THE SKY

RUNNER,
KILIAN
JORNET
CUTTING THE
SLACK WITH
DEAN POTTER
IN HER WORDS:
Edurne
Pasaban
THE ALPINIST
THE SKY RUNNER
KILIAN JORNET
Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete
of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80
races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records,
many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to pur-
chase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses (Corsi-
ca) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He reg-
ularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from
streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at
the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles
up to Europes roof over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Texd climb-
ers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet and back home again in less
than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete.
A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped
just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In
the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six
miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating
the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning,
by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked
as if hed just won the local turkey trot.
Jornet is not normal, his mother says. My mission is to make
Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no.
Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jor-
net puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up
ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up
and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet
reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of
the last four winters.
So whats next when youre 25 and every one of the races on the
wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You
dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the
Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records
climbing and descending some of the worlds most well known peaks,
from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing
so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland
and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and
redefining whats possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing
has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the
Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and
ski the south face of a peak that hasnt been skied before in win-
ter.
But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago,
Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stphane Brosse died in the
mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth
sacrificing to do what you love?
Chamonix, France, is a resort town wedged into a narrow valley
at the foot of Mont Blanc, just over an hours drive southeast of
Geneva. For those who adore high mountains, the place is hallowed.
The Rue du Docteur Paccard is named for one of the first men to as-
cend Mont Blanc, in 1786; millionaires are tolerated, but mountain
men are revered. The valley is Jornets home for the few months each
year when he is not traveling. I met him there on a stormy morning
in December, when he drove his dented Peugeot van into a parking lot
at the edge of town, stepped out and offered a shy handshake. He is
slight and unremarkable in the deceptive way of a Tour de France cy-
clist hes 5-foot-6 and 125 pounds with the burnished complexion
of years spent above the tree line and a thatch of black hair that,
when sprung from a ski hat, has a slightly blendered look.
As we drove to and from Valle dAosta in Italy, where he would
train that day, Jornet told me in soft-spoken English (one of five
languages he speaks) how he first stunned the small world of elite
ultrarunning. It happened at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Cham-
onix, the most competitive ultrarunning event outside the United
States. (An ultra is any race longer than a marathon.) In 2008,
when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek,
perhaps the sports most well known star, while setting a record
for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif (which happens
to include 31,500 feet of uphill climbing, or the equivalent of 25
trips to the top of the Empire State Building). It was a revelation
and a coronation at once, Runners World magazine later wrote. Then
Jornet won again the next year (and again in 2011).
CREDIT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/magazine/creating-the-all-terrain-human.html?_r=0
CUTTING THE SLACK

He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless
man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing
around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between
a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van.
Dean Potter, one of the worlds best mountain climbers.
This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the worlds best
climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of
a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall
on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash teth-
ered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-
14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open
quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall.
At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in
jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over
unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Rich-
ards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope a strand
of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and cop-
pery green he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure
sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.
He was also taking another stride toward his longing for avian flight,
not as a birdman in a nylon wing suit or squirrel suit, which he had tried,
but as a soloist who could jump off a cliff in a way that he did not yet un-
derstand, with a strength and concentration that he did not yet possess, and
simply fly. Trance music pulsed from speakers on the canyon ledge with know-
ing lyrics:
Sometimes I think my dreams are wild.
Highlining was a high-wire version of slacklining, an extreme cousin
of tightrope walking in which no pole was used for balance and the rope was
elastic, allowing for various tricks involving walking, sitting, lying down,
flipping, even spinning hula hoops. BASE-jumping was an acronym used to de-
scribe parachuting from objects like buildings, towers, bridges and cliffs.
At 35, Potter had long stirred wonder as a climber. Six years ago, in
Yosemite National Park, he became the first person to free climb El Capi-
tan and Half Dome together in less than 24 hours, meaning he used ropes only
for protection in case he fell, climbing only with his hands and feet for a
vertical mile. It was an effort requiring remarkable concentration and speed
that would be unthinkable for an average weekend climber, who would need
gear and most or all of a two-week vacation to make a similar ascent.
In 2001, Potter climbed the famous Nose route on El Capitan, a 3,000-
foot vertical wall with a fierce overhang, in 3 hours 24 minutes. It was
a feat stunning in its economy, considering that, in 1958, the renowned
climber Warren J. Harding led the first team up the route in 45 days. Of-
ten, Potter has climbed thousands of feet carrying no ropes at all, nothing
to aid his grip but shoes and a bag of chalk.
Sport is all about being in the zone, when time and space stop and
everything goes away, said Beaver Theodosakis, the founder and president
of prAna, the climbing apparel company that sponsors Potter. Dean holds
that zone for hours on end, when the mind cant wander, when you cant sec-
ond-guess, when you have to be so confident and deliberate in your moves.
Imagine in everyday life, if we could go to the office like that and not be
distracted.
If he was awe-inspiring, Potter was also a polarizing figure in the
climbing world. In 2006, he climbed Delicate Arch, the revered 60-foot
sandstone structure located near here that is featured on Utah license
plates. Technically, it was not an illegal ascent, but Potter came under
ferocious criticism, accused by others of slicing grooves in the struc-
ture (which he denies) and of betraying the soulfulness of climbing with
self-promoting news media attention.
Do what you want, but dont make it a spectacle, Cory Richards, a
Moab photographer and climber, said.
In the uproar, Potter lost his sponsorship with Patagonia, the envi-
ronmentally sensitive clothing and apparel company.
