Cold Wars

by Andy Kirkpatrick

  ‘How bad is it?’ I asked, suddenly panicked at the idea that maybe we’d have to go down, then worried if he could actually make it down under his own steam. Rescue helicopters would not fly close to the wall due to rock fall, so we were on our own.

  ‘It’s bad. Last time it was like this, I had to lay on the floor for a few months,’ said Paul, his face now grey and crossed with shocks of pain each time he tested the limits of his diminishing flexibility.

  ‘Sorry Andy, we’ll have to go down.’

  I couldn’t stand it, to fail just as we’d started, after such a mammoth journey here, all that money and effort wasted. My mind looked for a solution, but I knew he was right. Our climb was over.

  ‘Do you think I could carry on by myself?’ I asked, looking for an answer from me just as much as Paul, thinking he could just abseil off and leave me to carry on, with no thought for his pain, only my own.

  ‘I need to get back to Britain,’ said Paul. ‘And you’ll have to drive.’

  That was it. It was over.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, my mind switching to how we’d get all our stuff down, especially with me having to do it alone.

  Then I had another idea, but I only had a moment to work out if it was a good one.

  ‘Right, this might sound a bit mad, but – ’ I began, trying to sound authoritative and considered, ‘– I’ll leave a haul-bag with all my gear in it here, with all the food and the portaledge and stuff on this ledge, chuck off the rest, then tie all the ropes together to reach the base of the climb, and leave them fixed.’

  Paul just looked at me.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ I continued, ‘then I’ll come back, climb my ropes and try to solo it.’

  It was a monumentally stupid idea, monumentally stupid on so many levels, to imagine that my ropes and gear would not have been smashed to bits or cut by rock fall by the time I returned, that I could just ‘come back.’

  But I was clinging tight to my dream. I wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Okay,’ said Paul. His answer was a sign of how much pain he was in. Any other time he’d have told me not to be stupid and I’d have agreed.

  Half an hour later I tossed off one haul-bag containing all Paul’s gear, and the gear I’d need to get home and back, and watched it spin down the wall until it disappeared below our feet, hitting the snow out of sight, shooting down several hundred metres to the trees and the river below.

  I didn’t care if we couldn’t find it.

  ‘Were the passports in that one?’ asked Paul.

  We abseiled down the ropes, my plan permitting a fast descent, down our fire escape of rope. I adjusted each belay as we went, placing more gear and attaching the rope to it with an alpine butterfly knot, so that on my return I wouldn’t have to trust just a single strand of rope running unhindered over many sharp edges.

  Eventually we reached the bottom of the wall, and the top of the snow slope, and Paul began to climb down, while I tied off the rope, not wanting it to swing free in the wind and get hung up on a flake higher up.

  With the rope secured, I looked up at it, spidering up the wall, a string that held all that was left of my collapsing dream. I was leaving every bit of climbing gear I owned. If I lost it I could never replace it. I thought back to the Lafaille, to that broken haul-bag. We had been faced with a choice, to go down with all we had, or leave all we had, forcing us to return.

  We had made the right choice then. But there had been two of us. And it hadn’t been a new route.

  It hadn’t been the Troll Wall. And it hadn’t been me, not the person I was now. It had been someone else.

  But it was done.

  Live with it.

  I followed Paul down, who wasn’t far ahead, knowing he had to wait as I had the spare rope we needed to abseil down the band of cliffs two hundred metres below us.

  The snow was dangerous, a slip deadly. I focused on this as I climbed down carefully, the snow thick and sticky.

  Focus. Focus. Focus.

  I looked down to check on Paul’s progress.

  He was gone.

  I knew he must have slipped.

  My heart dropped.

  I moved down carefully, shouting Paul’s name, knowing he could well have fallen all the way down the slopes, following the track of the haul-bag. That he’d probably be dead if he had.

  I imagined having to tell his wife Mary that he was dead, thought about having to ring her from here. Tonight.

  ‘Do I have her number?’ I thought.

  ‘I’m okay.’ Paul’s voice was weak, his head visible far below, just above the big drop.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he repeated, and I wondered if he was talking to me, or to himself. ‘I slipped,’ he shouted. ‘Watch it, it’s dead icy just below you.’

  I climbed down carefully to where the belay was for the abseil.

  ‘I bloody slipped. I thought I was a goner, but just managed to stop myself before I went over the edge.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  An hour later, after staggering, wallowing and bum sliding, we made it to the trees.

  ‘I’m going to try crossing the river,’ said Paul. ‘It’s only a few hundred metres if we go direct. I don’t think I can go all the way round.’

  I followed him to the edge of the river, knowing crossing it was very risky, but that he was in serious pain. The river was only a hundred metres across, and low because it was winter, but how would he cope with the temperature of the slushy water, choked with blocks of ice that had broken off the bank and were floating downstream?

  Paul set off, the water soon over his knees, then up to his waist, inching up to his armpits. It occurred to me that I should have tied the rope to him, but it was too late now.

  Slowly the water inched down his body as he reached the shallows on the other side.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘but cold,’ and waved me on, then moved into the trees, heading for the car.

