in this video i want to talk about when you should trust your guides or when not to.
and we want to discuss one of the most
crucial decisions that you're ever likely to make in the mountains and that
is to accept the risks of ascending with a chance of reaching the summit
or to descend back to the safety of base camp with your life intact and this is
particularly important at altitude. To get a better understanding of the
full scope of that question and all the things that are involved,
I want to share with you a story that recently happened from one of my
clients who was training to climb to the summit of aconcagua
but i fortunately didn't make it. so the story is like this ....i'm super
excited looking at my phone every day waiting for a message to see if it got
to the summit and i get this message. hi chase my group summited last monday
nine out of 12 made it i made 5940 metres before turning around
over that time i had no symptoms of altitude sickness and i was feeling
great i'm back in sydney late next week if you
wanted to catch up for a debrief and i saw that and i'm like that sounds
like perfect conditions you were feeling great no altitude sickness
you know the weather's good other people got to the top, what
went wrong? like, i just don't understand tell me what happened! so now that i've
had that debrief with paul and found out exactly what happened and why
he turned around i wanted to share that with you because there's a learning
opportunity in this not just for me as a coach to see you know potentially what i
did wrong with the training program but also there's loads that you guys can
learn from this experience so that you know if you're ever in this
situation you can make the right decision
so a little bit of backstory so you understand this fully this is the first
mountain for paul he'd never done anything like this it's a big mountain
six thousand nine hundred and twenty meters i think so
there is definitely some altitude problems that are going to arise
so we when we had the debrief and uh he gave me the full story and
like i said he was feeling good he was feeling very strong
but as he was approaching camp three which is about the six thousand meter
level he was you know 20 minutes from camp three and he said that he was you
know puffing and breathing quite heavily and
he got to this point and the guide from the company told him to go down
you know he's 20 minutes from camp three he had to turn around and go back down
to camp two so that's another four hours of descent
in double boots and you know i started to ask more
questions about what this situation was it was 1pm so definitely
no time pressure it wasn't even summit day
and he was other than you know breathing heavily he had no symptoms of altitude
when he got back to camp you saw a doctor the doctor assessed him and said
you have you know no symptoms of altitude
sickness you don't seem to be suffering from altitude sickness at all
so from learning that i'm starting to ask myself the question
why did this guide think that he wasn't fast enough or fit enough to actually be
given a chance to go and summit the mountain on the following day
so the day after descending from camp three
paul wakes up he tells me he's feeling pretty much fully recovered
not feeling tired his muscles have recovered properly he's not feeling any
soreness not feeling the altitude really and so
that in my mind is the perfect condition to be able to go up to the summit but he
wasn't given the chance and i think what's happened here is that
the guide has really erred on the side of caution but far too much i mean
breathing heavily when the for the first time that you arrive at 6 000 meters
i don't know if you guys have been through that but
it's very normal to be breathing heavily at six thousand meters especially when
you first arrive and you've just done you know five six
seven hours of pretty steep uphill walking with a backpack on you're
going to be breathing heavily that is not a sign of altitude sickness
it's just a sign of being in altitude from what i gather the the guides on
this trip they were really about speed and speed
in high altitude mountaineering is it's not really a factor that you
should be considering until summit day so when my client was turned around the
day before summit day that speed it really wasn't a factor
especially given that it was 1pm i've always told
my clients this and i'll continue to keep telling people this
because i think it's really important you don't need to go fast at altitude
and you in fact you certainly shouldn't there's good
evidence to suggest that over exerting yourself when you're at altitude
is actually going to bring those symptoms on quicker and we see this
all the time when we have super fit people you know triathletes and such and
they go and do the trek to everest base camp and they
try and smash it because they're these competitive athletes and they get
sick from altitude because they're pushing themselves too
hard of course summit day is a completely different thing
when you have your summit day for big mountains
there's often a lot more altitude that you've got to ascend so of course yeah
now is the time that you want to exert yourself and get to the summit as
quickly as possible and get back down within a safe hour but
the day before summit day that's when you should be you know
kind of chilling and relaxing and just taking out your time
so naturally i told paul this and i said you know take your time take it super
easy until summer day but what this guide has has done is seen
my client breathing heavily maybe being one of the last couple to come here to
camp and he's seen that as as a as a weakness
instead of a strength and he's told him to go down without
really taking a full assessment of you know his symptoms without using a
pulse oximeter and getting a reading on his blood oxygen saturation
without really asking my client how he felt whether he was feeling the symptoms
of altitude sickness and i think if he'd done that he would have realized that
he wasn't suffering from altitude sickness at all and
what he should have done is gone straight into camp three have a good
rest and then wake up fresh the next day
ready for summit day so i guess what i'm saying is
this guide fucked up and whilst the summit isn't everything
i think that to deny someone it's a really crucial decision
and it shouldn't be made lightly on whether to send someone down
having said that i understand you know erring on the side of caution and being
safe obviously we don't want to push clients into a situation where
they're going to become sick but in this situation when the
weather's good there's plenty of time it's 1pm it's not even summit day in
20 minutes from camp 3 just baffles me completely
now you guys might watch this video and think at the end that
i'm just a bitter old guy who didn't get his way
and uh is making commentary on a decision that
was made on a mountain on the other side of the world but i have
a huge stake in this i genuinely care so much
about my clients and whether they succeed and whether they feel
fulfilled from the trip regardless of whether they get to the summit or not
and so i have a big stake in that i really want to see my clients succeed
and when i feel like i myself have done everything
within my power to to get this person to the summit and
for that to be taken away by a guy who's just seen this
seen this guy going a little slower and said nope you're too slow you've got to
go down you're not going to be able to keep up
the pace that i want to set as a guide that doesn't sit right with me and i
really don't think that that's the way that people should be
guiding trips so this conversation i think is so
important and that's why i've made already so many videos on this topic i
mean i'll link them up here that you can check out i've got
symptoms of altitude sickness a whole video on diamox
and the three golden rules of altitude if you're doing a trip
above you know four thousand meters above sea level
i think it's super important that you go and watch those videos and get a full
understanding of altitude so you can prevent a situation like this happening
and hopefully under the right circumstances being fit
having good weather and having no symptoms of altitude sickness
hopefully i'll see you on the summer peace by the way
this is my little training ground and uh i've just filmed
a nice little session called heartbreak hill which is an old-school one from
back in my brisbane days when we had a physical business training people face
to face it was a really popular session so i'm adding heartbreak hill
just filmed it to all of our new programs if you want to check them out
the link in the description below peace