Except they’re not! Instead I’m lying in bed writing this blog while the bed in the guest bedroom remains covered in all the gear for the trip. My most recent interaction with said gear has been taking guests to look at it, as if they were being introduced to some elderly, crotchety relative who lives in a back bedroom, or to view an important but obscure work of art. We gaze upon the equipment reverently, with appropriate looks of awe, and I secretly wish I had less reverence and more knowledge about all of it.
Same As It Ever Was
In any event, the daunting task of packing, together with other last minute activities, remains. It’s been a harried week, with work and a week long visit from our daughters who are briefly in town (but who have shown little interest in helping their aged parents pack). I can no longer use this blog as my vehicle for procrastination today.
I hope to have decent internet access here and there. Please excuse any typos in posts from the road as they may well be written on my phone. To Russia, With Love!
One way to alleviate the excruciating boredom of climbing the fire staircase as part of my training routine is surfing the internet on my phone. (Yes, it can be done, although it is easier on the way down than up and it is certainly not possible while going backwards.) As part of that practice, I have possibly read every blog ever written about Mt. Elbrus, ranging from the missives sent by the ubiquitous Pilgrim Tours (who publish success ratios for each of their almost weekly climbs once the season starts) to past worldwide wrestling pro John Layfield’s diary of his ill fated attempt to summit a couple of years ago. I
haven’t ignored YouTube either. I have stayed up many a night viewing other people’s clips of the Barrel Huts, the snow, and sometimes, the summit.
What all these have in common is their utter lack of consistency. You go from the cheery Canadians planting their flag at the summit under almost clear skies to the blog from the South African woman whose group gets caught in a storm just meters from the summit and who has to struggle for hours through deep, deep snow to get back down. There’s one video that seems to consist of nothing but climbers collapsed in a heap while snow pelts down on them.
Last Thursday I watched and read enough of these that I awoke Friday wondering just what the heck I was I actually planning on doing. How do we know whether we are going to encounter blue skies or will we fall victim to the truly dangerous mountain gods? But, it didn’t take much more than remembering how I felt when we reached the top of Kilimanjaro in all its icy splendor, or the views of the wind whipped rock and stone of Dead Woman’s Pass on the Inca Trail, to get me going again. Two weeks from today. Countdown is on.
It is a well known fact that men like gear. Trigger alert – this post may disturb some of you gentlemen so continue to read at your own peril.
My husband is no exception. He has studied the meaning of “soft shell guide pants,” weighed the respective benefits of Black Diamond vs. other brands of crampons (that dilemma was easily resolved when the Black Diamonds wouldn’t fit his boots), and by now has a vast knowledge of the respective merits of multiple types of plastic boots. The number of emails he receives from Moosejaw is by now probably equivalent to those he receives from the president or other political luminaries.
I realized gear was a large part of the male enjoyment of the Great Outdoors many years ago on a one night camping trip in the Adirondacks with the husband and several of his male buddies. We arrived in the small town outside the state park about noon, and then proceeded to spend the entire afternoon buying equipment for what was probably no more than a six mile hike the next day. We got to the camp site just in time to drop off all the new gear before heading back to town to have dinner at a restaurant.
The wind up for this trip has been no different. The husband’s latest mail order has been the much wondered about soft shell guide pants made out of some special fabric apparently guaranteed to turn the most inexperienced climber into something worthy of Everest. But in all fairness, I have to admit I have not been immune from the gear bug. At Travel Country’s last sale (by now they recognize us and devote an entire cash register to us as soon as they see us coming in) – I found unbelievably expensive hard shell pants at half price. Water proof, breathable – clearly if my body fails, these pants will surely walk me up the mountain by themselves.
But yesterday we decided to practice putting our crampons on, zipping and unzipping pants over our plastic boots, etc. Unfortunately, I forgot that my highly exotic full side zippered pants zip both up and down. After I couldn’t figure them out, I resorted to my husband’s clearly superior gear skills to solve the problem by yanking on the *#%@ zipper. Following a fair amount of cursing and blame and tugging – now the zipper doesn’t work at all! The pants are now off at a tailor in the hopes they can be fixed, labels still pristine.
All I can say is, despite all my maligning of my husband’s obsession with his equipment, all his stuff still works. At least so far.
I have hated running for as long as I can remember. It started in junior high or high school when our gym teacher decided an appropriate way to avoid the mutual torture that comprised our gym classes was to require each student to do an independent series of workouts for about six weeks. Every week we each had to accumulate a certain number of aerobics points after which we were free to return to eating Pringles, drinking cokes, watching Star Trek and I Love Lucy reruns, and the other activities that made up our generally somnolent 1970s lives. I’m pretty sure the book upon which this brilliant exercise in avoiding actually teaching (much less seeing) your gym students was Kenneth Cooper’s The New Aerobics.
I would stagger around Duke’s east campus in the hot North Carolina afternoons, convinced that I must be running at least 3 or 4 miles. It was only much later I found out it was barely two miles door to door. But my aerobics points were much higher when I self reported the greater number of miles, and hence my completion of the task much sooner.
In any event, it was those memories that faced me each time I thought of running as a form of training. But as Elbrus has drawn nearer and nearer, the fear factor ever increasing, and the conflict between the time needed for other types of training and my work responsibilities seemingly sometimes insurmountable, running has occasionally seemed like the best solution. Hence, off I have gone, Pandora radio plugged in, and at a steady 11 1/2 minute per mile pace. And very occasionally I have actually hit that point where your stride feels rhythmic, breathing even, and you feel you can keep going indefinitely. I have to admit that the purchase of real running shoes as opposed to what we wore in the ’70s has also made a difference. I’m certainly not into speed – in fact, the few times my much taller husband has run with me he claims my pace is impervious to topographical features. But in my view you shouldn’t have too much fun running downhill – I figure that it’s the sheer mental endurance that may be the most needed quality for the long slog up Mt. Elbrus.
So, I will now grudgingly sometimes go for a run – and maybe even enjoy it (but not too much!). Nonetheless, I must point out that Jim Fixx, the author of The Complete Book of Running dropped dead of a heart attack at 52. Need I say more.
FromSwamptoSummit 