After returning from the Swiss Alps, it was time to take a vague idea and figure out what was actually required to climb the Matterhorn. Step 1 after returning home was a marathon google slog: “climbing matterhorn”, “guided Matterhorn climb”, “mountaineering”, “alpine climbing”, “reddit.com/r/mountaineering”. This rabbit hole consumed my down time my first week back to work. Taking physical and skills based requirements that guiding companies included on their website, checking those against reddit posts, youtube how to videos, and other blogs, until I settled on the first two books I would need to take my first steps into mountain ascents: Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills by The Mountaineers, and Training for the New Alpinism, by Steve House and Scott Johnston. These two books would end up forming the mental and physical pillars of the next 11 months of my life. Neither book is exactly a page turner, but they are both packed with information and lifetimes worth of accumulated knowledge. Freedom of the Hills is basically the Boy Scout handbook for all things related to going up. Rock climbing anchors, rope techniques, belaying, walking uphill to conserve energy, safety while climbing frozen waterfalls, it’s literally all in there. For anyone looking to gain an academic understanding of how climbing works and should be done to maximize safety, this is the book. Where Freedom of the Hills teaches the systems and techniques required for climbing, Training for the New Alpinism lays out the physical requirements and appropriate training for gaining large amounts of elevation. This book and its companion logbook were what I used to build out my training plan for 2024. One note for both of these excellent books: consider them text books. I read through both once, and then consistently referred to different sections as questions came up. What does this mean? DO NOT BUY DIGITAL VERSIONS, BUY (or BORROW) THE PHYSICAL EDITIONS. You will thank me later by not making the same mistake I did.

With the knowledge beginning seep into my brain and ever deeper longing to go into the hills settling into my heart, it was time to pick an objective for Year 1. It took some time of perusing different guiding companies to find not just a guided trip up a mountain but a proper alpine climbing course. Eventually we decided on an 8 day trip of alpine rock climbing and glacier mountaineering instruction culminating in a summit attempt on Mt. Baker in Washington. So now we had a destination and a timeframe for approximately one year after our return from the Alps. Now to begin learning to climb.

Temecula, CA is in a weird spot. It is at least an hour from everything but within three hours of lots of things. Decent surf spots? 65 minutes away. Disneyland? One hour, fifteen minutes. Downtown San Diego? One Hour, ten minutes. Downtown Los Angeles? Oh god, who would want to go there? The point being, the easiest access real crag is Mission Gorge in San Diego, a little over an hour away. So the only way to get consistent climbing while living in Temecula, working full time, and raising two kids in your late 30s, is to go to a climbing gym. Exactly two weeks after staring up at the Matterhorn, we were staring up at the 30 foot fake rock walls of Rock Fitness in Wildomar, CA.

Shiela and I had visited this gym once before in 2013 when we first got married. Something about climbing didn’t click for us then, but that changed on this second go-around. We became regulars after a month, taking top roping and then lead courses and getting more comfortable moving in the vertical. By December, we finally managed a babysitter so we could do some outdoor climbing. Finally! A chance to touch rock. An awesome guide took us and two other clients to Mission Gorge for some top roping. After “what the fuck am I doing” myself to the top of 3 routes in the Limbo Area and belaying Shiela on the same, my stomach knotted up and doubled me over before I could try anything else. Running down the climber’s trail and desperately searching for a bathroom that would never be found, I settled for playing dangerously and slow releasing what must have been 2 or 3 liters of bottled up gas. Feeling relieved, I reflected on the events of the day.

If following the advice in Training for the New Alpinism, it is generally prescribed that athletes training for mountain ascents maintain their workouts in an aerobic range, meaning you can still hold a conversation while working out. This does not mesh well with training for a January ‘24 half marathon at Disneyland. My end of 2023 training was focused on surviving through this stupid half marathon that I had been bamboozled by Shiela into signing up for. Had I been following the guidance of Steve House six months sooner, the run may have been easier, but instead my mountain focused fitness plan was on hold.

This blog isn’t meant to be a forum for calling out bad practices, nor is it a running blog. HOWEVER, the runDisney Marathon weekend is a shit show. If you are a marathoner (I am not, more power to you) who loves the sport, this marathon is not for you. If you are a Disney fan who thinks you’ll have fun running through the park, this marathon is not for you. If you are an aspiring influencer with no regard for the people running around your dumb ass as you cut sideways through the masses of people to go get a selfie with a character from a movie no one liked, this marathon is apparently for you. Also if you like having water stations set up in the narrowest bottleneck of the course, making a 4-5 person wide crush to get through, this marathon is apparently for you. If running through Disney parks for about 3 miles out of 13 before sunrise and then running through the streets of Anaheim sounds fun, this marathon is apparently for you. Needless to say, this was my first and last half or any type of marathon. Spartan races and 10k trail runs are enough for me.

Okay, now that the stupid running was over, I gave my knees a couple of weeks rest as I recovered from my 4th bout of Covid. Finally I could focus my attention on becoming a lean, mean, mountain machine… or at least a middle age guy that could survive an ascent…