“Anything is possible is a lie. I love the spirit of that but I don’t believe it’s true. But what I think is actually more effective is really to go and say to tell the truth to ourselves, to actually know our limits. And to truly know “our limits” we have to go and test those limits. Without that, it’s just an assumption.
The First time, actually, on Kilimanjaro what I thought was I found myself on the fourth night in the trip, and I was completely physically Broken. Bear Crawling for 6-7 hours a day and my arms were swelling up my feet. The pain has gotten to be really intense and I thought “I’m done, it’s only 4 days and we projected that it’s going to take us 15 days to reach the summit”.
I thought that the next day I’m going to get up and I’m going to go and helicopter out. Aconcagua is the same and the fourth day, and this day, in particular, you see in this photo it was close to 1000 pull-ups through these ice fields called penitents.
You got to the top of this thing, it was a scree field where I’m just sliding down faster than I could go and climb, and all of a sudden I get to the top of this scree field, physically more exhausted than I’ve ever been and my guide yells, “Rock.”. Watermelon sized boulder releases go by a foot away from my head as I dove under a rock. I’m questioning that night too. I was there in my tent lying and crying. I was thinking “why am I here?”
