“Dave, man…I hear you’re going to China!”

Close, but not quite. Nepal borders Tibet, I explain, and I consider Tibet to be Tibet, not China. But I would love to go to both Tibet and China some day; to walk through historic, remote Lhasa to soak up some ancient Tibetan culture, and to walk atop the Great Wall of China. Erin and I lived in close proximity to China back in 1999 during a teaching stint in the industrial city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and I was always disappointed that I never made the short flight to China.

“Dave, good to see you! What’s this I hear about you climbing Everest?”

This one I especially laugh at, considering that I’ve never climbed, well…anything before, other than a couple of day hikes up small Yukon mountains (hills, really) and Mount Everest wouldn’t be my starting point if and when I ever choose to start climbing. No Everest guiding company would ever consider taking a complete greenhorn up the largest and one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, even if I did have delusions of grandeur.

I can picture it now: sitting on the snow, preparing to navigate the notorious Khumbu icefall (a treacherous section of glacier that must be navigated to reach Advanced Base Camp – ABC – which is full of massive, precariously balanced and often crashing towers of ice) and not even knowing how to strap on crampons. Hell, I stray away from tie-up laces, considering them an affront to everyday practicality (slip-on shoes rock!). In any case, I would redefine buffoon if anyone caught me on a real mountain considering my present state.

To tell you the truth, though, I would love to climb some day. I would love to start small, with a week-long training climb put on by experts, somewhere in the Rockies. I’ve even looked into it several times, and it’s a goal of mine to complete such a course some time in the next five years. Learn the basics, like mountain safety, belaying, and rappelling, and hopefully summit some “small” (by mountaineering standards) 8000-12000 foot mountain in the process.

From there, I would like to progress to the next step – assuming that mountain climbing agreed with me and I didn’t make a complete ass of myself – for I can picture a wiseass mountain goat guffawing to his mountain goat cousins, perhaps over a feed of prime alpine lichen, “Billy, you should have seen that shiny foreheaded fool last week on the north face! I tell you, he came this close to impaling himself on his ice axe….priceless! Our one-legged brother, Tippy, had better balance…”

Yes, I would like to progress from training to doing some stunning peaks in the Rockies; nothing boneheadedly dangerous, but terrain that would feed my photographic hunger and truly take my breath away. Beyond that, I have no solid goals, although a lingering yearning of mine has been Mount Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

But climb Mount Everest? That’s hardcore, and I am – even through my process of exercising – decidedly a soft-core man.

One hundred and forty eight! One hundred and forty nine!

(Gasp, gasp)

One hundred and fifty!!

This is last night. I am lying on my back on the floor, panting.

Erin is sitting on the Lazy Boy beside me with her eyebrows raised; she’s obviously impressed. Luke is laying down on his belly next to me, trying his best to make me stay still so that he can chew on my ear, which to him always seems tastier than a six-pack of Arrowroots. I woud like to say that he’s impressed, but he - for now - seems more impressed that he can chew hard enough to make me jump.

I have just finished one hundred and fifty crunches, and it only took me about five minutes to rip through the ab-burning repetitions. I have impressed myself.

Three weeks ago I would have laughed off the notion of twenty five crunches. One hundred and fifty was something that you read about in Men’s Health, scrunched your head thoughtfully, and then dismissed as marketing fodder.

Three weeks ago is when I came to the decision that I was going to need a new body if I was going to pull off this trek, and there was nothing serious in my way except my own apathy. The biggest problem was that I was quite comfortable with apathy — we had always been great workout partners. This time I had to do something different. I couldn’t really change dramatically by just “eating right” (for we all know that never amounts to anything), and my new habit of walking almost everywhere could only do so much (to work in the mornings, home at lunch, back up to work after lunch, home again in the evening, and even then back up to Javaroma - our local fine coffee haunt - in the evenings to catch up on my photography business and write dribble for my Everest blog).

I bought a gym membership.

The last time I had a gym “membership” (which came free with ungodly tuition), I was in college and had a reason to have a gym membership. The “frosh fifteen” was no myth, and as we all consumed Kraft Dinner out of hot pots on a thrice-nightly schedule, we quickly found that those relatively trim bodies we left high school with were very quickly replaced with beer and convenience food-thickened bloatededness. Due to the fact that college was the time to focus more on impressing the opposite sex than our professors, the gym became a second home.

That was twelve years ago, however (!!), and the hundreds of crunches I did at that time somehow wore off since. I needed a gym membership, and bought one. The Racquet Club here in Yellowknife, conveniently located a stone’s throw away. Damn, I can’t even blame the weather (darkness, cold, sleet, mosquitos, cook breezes, or any other number of excuses that I had in my former vocabulary), as the Racquet Club is seriously that close to my house that I could probably walk over in my skivvies and make it to the change room before anyone called the cops.

*******************************************

Back to Luke lying on the floor filling up my ear lobe with clear baby drool.

I had just finished one hundred and fifty crunches, and I honestly have to say that I was elated. I seriously struggled through twenty - not three weeks ago - when I complained to Erin in a whiny voice about how it felt that my stomach was on fire. That time, she only raised one eyebrow.

It’s really amazing what the body can do in a short time. Seriously I’ve convinced myself that excuses really are the only thing that gets in most of our ways. In three short weeks I have dropped from an unpleasant 201 pounds (on my 5′ 9 1/2″ frame) to 191 pounds, and have likely gained some muscle weight in the process. I have been in the gym on average six days a week (at six o’clock on the morning!), and feel - for lack of a better description - Mr. T good. Seriously…give me some gold chains, a Mohawk, and some face paint and I could shoot a remake of the A-Team pronto. And this hasn’t been at the expense of food, which always seems to be my hold up. I love food with a passion, and it loves me. I haven’t given it up, and don’t plan to. Give me a big juicy steak on the grill and give me my McDonald’s bacon-and-egg bagels. Give me my weekend six-pack of beer and my occasional glass of red wine, like the Merlot that I’m sipping on now.

