape of my life and I was fat adapted from doing fasted zone 2 work and being committed to a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. While I was grateful for the training and guidance on becoming fat adapted, I didn’t feel like I knew how to fuel for longer training hikes (more than an hour) or during a climb.

While eating the standard fuel – candy bars, gels, etc. – worked for me on Denali, I knew there was a likely a better way. And, it didn’t make sense to me that one would train to become fat adapted only to seemingly discard that effort during a long training session or climb by reverting to consuming simple sugars.

Being a committed researcher and not being afraid to follow the research wherever it takes me, I found a new company, SFuels, that focuses on what was lacking in my approach. The SFuels Optimization Guide

highlights what to do pre-race (or HIIT session), and then the need to shift from a NO-Carb Fat+Electrolyte fuel, to a Carb+Fat+Electrolyte fuel – as you move through the 30-60mins, and then into the 2nd hour of your session or Race.  By doing this, you’re training the body to switch on simultaneous carb-fat substrate oxidation for fueling.

This approach has been the missing link for me. I have recently started following SFuels’ approach and have noticed I can do more work at a lower heart rate without gut issues from consuming large amounts of simple sugars and carbohydrate drink mixes.

I’m currently heading to Ecuador to “test drive” my new approach on some of the volcanos there before heading to Everest in late March. Consistent with the approach outlined by SFuels above, my fueling/nutrition coach, Aaron Geiser, has helped my come up with a strategy that keep my body “metabolically flexible” and allow me to access fat stores and glycogen and not shut off the GLUT4 pathway by taking in carbs before my event or too early. The approach involves taking Train — a no sugar added sports drink — for the first two hours of a training or climbing session and Race+, a sports drink that contains some carbohydrates, but maximizes carbohydrate and fat oxidation. In addition to these two SFuels products, Aaron also recommended I take a bottle of DeltaG every two hours. I’ll follow up during and after my climbs in Ecuador.

Servant Leadership on Mount Rainier

In 1988, I had the good fortune of taking a leadership course developed and taught by Dan Pryor at Baylor University. During that semester, Pryor introduced his students to the notion of Servant Leadership, a concept coined by Robert Greenleaf after Greenleaf read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East:

The idea of the servant as leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey, probably also Hesse's own journey. The central figure of the story is Leo, who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.

From July 24-28, 2022, Ellie and I climbed Mt. Rainier with the Memphis Rox Summit Team. We started the summit team several years ago with the goal of taking kids from South Memphis to the summit of four progressively more difficult peaks over four years, culminating with Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America.

We intended for Mt. Baker to be the Summit Team’s first objective, but that was cancelled because of COVID. So we pivoted to Mt. Sneffels, which is near Telluride where we live part of the year. The North Face, which is a supporter of Memphis Rox (where I am on the Board), connected us with Andres Marin who is a North Face-sponsored professional climber. Andres graciously agreed to climb Sneffels with us. The whole group was immediately attracted to Andres’s high stoke, his technical ability, and his overall good nature.

The kids who summited Sneffels were all offered a spot to attempt Rainier, the next level up on our list of four objectives. Because climbing a mountain like Rainier requires month of physical preparation, we lost several of our team members, but the ones who remained committed themselves fully to preparing for the climb.

Ellie and I spent a lot of time in Telluride in the winter of 2022 and had the good fortune to do some backcountry skiing with Andres and his partner, Anna Pfaff. We enjoyed getting to know Andres and Anna better and soon we all planned for Anna and Andres to go with us to Rainier.

Unfortunately, Anna suffered severe frostbite climbing Mt. Huntington in Alaska and was not able to join us on Rainier. In the meantime, one of the other Memphis Rox Board members and also a North Face athlete, Conrad Anker, offered to step in for Anna and go to Rainier with us.

So here’s the set up. Our little group from Memphis was about to climb Mt. Rainier with Andres Marin and Conrad Anker. If you are not familiar with these two, you might consider clicking on the links above. Conrad may be the most famous mountaineer in the world and Conrad and Andres have both accomplished many amazing feats in the mountains. But that’s not really the point of this post.

The thing that struck me about being on Rainier with Andres and Conrad is that they served us fully the time we were on Rainier. They melted ice for water, they set up tents, and did countless other things that likely went unnoticed because they were so numerous. But the think that stuck out to me was how they took care of Ellie’s feet.

Ellie began feeling hot spots on her heels during he first hour of the climb to Camp Muir. Andres took her boots off and spent 20 minutes trying to tape them up so that her blisters would not get worse, but they got worse the higher we went. By the time we reached Muir, Ellie had open blisters the size of quarters on each heel.

Throughout the rest of the climb, Andres and Conrad each spent a lot of time trying to clean her feet, make donuts out of sleeping pads, and, in general, do whatever they could to help her mentally and physically so that she could summit. And it worked.

Don’t get me wrong; Andres and Conrad were flawless and as impressive as you would expect in helping us move up to the summit, but it’s their selfless servant leadership for the entire group that I will always remember and strive to emulate.

