Base Camp

First Step to Your Peak

The marathon is often compared to Everest. Both symbolize the ultimate challenge, the supreme test, the great quest that calls to our stronger, more disciplined selves. Both compel us to pursue their height "because it is there." But the marathon and Everest share more than their symbolism. Both require extensive planning, a significant commitment of time, and adapting to conditions far beyond the ordinary - even if ordinary is fit and healthy. Everest requires adapting to extremes of altitude, the marathon, extremes of distance. In neither is it advisable, nor indeed, possible, to march directly from sea level to the summit.

In his best selling book, Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer describes ascending Everest as “a long, tedious process, more like a mammoth construction project than climbing as I’d previously known it.” This construction project involves weeks of patience even after reaching the mountain before the climbers can safely consider an attempt at the summit. 

Dramatic consequences await those who climb “too high, too fast”—most commonly High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, a condition where the lungs fill will fluid, and unless the victim can descend rapidly, “death is the most likely outcome.” Consequences for the marathoner who adds mileage too fast, too soon, are not quite as drastic, but no less deadly to one’s marathon goals. Most suffer injury or illness: those who do make it to marathon day—the summit push—arrive over-tired and unadapted to the requirements of the distance. If they finish, they still fall far short of the summit of their potential.

The solution to this dilemma in climbing Everest is to spend several weeks at Base Camp, located at the foot of the mountain, but at 17,600 feet, already far above where most ever go. At this base camp the body makes the necessary physiological adaptations—changing the pH of the blood, increasing the number of red blood cells, speeding up respiration—that enable the climbers to go above the “death zone” where most cannot survive.

In the Everest that is the marathon, we also need to spend time at base camp—a level of mileage where the body adapts, enabling us to climb higher than we have ever gone before. Base camp cannot be a single week of high mileage, but must be lived at for long enough that it becomes normal and comfortable.