The Runners High
“What the hell was that?” Breathless, I sat beside Spring as we got into the car. Spring spoke but there was a dull ringing in my ears that muted her voice. Eventually I heard her say “something got into you eh? You just took off, how long were you waiting for me at the end?”. We drove home and pulled into our driveway. Spring got out, she noticed that I wasn’t following and asked “Are you coming?”. I responded “In a few minutes”. I needed to understand what had happened. Where my mind had gone. Before distractions dulled this experience and reduced it to something imagined at a later point in the day. Like a dream, precisely like a dream to be exact, I needed to not let this memory fade into the ether now that I had regained composure, regained consciousness. I looked at the running app on my phone. I had run the fastest split time for that distance in my life, at least 25% faster than when I had ran the same trail and distance a few days prior. I rejoined Spring in our apartment; “I think that was it” I said, “I think that was a runners high”. This experience happened some months ago. In the period between then and now I have battled with whether I should write about it or not. I’ve written drafts of this post and then scrapped them. I’m skeptical by nature. I spend my leisure time in the mountains and take calculated risks. The key point is that these activities require me to be calculated, to evaluate the hard evidence, to mitigate dangers and to move safely through the terrain. There’s no room there for flights of fancy or the unquantifiable. I like the raw honesty of the wild and the trust I can put in those experiences. Rock is hard, Ice is cold and the Mountains are eternally indifferent. I’ve heard of climbers refer to being in “the zone” but it always sounded foolish to me. Nobody plans a trip and says “ok, when we get to the base of this climb we’ll enter The Zone and then climb effortlessly to the summit”. It sounds farcical. The sporadic nature of accounts about this heightened state of awareness naturally leads one to be skeptical. Yet I couldn’t deny my own experience. That state I was in while running was not normal consciousness, it was not a normal level of awareness. It was different. I’d read about the purported “runners high” before. It always seemed like marketing fluff to sell more race tickets or running shoes. Or just another way...
Mount Baker: Ice Climbing
“Did you see the BCMC call out for a trip to the Mt Baker seracs to do some ice climbing? Do you want to sign up?” This was the question I received in a text from Leigh one morning in October. I texted back within seconds saying “Anniversary at Baker!” It just so happened that the Thursday before the trip we would see our 8th year wedding anniversary come and go. This seemed like the perfect way to see in another year of adventure together. We signed up for the trip and started dreaming about climbing ice again. The only type of ice that Leigh and I have climbed before has been waterfall ice, some in the Rockies and some in the Coastal Range, so climbing glacier ice was going to be a new experience for us and it was going to take some time to knock the rust off of our recently acquired ice climbing skills. We set up top-ropes at the first wall of ice we could walk up to on the glacier. These first climbs proved to be more difficult than anticipated, and everyone, albeit 1 or 2, had to shout “take” more than once on their way up. There were several bulges and overhangs to contend with and the density of this ice was proving to be very hard and made for some very ginger tool placements, as no crampon or ice pick was really sinking in. All part of the learning process and also part of the beauty of ice climbing, no two walls of ice are ever the same. Once we had our fill of these climbs we decided to make our way over to an area where 2 from our group set up a few more ropes. We had to weave around gaping crevasses, jump over cracks in the ice and down-climb some sections just to get to the climbing area. It was unnerving but so much fun at the same time. It was really starting to feel like we were on another planet with such an other-worldly almost eery feeling. The only sounds apart from the odd shout of “on belay” or “climb on” was the groaning and cracking of the glacier. I walked the final narrow ice bridge towards the crevasse where the top-ropes were set up to see that you had to rappel into the hole if you wanted to climb. I felt a reluctance at first, as my first instinct is to always avoid being inside a crevasse, but I had to find a way to push through it and I joined Leigh and our friend Scott down below. Did someone say...
Tantalust, Part IV: Risking Adventure
< Tantalust, Part III: Finding Jim I stirred awake. I could hear Spring outside, in the kitchen area of the Cabin, preparing breakfast. I hadn’t really slept, the sleep I did get was restless and fitful at best. I woke up periodically and looked around to remind myself that I wasn’t out sleeping somewhere on those glaciers. My shoulders felt stiff and knotted, from bearing the weight of a heavy pack and a stressful day. I joined Spring outside. The clouds still hung low beyond the large windows, dulling the morning light. There was an unease inside me that wouldn’t abate. The previous day had been hard, really hard. The mental fatigue from it still lingered. An Alpinist I met while ice climbing in Canmore last Winter, and subsequently added on Facebook, did some serious climbs in Alaska this past Spring. When he returned he posted online about how amazing his trip had been, and mentioned the obstacles he had overcome in a very matter of fact way. Weeks later though he posted a picture of the journal he had written on that trip which told a very different story. A story of fear, of exhaustion, of doubt. In retrospect he could only remember how much fun the trip had been, but his journals kept him honest when reflecting. I took inspiration from him and kept my own journal on this trip. Reading over it now is like looking at the scrawlings from the mind of someone else. It would be easy for me to gloss over the trials in hindsight and make light of them. In retrospect, they weren’t that difficult. In retrospect I know that we left the Tantalus Hut and arrived at the Jim Haberl Hut 12 hours later and successfully navigated some heavily glaciated terrain. The experience of that day was very different though and merely stating the facts would be disingenuous. I didn’t know if the fringes of snow that I’d step onto would hold, I didn’t know if the choices we made would work, I didn’t know if we’d have to sleep out there, if we’d find the Hut, if we’d get trapped by a dead end and an irreversible route, if we’d get injured by any one of the objective hazards we had to contend with, or worse, die. That constant uncertainty and worry whittled away at my core all day until nothing was left but a shell. I sat in the Hut for most of the morning, looking at old, tattered magazines but seeing nothing but the events of the preceding day. Sometime in the afternoon on our first day in the...