  I followed him, the water moving up my gaiters until it spilled over the top, the water, ice cold, filtering into my boots and under my clothing. It was painful. I inched forward, knowing I had to ignore the cold and cross quickly, the thick slushy water forming up around me, trying to suck me down river.

  I thought about getting stuck, of freezing to death, sticking out of the ice, caught by the trolls in some wicked spell. I tried not to panic.

  Caught by the trolls? Wasn’t I already caught?

  The water was over my waist.

  Nipples.

  Breathless.

  I felt the haul-bag begin to drag me back. I wanted to run, but knew its weight might tip me backwards, into the water.

  The level began to drop.

  I stopped for some reason, and pulled out my camera to take a picture of my half-submerged legs, to take stock of this moment. It came to me, a realisation that was profoundly worrying, that here, standing in this almost frozen river, was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

  I heard Paul start the engine.

  TEN

  Hard

  36:01

  36:00

  35:59

  My eyes are fixed on a digital readout, black on grey, a clock slowly counting down, the moment between each second a small torture, the change a tiny relief. As I row back and forth on the rowing machine, back and forth, it feels like I’m chasing down time itself.

  35:01

  35:00

  29:59

  The gym is almost empty in the midmorning. It’s just me, the usual gang of off-duty bouncers pumping iron in the corner and sometimes the odd pensioner keeping fit. Dance music thumps away but I barely hear it as I pull hard, slide back, pull hard, slide back, the display my only focus.

  30:01

  30:00

  29:99

  I hear the bouncers laughing, dropping the dumbbells onto the mat so they ring out, breaking the rules but knowing no one will dare make a point of it. One of them shouts at his mate: ‘Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.�
� I’ve been rowing for a little over ten minutes and already I feel as if I’m going to die.

  27:01

  27:00

  26:59

  Sweat stings my eyes and I want to scratch my nose. I want a drink. I want to be sick. But I also know that if I do anything but row, and row hard, I’ll miss my target: ten kilometres in under forty minutes. I know I can do it physically. I’ve done it every day for two weeks straight. My body is dumb, easily bossed around. It’s my mind that’s the weakest link, making excuses why I should stop, one after another: you need a rest day, you’re overtraining, you’re damaging yourself. And yet some part of me overrides it and we go on once more altogether.

  25:01

  25:00

  24:59

  You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a typical day for a professional climber, pushing the body, honing yourself. But it wasn’t. It was the desperate act of a man trying to get fit quickly. I knew I was unfit, unready for my next climb, too lazy to put in half the effort over twice the time. That meant I now had to beast myself into shape, perhaps not physical shape, but mental, to remind myself how to push the limits of failure.

  23:01

  23:00

  22:59

  I used to have a pair of trousers that dried super-fast. In fact, that was their main selling point, the adverts and swing-tags making a big thing about how no matter how wet they became, they would dry in a flash. What the adverts didn’t explain was the flipside – that while they dried fast, they also got wet quickly. The trousers had all the water-repelling qualities of kitchen roll.

  My fitness was like those trousers. I could get fit very quickly, very often while actually on the climb, but once home I would do nothing, and so my fitness would go back to zero. Zero to hero and back again. Being fit is a full-time job, and like most real work, I tended to avoid it.

  To make matters worse, I learned that you didn’t actually have to be that fit, and the psychological commitment to climb was more important than pull-ups and ten-kilometre runs. This was my greatest asset, and my biggest downfall.

  While some trained every day, I trained a few times a year. Also, my lifestyle was not conducive to fitness, being a binger in all things: work, food and climbing. This meant I usually went away as unfit as I could be, and came back in good shape, having often lost a lot of weight. It was the most extreme diet you could imagine, with the added benefit of involuntary colonic irrigation if it got really scary.

  I did aspire to be fit, and this was part of my addiction to climbing. Coming home thin and fit meant that climbing created the person I wanted to be but was too lazy to do on my own.

  The reason I could get away with this lack of preparation was the climbing I did tended to be slow and technical, meaning you didn’t have to be an Olympic athlete, just a plodder, even if you were plodding up vertical granite. Knowing this truth – that you didn’t need to be a superman – was probably my biggest asset.

  Ian, as well as most climbers better than us, spent all their time training, each extra pull-up or personal best reached bringing them mentally closer to being the superman they believed they had to be. Many people train all their lives for a race they’ll never feel ready to run. I’m just ignorant – or arrogant – enough to set off anyway, confident that I’ll wing it.

  21:01

  21:00

  20:59

  I try not to look at the counter. The faster my heart beats, the longer the pause between each second seems to grow, stretching the laws of physics. It is like rowing away from a black hole.

  Eyes closed, I picture myself zipping across the water in the Olympics, or trying to outrun a tanker during an Atlantic crossing – anything but sat in the gym, the space between now and the end unimaginably vast, only tempered by the tiny joy of the distance readout changing, the relief of passing each kilometre mark, knowing that eventually it will go from thousands to hundreds to tens and then single digits.

