pretty. neat.

"So, you spend weeks and weeks and weeks on the mountain, climbing high, sleeping for a day or two, and then coming back down to recover, to sort of kick-start your body into acclimatizing. You grow more red blood cells; pH levels change. All kinds of things that I don’t pretend to understand happen, but I know it takes a lot of time for that to take place. The going up and down really can be discouraging because you think…the time I thought it the most was when we made the last acclimatization trip up to Camp 3 at 24,000 feet and you have killed yourself to get to 24,000 feet. It took me nine hours to climb from Camp 2 to Camp 3 and I thought, ―The last thing I want to do is go back down to the base camp just so I can eat and sleep, only to turn around and come right back to where I’m already sitting. And that was a difficult decision, but you know it’s the right one because you don’t have enough strength left. Your body hasn’t acclimatized enough yet that, if you made a summit push, it would end in disaster.

You want to give up. You’re thinking, ―I just can’t do it. It’s just so hard. And then you stop and go, ―No, no, don’t let that thought enter your mind; just don’t look at the top; it’s too far away; just put your head down and walk to that next snowball or whatever you see fifty feet in front of you, and just little tiny bites, one at a time. And it was challenging, really challenging but it was worth it."