Now, three weeks by no means equates success. It’s a start, and I feel one whole heck of a mountain goat better now than I did at the start of February, but it’s just a start. My goal? To go from 201 pounds to 175 pounds for the trek, with a massive shift from my still somewhat flabby anatomy to something that doesn’t bounce when I don’t jump.

And by stating that goal here - on the record for anyone who’s bored enough to read this - I hope that it will serve as greater inspiration to me to ultimately reach my goal.

Cheers.

The today me - or at least the “today” me of two weeks ago when I very first decided that I was committing to this crazy plan - is not a pretty sight. The last time I seriously exercised was about three years ago when I went on a jogging kick one summer and dropped about 40 pounds. Needless to say it didn’t last, and a lot of the belly came back. Then, approximately seventeen months ago, the miracle of procreation kicked in with Erin informing me - a surprised and happy me - that she was pregnant.

That translated into several things: a crash course in basic human anatomy and biology (I learned what “dilated” meant), approximately a terabyte of baby-related photographs ended up on my external hard drive (for he’s without doubt the cutest kid in the world - which is what all parents are supposed to say, but in our case is true…), and about 20 pounds of pregnancy-related jigglies made an unsightly addition to my body. I would like to say I did it out of sympathy to my wife, but it was just a gradual decline on my part borne out of excuses.

I have:

• arms that are soft (should I say squishy?) reminders of biceps that I used to have
• lungs that make me breath heavy during a brisk walk through the grocery store isles in search for spicy Dorito chips.
• non-existent abs (or if they’re there I wouldn’t know)
• shins that ache when I walk up tiny hills

As I do a quick inventory I realized I’m in trouble, big trouble, and that changes are needed if I’m not going to be completely embarrassed by collapsing into a pile of yak dung in the first fifteen minutes of my trek come next March.

Although I’m not doing something that most athletic people would consider an outlandishly impressive physical feat - actually climbing Mount Everest (remember, I am simply content to survive the trek to the Mount Everest Base Camp) - I am doing something that is going to be completely foreign to anything that I’ve ever done before: a sustained physical undertaking that will see me walk about 90 kilometres over two weeks through some of the most extreme and beautiful landscape our world has to offer. If I am going to do this, I don’t want anything getting in the way of me having the trip of a lifetime. I have to be in shape - in better shape than I’ve ever been before - and this means that I have to completely change everything about my current physical state. I have to train, hard, and I have just over 12 months to do it.

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”.

The moment for me – as it was for many people – was when I read Jon Krakeur’s Into Thin Air, the now famous account of the 1996 Everest tragedy in which eight members of the two teams that Krakeur climbed with (and a total of 15 people) died trying to climb the most well-known mountain in the world.

Now for most safety-loving, suburb-living, “normal” people this moment would translate into the moment in which I declare all climbers as crazy death-loving fools, and go about their lives without a second thought to Everest, or to climbing. For me, though, it had the opposite effect. I was enthralled.

I became enthralled with everything Everest and everything climbing-related. I devoured tales of harrowing experiences on razor thin Himalayan ridges and watched Joe Simpson’s Touching The Void (a recreation of his and Simon Yates epic, incredible, somewhat disastrous attempt on Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes) not once, not twice, but probably four or five times. My personal library now has dozens of climbing-related books (along with other non climbing-related adventure stories), each read with a sense of excitement and awe, each read cover-to-cover.

Although it seemed like the majority of the adventure stories that I read had some element of death and danger to them (would they be adventures otherwise?), it’s not the death and danger that ultimately drew me to them. Instead, I was enthralled with the notion that there are people in this world brave enough to shed the monotony of every day life, look all the people in the eye that said they couldn’t, and went to experience these places in the world that most people only read about, whether that be a scenic peak in the Canadian Rockies, the vast barren icy landscape of the North Pole, or the mountain which the local people call Chomolungma, “Goddess Mother of the World” (Mount Everest). This is what I wanted to do as well, someday, but content to live vicariously through the words of others until it was my time.

Fast forward to February of 2007, which is the month that I write this. My wife, Erin, who has long known about my ambitions to “someday” go to Mount Everest, or go for an extended hike through the Canadian Rockies, or to train to climb Mount Logan – although my “someday” was always in the future, free from commitment – turned to me as she was making a cup of tea and said, “Dave, you should go to Nepal. You should go to Mount Everest”.

Mount Everest. Nepal. The sounds of the words bounced through my brain quickly enveloped in images of the Himalaya, lush green foothills, Bhuddist temples, and Sherpa’s trekking up steep cliffs with oxygen tanks (Sherpas are the ethnic group found on the Nepalese side of Mount Everest, and are noted for their amazing strength and ability to live and work high in this mountainous region with oxygen levels far below those found at sea level).

What? I wasn’t quite sure I heard her correctly. Of course I should go to Nepal – to Everest – but I have said that for years, not really believing it myself.

“I’m serious. You should go. You need to go. Let’s look at what it would take…”

With that sentence it became somewhat a possibility, and has since become real. After some internet research in which I have determined the optimal time to go for what I want to see (Spring), a respected and reasonably priced guiding company (GAP Adventures), and hundreds of web pages describing and displaying the over-powering beauty of this region of the world, I am booked to go to Nepal and to Everest Base Camp (I’m not insane enough to think that I’m anywhere close to being able to climb the thing, not to mention put my family through that risk) in March of 2009.

 I am going. I am going to Mount Everest.