  20:01

  20:00

  19:59

  People have told me I must have good muscle memory, but I have no idea what that really means, and it seems to go against the three things all alpinists need: fortitude, a bad memory and – I forget the third. The point is if you could remember how scared, miserable and frustrated you were during a climb you’d never go back. I didn’t think of myself as being strong or fit, but I did have strong legs and thick bones, which seemed hard to break.

  Truth be told, I did have a resting heart rate below forty beats per minute, which some might argue puts me in the bracket of super-athlete. I put this down to being a sloth, a languid kind of chap, easygoing to the point of not going at all. I lived by the Iranian proverb: ‘When the river is in flood you should swim, and when the river is empty you should rest.’ I did almost nothing at all between big climbing trips: no rock climbing, no running, no going to the gym, my biggest exertion climbing the stairs, my heaviest load my kids on my back. Laziness wasn’t the only reason for this. I also felt duty bound to be a normal person, to take off my super-climber costume, and just be a dad and a husband.

  11:02

  11:01

  11:00

  I push a little harder for the three-quarter mark, fearing if I weaken now I’ll not hit my target time. My stomach muscles ache from the bar hitting them, a thousand little punches, as I watch the numbers tick by.

  10:35

  10:34

  10:33

  The usual thought comes to me, whispering, rational, convincing: ‘Why not stop now? You’ve done enough.’

  Stop.

  Stop.

  Stop.

  There is no need to be persuaded, it’s all I want, just to stop – but that is too easy. Where would be the satisfaction of getting to the end? All I would have is the lazy guilt, the lazy guilt I was here trying to wipe away for just a moment. For once I have to shake off this laziness, buckle down and train hard. I am off to the Alps in a week or two.

  ‘The fitter you are, the harder you are to kill,’ was how Marc Twight put it, the sentiment that got me down here to train.

  10:28

  Stop.

  10:27

  Stop.

  10:26

  We make a science out of giving in and giving up, offering reasons that excuse our weakness. Failure feels good. Giving in feels good. That moment of relief, showing love and compassion for yourself, being weak.

  Weak.

  Weak.

  Weak.

  But it only lasts for a moment, and that joy is soon gone, leaving only the grubby guilt. Whereas to finish, or at least, to be utterly defeated while never giving in, that lasts forever.

  10:01

  10:00

  09:59

  I hit the three-quarter mark, my brain almost too fuzzy to work it out, the banging of the bouncers’ weights on the gym floor mirroring my pounding heart, my arms stretching out before me on the rack. ‘That feeling is weakness leaving your body,’ shouts a bouncer at his mate, as he lets out a primal grunt, a set of weights the size of two small cars above his head.

  All I have to do is keep going hard for ten more minutes.

  08:01

  08:00

  07:59

  At first you try and focus on form, sitting up straight, legs and arms working together, just like the diagram on the rowing machine, breathing in and out smoothly. But this only gets you so far. Soon you begin to lose your shape, leaning back and using your core to give your arms a break, going faster with less power and then slower with more. After that it’s survival rowing, chased down by the great white shark of failure. To the finish or death.

  05:01

  05:00

  04:59

  Most people would set out with a rigid and comprehensive fitness regime, but I don’t. I’m easily bored or sidetracked, wanting expedition fitness, not to be a body builder or a tri-athlete. On an expedition you really go into the red, many times feeling sick with hunger and thirst, pushing your body beyond the boundaries of comfort, d
eprived of sleep and generally running on empty, breaking most of the rules of athletic performance.

  I’d read that the body can only store two thousand calories of easy-to-access energy, and so based my training on that. I would take Ella to nursery and put Ewen in the gym’s crèche, just down the bottom of our hill. I’d do two thousand calories of exercise – running, cross training, rowing, anything just as long as the machine showed my calorie output. I didn’t have time to do it properly. I had to go for maximum pain.

  When Ewen wasn’t there a session lasted about two hours, and after it I’d go back up the hill slowly, legs wobbly, feeling a bit sick, and gobble down my lunch. It was an unconventional approach, and one that worked not on the usual male obsession of a six-pack, but rather an expedition sick pack. This regime lasted a month, with six visits a week. I never felt the benefit, never really recovered. But then again, that’s what it’s like on a trip.

  01:01

  01:00

  00:59

  With a growing sense of relief, I try to put on a sprint, realising I’m still on target for a sub-forty-minute finishing time. My whole system shudders with the strain, my heart ready to give out, suddenly not sure I’ll make it down the home stretch.

  00:56

  00:55

  00:54

  I know I must look and sound a state, really puffing now, trying to draw every last ounce of oxygen into my sore lungs, spit splattering the display, my fingers having to grip the bar harder, hands callused from doing this every day for a month, feeling as if I’ve gone too soon, that I’m about to black out. I know what will happen when I stop, that I’ll let go and slump forward, the bar springing home, my body shaking, as if it is unable to cope with stopping and wants to go on. I’ll be gulping air, my lungs scorched, tasting blood, expanding to new dimensions in the depths of my chest.

  00:32

  The fitter you are the harder you are to kill.