Up. Ben Fogle
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was illuminated pink. The power of that sunrise was incredible. I could feel the sun charge my energy – it felt like new batteries had been placed inside me.
The three of us marched on in silence. Heads bowed to the mountain, each of us in our own misery. The suffering on a high mountain is largely invisible. It is the nakedness of that suffering that makes it harder to grasp. You end up hating yourself and beating yourself up for feeling as you do.
It is completely unlike running a marathon in which the physical drain is obvious. Here, the exhaustion is invisible. It creeps up on you and renders you useless. It is impossible to fight it; you simply have to endure it. Suffer it and deal with it.
‘That’s it,’ came an exclamation from Victoria, ‘I’m out.’
It was 6.30 am and we were just a few metres from the summit. Kenton and I were incredulous. She had endured more than six hours of climbing and hardship, only to declare her quitting a matter of minutes from the summit. It was as unexpected as it was illogical, but then mountains have a strange effect on people. Irrationality is the norm and unreasonable behaviour becomes commonplace. It is one of the reasons solo mountaineering is so dangerous. Without another perspective, it’s difficult to gauge right from wrong. Kenton’s surprise soon turned to exasperation.
‘Get some bloody food in you,’ he berated her. ‘You have no energy because you haven’t eaten anything.’
She had ‘bonked’, as the cycling term refers to it. She had used up her reserves and was running on empty. Kenton was right, but I could tell she didn’t like his style. Victoria is not at all precious, but she has also spent her post-Olympic years trying to exorcise the ghosts of always being told what to do. She popped some nuts into her mouth and less than 20 minutes later we summited the highest peak that Victoria or I had ever climbed.
The summit was bittersweet. We had succeeded, but my mind and focus were elsewhere, back in Britain, worrying about my mother. The expedition had also opened a slight rift between Victoria and Kenton.
I spent the next few months visiting my mother’s bedside each day. Slowly, she recovered and three months later she was discharged from hospital. She had defied the odds, and not only could she walk – something my father had warned us might not be possible – but she also had control of all her senses.
Meanwhile, Victoria was worried about the expedition. She had been unimpressed with Kenton’s slightly laissez-faire approach. His lack of headtorch and failure to pack a satellite phone had rankled her. It had bothered me too, but I’d put it down to a one-off error.
Victoria is a harsher critic and I had to try and convince her that not only was Kenton still the man for the job, but also that Everest was still the right challenge for us.
We had both struggled in Bolivia. Victoria had displayed worrying physiological stats and had struggled in the thin air at 6,500 metres, the same height as Camp 1 on Everest. We would be going several vertical miles higher.
Bolivia had been my first real mountain test. It had pushed me physically, but I had also been inadvertently pushed mentally – worrying about both Victoria and my mother. I am a worrier. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I worry about everything. Worry and guilt are my two worst traits.
I’m one of those people that never really enjoys a party I host, because I’m so busy worrying about whether my guests are having a good time and guilty that they have made the effort to come to the party in the first place.
I often feel guilty. There is often no sensible or rational reason for it. I had always been worried (there we go again) that I would worry about Victoria. I felt a guilty responsibility for her being in the mountains in the first place, even though our decision to try and climb Everest had been very much a collaborative one.
Taking on Mount Everest was a massive task. We had to want it, but we also had to enjoy it. There was no point taking two years out of our lives, and the sacrifices that come with that, to climb one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, if we didn’t really enjoy it.
Life is way too short to spend that amount of time doing something you aren’t really committed to. I got the impression that Victoria had already dedicated enough of her life to cycling, which had never really been her passion. She had simply gone with the ride and discovered she was pretty good at it. She had impressed Kenton with her stamina and mental drive in Bolivia, but she hadn’t impressed herself. We had both seen her ability to beat herself up. But I wanted Victoria to persevere. I could see the life-changing beauty that lay ahead for her, if only she would embrace the challenge.
Our second training expedition would take us into the heart of Nepal and the Himalayas. Kenton wanted to get us used to the high mountains of the Everest region, to introduce us to the food, the sherpas, the equipment and the landscape in which we would spend upwards of two months in our ultimate quest.
It was early January 2018. Kenton and Victoria had gone ahead of me. I thought it would be good for the pair of them to have an extra week to re-bond and connect. We needed absolute trust and confidence in one another, and it was the perfect opportunity for the two of them to spend time together.
I joined them a week later, at the foot of Imja Tse, a 6,000-metre snow peak in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal that is popular with trekkers. It was given the name ‘Island Peak’ by members of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, because it is surrounded by a sea of ice. Renamed Imja Tse some 20 years later, it is still called Island Peak by most trekkers and climbers today.
I had spent the previous month at sea-level with my family in the Bahamas. The cold, snowy mountains of Nepal were certainly a shock to the system as I helicoptered from Kathmandu deep into the Khumbu Valley – on the route to Everest herself. Within a day of arriving we were at base camp getting ready to climb another 6,000-metre peak. It was the first time since Bolivia that the three of us had been together in the mountains.
At midnight, we pulled on our safety harness and roped ourselves together. Joining us was a local sherpa called Siddhi. In the chill morning air, we set off up the mountain. The climb was easier than Illimani, but nonetheless we struggled.
About halfway up, Victoria stopped for a rest and she broke. She hit the wall and just couldn’t go on. I was confused and upset, and I didn’t know what we could do. If she was struggling here, then what would happen once we went higher?
Victoria settled on a safe glacial plane while the three of us climbed on towards the summit. We could see her all the way to the top, a tiny silhouette dwarfed by the surrounding snow and ice. Just as the summiting of Illimani had been tempered by worry and guilt, I found myself once again torn between the elation of reaching the summit of Island Peak, getting another step closer to my dream to climb Mount Everest, and my worry over Victoria.
Surprisingly, we never talked about what happened on Island Peak. I’m not sure why. In some ways, I assumed Victoria might have decided to abandon the expedition, but she didn’t. In fact, she seemed to have a renewed sense of determination and Kenton and I admired her resolve.
An astonishing athlete, Victoria had embraced mountaineering effortlessly. I never doubted her physical ability and in fact, I always felt she had a better chance of summiting Everest than I did. But I could see that she struggled with self-doubt. She seemed to listen to a loud inner voice of negativity, which belied her strengths and amazing potential. Kenton and I did our best to reassure her and reinforce how good she was on the mountain, but her own questions about her ability were never far from her mind.
I asked her once whether she had ever been happy with her performance in life.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Not even when you won a gold medal?’
‘I could have won it better,’ she smiled back.
That’s the thing about Victoria, always scrutinising herself, her own harshest critic.
I hoped that Everest would be a chance to change that. To embrace the unknown and the uncontrollable variables, to give in to the wilderness and silence