I had some pretty fancy dreams of summiting Mt Whitney today for the second time.
Sometimes dreams just don’t come true.
Sometimes your heart is just beating so fast, your asthma is kicking in and your feet fucking hurt.
I literally pushed myself to my limit today and I had to make myself stop before I did some damage.
At the very beginning of the hike I felt horrible, nauseas, weak and felt like I would barely make it a few hours.
I tried to drink some protein shake and some juice to get something, anything in my stomach to fuel my muscles, which, let’s face it, would rather still be sleeping.
At about 10,000 feet my body began to adjust to the hiking and my heavy pack (3 liters of water)
I was feeling much better, a little more awake and I thought, hey maybe I could actually summit today!
That was before hiking for six and a half hours up hill.
I don’t remember this hike being so hard last year.
I don’t remember this hike being so hard last year.
The moment of hope was before my feet really started hurting and it was the time that I was really enjoying the hike. ( before my feet started killing me and I felt like I could get no air at all in my lungs.)
When I did Mt Whitney last year we did the hike in 16 hours.
I had some crazy grand plan to do the hike in 12 hours today.
We reached the switch backs at about 10 a.m. Which was what I was thinking would be our turn around time.
This won’t be so hard I thought to myself, remembering last year skipping up the switch backs while singing 99 damn switch backs on Whitney ( 99 bottles of beer on the wall)
Yeah, let me tell you, when you are hiking up a mountain practically at running speed switch backs are hard.
Especially 99 of them.
Comments
That’s intense! I think I would really enjoy the hike, but not running it.
Well kudos to you! I’m too lazy to run on a flat surface and I get too many stress fractures just walking so WOW this is awesome!