Too Old for This Shit
Author on Martoli ridge, 2009 (photo Dieter Reeb)
“I’m too old for this shit!” Dieter exploded, gasping, red in the face from kicking steps in the snow.
High up in the Johar valley, the snow had come early that year. We had paid our respects to Nanda Devi at the temple that morning, and hoped to beat our way to a spot on the Martoli ridge, from where we could get an unobstructed view of her summit. But the snow was packed high on the slopes, we didn’t have the boots for the slog, and then there was that “too old” thing.
We crested the mini ridge you see in the photograph, looked at each other, and accepted that we were not going to make it. Downslope, the snow was covering our tracks, and the route back to our camp was far from clear. Sometimes sliding, sometimes stumbling, we traversed vast loops down the snow fields till Peter caught sight of our tents five hundred meters below us.
Squatting by the campfire that night, I travelled back decades, to another trek, another walk in the unseasonal snow. On our way to Amarnath, we had just crossed the high point of Pissu Ghati, when snowflakes fluttered down to my shoulder, flecked the hood of my sister’s cape with white. My father turned back, smiled, and marched on. My mother and elder sister, on horses, were behind us, and we waited for them in the warmth of the next shelter. Sweet and spicy, we sipped greedily at the adrak chai. By the time Ma and Mala rode up, the snow was abating, and “Ma, it’s mostly downhill from here..the worst is over,” we pleaded, but she was spooked, and we turned back.
Thirty-three years, and at least as many treks later, this was only the second time I was turning back before my goal. Too old for this shit? I was only fifty-three, and this was a bitter pill I wasn’t ready to swallow just yet. But something did shift, and Dieter and I never trekked as high, or as late in the year again. A couple of years later, he moved back to Germany, and I lost my trekking companion of many years.
Next winter, a chance encounter at a party, a drunken challenge, and I took to running. A year later, I ran my first half-marathon. For several years, I pursued tightly structured goals: my first 10 km run, my first 10 km in an hour, a half-marathon in under 2 hours…. Madhavan offered to pace me to that target, and we made the first half in well under an hour, but just after the turn, a niggle in my hip began to throb, and I had to walk for a bit. The second half was slow, and far from easy. I clocked my personal best, but came in at two hours, four minutes, and accepted that I was unlikely to ever complete a half-marathon in under two hours.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Arun Simha wrote* about his own middle-age struggle with training, and the realisation that “one often has to surrender to forces beyond us.”
This is true, but I don’t think ‘surrender’ is the right word. Surrender is too emphatic, too final. I prefer ‘acceptance’, which is a good way to approach life in general. But an acceptance that is both conditional and temporary - conditional to being better prepared, with a time-stamp that expires if I can become stronger.
“Why that niggle?”, I asked, “Can I work on my flexibility and strength to get rid of it?”
“If I lose some weight, and build some strength into my legs, will a steep trek at 12,000 feet always be as daunting?”
For the next several years, I focused on cycling, on walking in the lower slopes around our hill home. In 2016, our son Kedar was invited to climb Friendship Peak in Himachal. Premila and I decided we would go up to base camp with his group. In late summer, there would be no snow, and at 13,000 feet, the camp at Lady Leg should not be too daunting.
“I’ll walk really slow” I warned our expedition leader, the doughty Mohit Oberoi.
“No rush, Babaji.”
What joy to be back in the high mountains, away from the trash and the grey skies, from the traffic of New Delhi, and the insistence of the net. And I wasn’t that slow - the teenage pack were never out of sight.
In 2019, Mo put together another climb, to Matho Kangri, in Ladakh. Kedar, sadly, would not be on that trip, but Premila and I decided we would still make up the ballast of base camp. We took our time to acclimatise, and spent a week walking and cycling around Leh. This time, we began our march from a road head above 13000 feet, and three nights later, sited our basecamp at just under 17000 feet. My feet were slow, but I found my own pace, never let my heart race, found the space to look at the grass, the pebbles, and the trickling streams.
When Mo took the boys out to explore the summit route, I didn’t go beyond the camp perimeter. I had to accept that 17,000 feet was the upper limit of my conditioning, for now.
In my own activities, I wrote to Arun Simha, “I am always trying to find a balance between acceptance and complacency”.
There should be no room for complacency, or for resignation. I look to explore my own boundaries, find ways to coax them outward, even while accepting that the long slope of age slopes away, not up.
Too old for this shit, maybe; but not too old for some shit. Hopefully a lot of it.
*https://arunsimha.substack.com/p/the-stillness-of-middle-age