Conrad Anker pouring water on Ellie’s feet

Incorporating New Tools and Ideas Into My Training

Today was one of my last training days in Telluride for awhile. My coach, Sam Naney, programmed a good one: three hours skinning up hill. In Telluride, one is limited to a specific area if you want to move up hill. One lap up — approximately 1,600 feet — takes me just under an hour and a half. So, the program for me was to do this two times by skinning up, taking my skins off my skis, skiing down, putting skins back on, and repeat; all while keeping my HR below 130.

Today’s session was memorable for a couple of reasons. First, I was able to incorporate a fueling regimen I learned from Ben Greenfield — with one modification in 5 below; I use low carb fuel instead of glycogen based fuels because I am attempting to train to be a fat burner instead of a sugar burner — that he recommended I incorporate for any endurance training session or events longer than an hour: (1) ketones (I use KetoStart by Audacious Nutrition); (2) electrolytes (I like Quinton Hypertonic); (3) amino acids (I like Kion Aminos); (4) beet root powder (I like HumanN); and (5) Race+ from Sfuels. With regard to the Race+, I have come to understand that there is some disagreement among athletes and coaches as to whether it is necessary — or event detrimental — to not use carbs during an event even if one has trained the body to rely more upon fats than sugars, but i’m going with this for now and staying open to trying a different approach if I think — or Sam thinks — it will help me perform better. But today, I used the above at the end of hours one and two and felt great the entire three hours. Most importantly, my HR stayed at 111, which is well below my current zone 2 ceiling of 130.

Second, while doing all of this skinning and fueling, I listened to Peter Attia interview Ryan Hall: “Ryan Hall is the fastest American ever to run the marathon (2:04:58) and half marathon (59:43) and is the author of the book Run the Mile You’re In.” I highly recommend this entire podcast, but there were three takeaways that I want to consider for my training: (1) training low and living at altitude (to the extent one can do this); (2) using concentric deadlifts to build strength without hypertrophy (i.e., making my butt and legs any bigger than they already are); and (3) using blood flow restriction training — in my case Kaatsu, the pioneer in BFR training, which I have used for years outside of endurance training — as an adjunct to normal strength work.

With regard to training low and living high, Ryan discussed a strategy of alternating training and living between low and high altitudes, which was suggested to him by Jack Daniels (he’s a famous running coach for my southern friends who are immediately thinking of whiskey). I’ve been living at 9,000 feet and training at 10,000-11,000 feet for the last couple of months, but I don’t, at this point, have any specific strategy for how to incorporate this approach — alternating living and training between sea level and altitude — between now and when I leave for Everest in a year, but stay tuned!

Most of us who enjoy lifting weights know that the deadlift is one of the best lifts for developing strength in the posterior chain. Ryan Hall is a big proponent of deadlifting to build strength, but, like me, didn’t want to gain a lot of unnecessary muscle mass. So, instead of deadlifting like most do — picking the bar up slowly and putting it down slowly — he picks the weight up and drops it from the top of the lift. By doing this, he was able to build strength for running without putting on a lot of muscle mass. I’m hoping to incorporate this approach into my training if Sam is open to it.

Finally, while I have used BFR training for years, I haven’t considered how to incorporate it into training for mountaineering. Like the altitude/sea level discussion above, stay tuned as I learn more about how to incorporate this approach into my training regimen.

Zone 2 testing, a team member I forgot to mention, and a PSA

Aerobic threshold testing

After hiking at 15 degrees on a treadmill and uploading my HR information to Training Peaks, my coach was able to calculate my aerobic threshold — for Zone 2 purposes — at 130. That seems really low and slow to me, but Ellie reminds me that all of our favorite endurance athletes remark that the feeling I’m having is not uncommon and that i just need to “trust the process”, which of course I know is true. After all, Sam has successfully trained many endurance athletes to excel at their events, including many who have reached the summit of Everest. So, I will be running a bit slow for a while, but I will adjust.

One of my most important team members who I forgot to mention

In my haste to get yesterday’s blog post out — while, at the same time, preparing for a trip — I failed to mention a key team member who is helping me prepare for Everest: Taylor Somerville. I’m a bit embarrassed by the omission because Taylor has been an an amazing breath work coach and purveyor of the art of making one less fragile by having participants in his weekly heat and ice sessions sit in a really hot sauna for 15 minutes, sit in an ice bath for 3 minutes and repeat the process two more times.

I’ve learned so much about myself from the heat and ice experience, from the private breathing sessions I do with Taylor when I’m in Memphis, and, maybe most importantly, watching how Taylor navigates life’s challenges with an uncommon grace that I strive to emulate, but fall short more than I succeed. So, Taylor, here is a public apology for failing to include you yesterday. You are a key part of my team and I’m really grateful for you.

Public Service Announcement

If you haven’t heard about Tony Robbins’ new book, Life Force, I highly recommend you pick it up. Most agree that our current medical system, which mostly treats disease through meds and surgeries — often unnecessary if one would make lifestyle changes — more than promoting health, is broken. Robbins and his co-authors discuss cutting edge tests and techniques to take back control of our health and provide actionable recommendations that were unheard of just a few years ago. If you want the Clif Note version, here is a great podcast I listened to today about the book.