Prelude to Training, Part One
February 28th, 2008 Posted in PreparationIn March of 2009 I will be going to
As soon as it sunk in that I was actually going, I felt this nudging, overwhelming feeling that at first I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I knew that something wasn’t right with the plan - my plan - but wasn’t quite sure what that something, that nudging, was.
I think I was finally able to put two and two together the first time I walked past the mirror after declaring that I was going to Everest. Simply put, that nudging feeling that I had experienced was my body telling my mind, and my lofty ambitions, that it was - quite frankly - retarded. Yes, retarded. Although my eagerness allowed me to buy into the whole notion that I could trek through winding hills, up and down, up and down, ultimately gaining thousands of feet of elevation, I had committed a mental faux pas and had failed to consult with my body if it was willing and able to pull it off.
My body. Now that’s a tale worth telling.
It started off with me being the fat kid in school. Not the fattest, mind you, but I had enough flub in my 10-year old acid-washed jeans to ensure that I was always the first one pushed down “The Hill” in our schoolyard playground, and was always more content to be “sick” on the majority of gym periods. To me, exercise meant hitting the “A” and “B” buttons really fast on our Nintendo system.
From an unsightly childhood to my preteen years, things only went from bad to worse. A persistent numbness and tingling in my legs lead me to convince my parents (how I don’t know, as I was the perennial kid crying wolf) that I should be checked out. An examination by my local doctor in Northern Alberta turned into a referral to a doctor in Grand Prairie, which then turned into a referral to a back specialist at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. That consultation resulted in the doctor taking one look at my x-rays, shoving me gently into a wheelchair with the proclamation “one more week walking and you could have been paralyzed for life”, and a major operation to fuse my spine together. Apparently I had something called Spondylolisthesis, which was curious enough to the doctors and the hospital there that before my surgery they rolled me out - half naked - onto a huge stage so that all the other doctors could muse at this pudgy little boy from Northern Alberta with a back that was about to fall apart.
The fusion was a success and the doctor informed me that I would for evermore have trouble touching my toes, shouldn’t ever lift anything heavy, and would need to find a desk job later on in life. I was 12, so I did nothing more than blink at him with a furrowed brow that masked my joy: a desk job!
Spondylolisthesis surgery meant learning to re walk - to some extent - and a lengthy stay in the hospital which got me out of classes, for which I was happy. The next time I was in the hospital, I wasn’t quite as lucky.
I was sixteen, and I drove the way that sixteen year olds drove - which is to say that they shouldn’t be driving. I won’t get into the full details of that tale here, as it’s been fully documented here , but let’s just say I ended up in a head-on collision at the start of the summer which saw me in the hospital through the summer with two broken legs and a Honda Civic that was conveniently missing its passenger side.
Long story short: again I had to re-learn how to walk and ended up with legs and a body that weren’t quite as perfect as they were before the accident. I now permanently have one leg that’s about an inch shorter than the other and have lost about 50% of the range of motion of right hip joint (I can’t even sit on the floor with my legs crossed as my leg simply won’t bend that way). I wasn’t called “Hop-A-Long” through high school for nothing.
There you have it: ultimately I’ve had an overall physical condition through my life not quite suited for boiling water…let alone hoofing up the side of mountains. So it’s with this stellar physical background that I have ignorantly decided that I can make it to Everest Base Camp, and it’s with this background that my body has informed me, quite politely, that I’m “f**king nuts”.