Tantalust, Part II: Dreams and Reality
< Tantalust, Part I: my little Everest *pop* I screamed out in pain and shock as I looked down and watched my left ankle collapse and roll underneath me. I heard an odd popping sound come from my ankle and felt a weird crunching sensation. I dropped to my knees… Thoughts from the events of a year ago were circling through my mind. Pain, it seems, is the bodies way of reminding the head of that which it hopes to forget. My ankle was twinging from the weight of my heavy backpack that was burdened with food and equipment for 8 days of Mountaineering. I propped my hiking pole in my side, below my rib cage, and put my weight on it to give my ankle a rest. The aching began to subside and I exhaled. As I did a lone wasp landed above my sore ankle on my shin and stung me. Through gritted teeth I swatted it away, but it had done it’s damage. The ache from my ankle had now been replaced with a piercing throb from this sting. “Why don’t you want me here? “ I heard myself irrationally ask inside my mind. Who was I asking? The Mountains of this Range? It’s not unusual for people to anthropomorphise places and things, but I usually don’t. My history with the Tantalus Range had skewed my usual high tolerance to apophenia however. I’ve written about this history before (see: Tantalized by the Tantalus) and I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t played at least a small part in my decision to turn around when attempting to push into the heart of the Tantalus Range from the North this Spring (see: When Sisyphus met Zeno: Tantalus Digressions). Curiously, I’ve never written a post about the events of last year though, about my injury and the ramifications of it. I suppose that is telling. Anyway, this history of trying to push into the Tantalus Range and feeling as though it is constantly trying to push back was wearing on me. As I continued to hike, I tried to reason with myself. My ankle was weaker than usual and causing me more pain as, the previous weekend, I had run in the Squamish50 trail race, completing the 23km variation of the course (see: Running the Arc’teryx Squamish 50 23k). Wasps were everywhere this year, so getting stung was not unusual at all. The Tantalus Range is known for being difficult to access and for having complicated terrain, the weather here is also known for being gnarly at the best of times. I remembered a quote, by a...
Tantalust, Part I: my little Everest
To say I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Mountains would be an understatement. While other mountaineers likely dream about far off high places in the Andes or the Karakoram, I spend most of my time thinking about those right on my doorstep here in British Columbia, Canada. You see, I’ve lost the taste for commuting. I imagine I will travel to other mountain ranges in the future to test my mettle but for now I just don’t want to invest my time in Planes, Trains and “those aren’t pillows!”. Coming from Ireland, a quaint Island on the edge of Europe, going anywhere new usually required hopping on Planes and wasting hours of my life in Airports. It seems self-evident now, but a quote I read many moons after leaving Ireland eloquently describes the epiphany I had that fateful day when I decided to leave, for good, the home I had grown up in: “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” ― Seth Godin I was living and working somewhere that I couldn’t wait to escape from for a few weeks of every year. Time was ticking by and I was about to enter that financial quicksand that is the 30’s grind of getting a mortgage, having some kids and getting into a lot of debt and then trying to work my way back out of it. There had to be another way. So, “why not go on a permanent vacation?” I told myself. Why not live in the kind of place that I’d like to escape to? It’s seems straightforward enough but it’s surprising how many people I meet that pine over a vacation location they hated having to leave who have never investigated if they could move there. The idea of a “Holiday” now seems so strange to me. I’ve been in Canada for 3.5 years now and apart from a few days just over the border in the US to visit some mountains I haven’t been to any other countries, and apart from one work related flight I haven’t been in any Airports either. For me now, the summits of Mountains have become the Capitals that I wish to visit, and the Ranges they lie within the Countries whose borders I wish to cross. One such Range abuts the very town that I live in. It stands like a medieval fortress, flanked by a wide treacherous moat, with high, dark Watchtowers on all sides. The Tantalus Range. I had been making plans to travel East to visit some Peaks...