Still, he said he had no regrets about climbing Delicate Arch. I
know we totally respected that place, he said. He continues to climb with
ambition. At the same time, rock climbing has become so mainstream that
gyms invite children to scale indoor walls at birthday parties. In the way
surfers branched into skateboarding in the late 1950s, Potter was now push-
ing the envelope in the emerging sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.
I think that partly has been a motivator for Dean, to keep pushing
into the unknown and getting a little more fringe as things are getting
more homogenized, Steph Davis, a top climber and Potters wife, said.
Part of me says its kind of crazy to think you can fly your human
body, Potter said. Another part of me thinks all of us have had the dream
that we can fly. Why not chase after it? Maybe it brings you to some other
tangent. Chasing after the unattainable is the fun part.
CREDIT: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/sports/othersports/14climber.html?pagewanted=all
IN HER WORDS
by Edurne Pasaban
A (Hard) Hobby
When I climbed Everest in 2001, never did I think that one day I will finish
all 14 eight-thousanders. Climbing was my hobby. I worked as an engineer. But
after I climbed Broad Peak in 2007, I thought, Ive already climbed nine of
the highest in the world. So why not? After I had done so many, I began to
think it would be possible to do them all.
No Rivals, Just Friends
I never feel like Im in competition with other climbers. When Gerlinde
Kaltenbrunner and I climbed Broad Peak and Dhaulagiri in the same season, I
never saw her like a rival. Both of us have a dream in our life, and its the
same dream. I think that the mountain gives me many things and one of these,
the most important, is friends. For me, Gerlinde is one of the best friends
that I have.
Puro y Duro
On K2 in 2004, we arrived to the summit very late in the afternoon and had
many problems on the way down. We spent 24 hours above 8,000 meters, which
can be deadly. And last year, descending Kanchenjunga, I got to a point where
I told the rest of my team that I couldnt go on, that they should leave me
behind. For me, it was egotism, puro y duro (pure and hard). Of course I
didnt want them to leave me, so it was a way of telling them I was in trou-
ble without necessarily saying it. Sometimes your own pride keeps you from
saying those types of things.
Mental Coaching
This year, the mental preparation was different, because I knew I would be
spending three months in the Himalaya, and that is a very long time. I had a
coach to help me prepare my mind for that. For me, my motivation wasnt to
be the first, but to finish my project, my dream, because I had started it.
These ten years were not easy for me. I had many personal problems. I had a
big depression during 2005 and 2006 and I think that it was the worst moment
in my life. But I had to prove to myself I could keep going and accomplish
this.
The Controversy
Really, I am very tired of talking about this. On the 17th of May [2010], I
finished my challenge. For me this is the most important thing. If I am the
first or the second it is not important for me. Maybe I can stay in the his-
tory books, but my real life will not change with this. Many times, in the
bad moments in my depression, in moments on the mountain when didnt think I
would make it, I didnt think about how many peaks I had climbed. The import-
ant thing is knowing oneself. If Miss Oh did Kangchenjunga, yes or no, is
not an important problem in my life. What is important is to be honest and
humble.
Going for Purity
This spring, I will do Everest without oxygen. I did all my peaks with-
out oxygen except Everest. I just want to continue be happy, doing what I
loveclimbing mountains.
Everything makes more sense on a mountain. Theres a purity to it,
a finality. You climb to the top and live to tell about it, or you dont.
And descents can be more fatal than the push to the summit. Edurne Pasaban
knows this all too well. Six years ago, on her way off of 28,251-foot K2,
Pasabn lost pieces of her big toes to frostbite. When she returned home
to Spain she felt like a load of things had piled up on me all at once.
She was 31 with no partner, no children, and a life dedicated to a quest
that had left her missing some of her toes. She had trouble getting out of
bed in the morning. She thought about quitting climbing. Then, not quite a
year later, Pasaban returned to the mountains, where things were clearer.
This spring, after knocking off 26,545-foot Annapurna and then,
quickly, 26,289-foot Shishapangma, the 37-year-old Basque became the sec-
ond woman in history to summit every mountain above 8,000 meters (26,247
feet). The first, a Korean named Oh Eun-sun, had climbed Annapurna just
weeks before. But Eun-suns claim for the 14 eight-thousanders is contro-
versial, her ascent of Kangchenjunga, in 2009, has been called into ques-
tionphoto evidence and Sherpa accounts dont match up. Pasaban is sick of
the debate. Shes climbed the highest, hardest mountains on Earth. All of
them. And to her, thats whats important. Who are we to disagree?
CREDIT: http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/edurne-pasaban-2010/
Iss. 87 MARCH
NOT A SUSCRIBER?
WHY TO BUY TWITCH:
BECAUSE WE KNOW THAT ACHING ITCH UNDER YOUR BONES. ITS AN ITCH FOR
ADVENTURE, FOR THRILLS, FOR VITALITY. YOU WANT TO STAY YOUNGER, BE
STRONGER, GO FURTHER. LIVE FRESHLY, LIVE WHOLEY, JUST LIVE. WE KNOW
YOU BITE, GROWL, GROAN, SCRATCH AND SHIVER. WE KNOW YOU ARE DYING TO
FULFILL YOUR ITCH FOR ADVENTURE. OUR ADVICE? GO, RUN, JUMP, CLIMB, CHEW.
BITE OFF A SLICE OF LIFE AND DONT SWALLOW UNTIL YOUVE TASTED EVERY
LAST INCH. BECAUSE THAT SENSATION WILL COME CURLING UP AGAIN,
AND THE SOLUTION THEN?
T W I T C H