Not only did I stick to my schedule of running five days a week, but I found myself looking forward to it. After a couple of days off, I’d be edgy and irritable, obscurely dissatisfied. ‘For God’s sake, go for a run,’ Kathleen would say, and her diagnosis was correct.
It was often uncomfortable, often painful, particularly for the first month, but other days were pure joy, a revelling in the sensation of movement, of strength and wellbeing. My regular headaches stopped. For the first time ever, I got through winter without even a cold. I felt incredibly well, began to walk and hold myself differently. When friends asked ‘How are you?’, instead of the normal Scottish ‘Oh, not too bad,’ I’d find myself saying ‘Extremely well!’
How obnoxious.
On other days training was pure slog, the body protesting and the will feeble. The mind could see little point in getting up before breakfast to run on a cold, dark morning, and none at all in continuing when it began to hurt. Take a break, why not have a breather, why not turn for home now?
It is at times like that that the real work is done. It’s easy to keep going when you feel strong and good. Anyone can do that. But at altitude it is going to feel horrible most of the time – and that’s what you’re really training for. So keep on running, through the pain and the reluctance. Do you really expect to get through this Expedition – this relationship, this book, this life for that matter – without some of the old blood, sweat and tears? No chance. That’s part of the point of it all. So keep on running …
The real purpose of training is not so much hardening the body as toughening the will. Enthusiasm may get you started, bodily strength may keep you going for a long time, but only the will makes you persist when those have faded. And stubborn pride. Pride and the will, with its overtones of fascism and suppression, have long been suspect qualities – the latter so much so that I’d doubted its existence. But it does exist, I could feel it gathering and bunching inside me as the months passed. There were times when it alone got me up and running, or kept me from whinging and retreating off a Scottish route. The will is the secret motor that keeps driving when the heart and the mind have had enough.
Mal would call it commitment. He’d said there was no point in going to a mountain with a ‘let’s see how it looks’ attitude. One’s commitment and self-belief had to be absolute. And yet that had to be balanced by clear, objective assessment of one’s capacities and limitations. That balancing act is at the very heart of climbing. I noticed that most climbers didn’t value bravado and boldness unless it was tempered by good judgement. One of the lads at Mal’s wedding said, ‘The hardest and bravest and probably the best mountaineering decision you can make is to say No.’ I looked at Tony. The diminutive innocent nodded vigorously. ‘That’s right. Mountaineering isn’t about getting to the top – it’s about mountaineering.’
To call mountaineering a sport or a pastime is like calling monastic life a hobby. For those who become serious – though seldom solemn – about it, it is the core of their lives. Everything else is arranged around it. It affects their attitude to everything else. As time went by I gradually exchanged one obsession, writing, for another, climbing – though I denied and derided it to the last. I picked up the elements of Good Brit Style: not to be seen training, not to have gleaming new gear, to play down all but one’s fears and fiascos. To drink too much too late, to get up reluctantly and late next morning, moaning and groaning, to arrive at the foot of the route with three hours’ daylight left and still climb it: that was considered Good Style. I had little problem in acquiring that.
The substance was another matter. Due to poor weather I only had another four weekends’ winter climbing in Glencoe. Yet the promise and threat of these changed my entire winter, made it something to be enjoyed rather than just suffered. Weekdays were a time for recovery and appreciation of home comforts, with the weekend to both dread and anticipate. My social life was suddenly full of climbers, climbing talk, climbing plans and reminiscences. Much laughter, drinking, abuse and friendship, shared experience. And gradually, the beginning of some composure.
It was, quite simply, very exciting. It dramatized my life.
By the end of the season, I’d done a grand total of six Scottish routes, none harder than Grade 3 or 4, and an amount of yomping about on the hills. It was an absurdly inadequate background for going to the Himalayas – the norm would be several Scottish winters, then a few seasons in the Alps doing the classics and adding some new routes, then one might consider Pakistan or Nepal.
My anxiety at exposure didn’t disappear, but did diminish. I still disliked waiting on belay halfway up a route. And some days I had no appetite or nerve for it at all, when climbing was all slog and fear and trembling and wanting it to be over with, hating it. That too – and having to continue just the same – was valuable experience. But other days …
One day in particular remains with me, always will. A day when nervousness took the form of controlled energy, when I wanted to climb. When I had the appetite. A day of great intensity and joy. Then I rejoiced in the challenge of the crux of SC Gully; pulling up and over it and moving on, I was lifted up like a surfer on a great wave of adrenalin. The day was perfect: ice blue, ice cold, needle-bright. After two hours in the shadowed gully I finally pulled myself through the notch in the cornice overhanging the top, and in my eyes was a dazzling world of sunlight and gleaming ridges and all the summits of Glencoe clear across to Ben Nevis. Mal silhouetted against the sun, belaying me; a few climbers moving on the summit ridge; my panting exhilaration – in that moment I felt like a king, and what I saw in front of me was the earth as Paradise, blue, golden and white, dazzlingly pure.
The intensity we win through effort! In that pristine clarity of the air and the senses, the simplest experiences become almost mystical in their intensity. A cigarette smoked in the lee of a cairn, an orange segment squirting in the mouth and the smell of it filling the moment, making the world fruit, the patch of lichen inches from your face, the final pulling off of boots at the end of the day – Glencoe and winter climbing gave me moments of completeness. I will never forget them.
Though I still intended to pack it in after the Mustagh trip, it was hard to imagine what I did with myself before climbing came along. The company, the personal struggle and the intensity of sensation on the mountains are all highly addictive. And more than that, I found all my customary worries and concerns – money, love life, boredom, the future, the past, politics, whatever – ceased to weigh on me in Glencoe. Such things cease to matter. All that matters is this move, the next hold, keeping the rope running out, the approaching storm clouds and the beer at the end of the day. All other worries slip off one’s shoulders and slide away into obscurity, like the sacks we sometimes sent off down a snow chute, to be picked up again on our way back down.
The weight one takes on in committing oneself to a mountain or a route is considerable, but it’s nothing compared to the weight of the world one leaves behind.
It was at the Clachaig that I first met Jon Tinker, the third of our lead climbers. I knew he’d been out to the Himalayas once, on an unsuccessful but highly educational trip to Annapurna 3, and that he was beginning to make a name for himself with some bold Alpine ascents. ‘A bit of a headbanger,’ someone opined. ‘I don’t know,’ Mal said, frowning, ‘I thought he was pretty impressive when we did that new route on the Ben.’ At twenty-four and a couple of months younger than Tony Brindle, he was the youngest of the team. I’d been forewarned that he’d be the most awkward and abrasive member, and that there could be some interesting strains between him and Tony.
‘So you’re the author chappie who wants to poke about inside our heads’ were practically his first words to me. And then he laughed, just a shade too loudly. That was typical Jon: the remark that niggled, then the forced laugh that seemed to say he was just joking yet with just enough edge to make it stick. I was to see him do it many times with people