I'm Hiking to Mt. Everest. (Tell My Family I Love Them.)

Everest Base Camp has been on my bucket list for over 20 years. In April, I’m finally doing it. I should be standing at 17,600 feet around April 15th, assuming my body cooperates and the weather doesn’t have other plans.

The bigger challenge was convincing my wife Dawn to come with me. Dawn is an artist. She paints in oils and watercolors. She is not a person you’d associate with extreme altitude hiking. Neither am I, frankly. But I don’t want to be sitting on the porch of a senior care facility in 50 years with no one to share the memory with. That argument worked (eventually).

Now Dawn is training right alongside me. She looks amazingly toned. I look like a CEO who recently discovered cardio. We’re both making progress, just at different levels of visual impressiveness.

Context

I’ve visited 80+ countries across all 7 continents. I’ve keynoted conferences on every one of them, including Antarctica. But conferences involve podiums, PowerPoint, and climate-controlled rooms. The most physically demanding part of any conference is navigating the buffet line while avoiding small talk (which I’m very good at avoiding, for what it’s worth).

Last year I hiked through Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, the largest cave in the world. Mud, underground rivers, camping inside a cave for multiple nights. It proved I could do something physical and uncomfortable for an extended period without quitting or complaining excessively. Everest Base Camp is the logical next step, assuming your logic is “what’s harder and higher and colder?”

My father used to say “no one can take your experiences.” I suspect he was not referring to quarterly business reviews.

The Training

I live on the 22nd floor of a building in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sea level. EBC is at 17,598 feet. The math is not in my favor.

So I built a training plan around three things: walking, climbing stairs, and destination hikes that keep escalating in difficulty until either I’m ready or the mountain takes pity on me. Here’s what that actually looks like for a 51-year-old CEO who spent most of his career optimizing for conference WiFi instead of VO2 max.

Walking

Almost every day, I walk the 2.3-mile loop around Laguna Condado. It’s flat, it’s near the ocean, and it’s the kind of thing a normal person would call “a pleasant stroll.” For me it’s active recovery between the days that hurt. On rest days, it keeps the legs from forgetting they have a job to do. On hard days, it’s the reward for surviving the stairwell.

The Stairwell

The stairwell is the centerpiece of the whole plan. I live 22 floors up, and the building has a stairwell that goes from the ground floor to the sub-penthouse level. One round means walking down all 22 floors and immediately walking back up. Multiple rounds per day, with a weighted pack that gets heavier every week.

Day one was 2 rounds with 6 pounds. Took 25 minutes. The plan builds to 5 rounds with 15 pounds, which works out to about 1,100 feet of vertical climbing in a single session. That’s a real hiking day, except the scenery is concrete and fluorescent lighting. (The elevator still works. We’re just choosing not to use it. Mostly.)

The descent matters more than most people think. EBC’s return leg is relentless downhill, and that’s where unprepared knees go to die. Going down 22 flights with control and good form trains the eccentric quad strength that keeps you walking on day eight instead of being helicoptered out on day three.

El Yunque

El Yunque National Forest is 45 minutes from my apartment. The hike to El Yunque Peak climbs over 1,300 feet of elevation through cloud forest, and we do it in about 2 hours without stopping. Steep stone steps, real elevation gain, real sweat. It rains there constantly (it’s a rainforest, so the name is a clue). We wear the boots that are going to Nepal and pay attention to how the quads feel on the way down.

Pico Duarte

The tallest peak in the Caribbean at 10,128 feet. A 4-day hike through the mountains of the Dominican Republic that mirrors EBC in miniature: multi-day effort, real altitude, sleeping on a mountain. Day one is a 13-mile push from base camp to high camp at 8,000 feet. Day two is the summit. Day three is the long descent back, which is where you find out whether the stairwell training actually worked.

This is the first dress rehearsal. If something doesn’t work (gear, pacing, nutrition, Dawn’s patience with me), I’d rather find out at 10,000 feet than at 17,000.

Santa Fe

After Pico Duarte, we’re spending two weeks in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The town sits at 7,000 feet and the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains go above 12,000. Every day is a different trail with a 10-to-15-pound day pack: Dale Ball, Atalaya Mountain, Tent Rocks, Bandelier, Cerro Pedernal, Aspen Vista. The progression goes from 7,000 feet in week one to above 10,000 feet in week two, with microspikes and snowshoes for the snow above treeline.

The capstone is Tesuque Peak at 12,045 feet. Nearly 12 miles round trip, 2,100 feet of gain, all above 9,900 feet. If I summit that, I arrive in Nepal knowing 12,000 feet is already behind me.

The strategy is “hike high, sleep low.” Climb to 10,000 or 12,000 feet during the day, sleep at 7,000 feet at the AirBnB. Gold standard for altitude acclimation. (The AirBnB also has a real bed, which is gold standard for everything else.)

All With a Pack

Everything above happens with a weighted pack on. Every walk, every stairwell session, every hike. The weight starts at 6 pounds and builds to 15, which matches what I’ll carry daily on the trek. By the time I get to Nepal, wearing a pack should feel less like training and more like getting dressed.

The Real Wildcard

You can train your legs and lungs at sea level, but you cannot simulate 50% less oxygen. Your body either acclimates or it doesn’t. There’s no spreadsheet for this. (I tried to make one. The results were inconclusive.)

That’s what the Santa Fe phase is for. Two weeks at altitude won’t make me a Sherpa, but it should make the jump from 7,000 to 17,000 feet feel less like a betrayal by my own circulatory system.

What I’m Learning

Preparation and planning are different things. I’ve spent my whole career planning. Spreadsheets, contingency plans, Gantt charts for my Gantt charts. Everest Base Camp doesn’t need any of that.

The plan is: walk uphill, acclimatize, don’t die, come back. The preparation, actually making your body capable of executing that simple plan, is where all the work lives. Turns out the mountain doesn’t care how elegant your project timeline is.

The stairwell teaches you things the trail doesn’t. When you’re on a beautiful mountain, the scenery distracts you from the suffering. In a concrete stairwell on your fourth round with 12 pounds on your back, there is nothing to look at except the next step. If you can grind through that, the Himalayas are going to feel like a reward.

Being vegetarian at altitude is a real consideration. I’ve been vegetarian for decades, and protein options above 14,000 feet narrow considerably. Everyone tells me dal bhat (lentils and rice) is the answer to everything. The Nepali saying is “dal bhat power, 24 hour.” I’m choosing to believe this because the alternative is worrying about it, which burns calories I’ll need for walking.

The mountain doesn’t read resumes. I have a 180 IQ, a perfect GPA, 15 published books, and more conference keynotes than I can count. None of that matters at 17,600 feet. The mountain just asks whether you can take one more step. As someone who has spent most of his adult life accumulating credentials, I find the mountain’s total indifference to them genuinely refreshing (and slightly terrifying).

What’s Next

Pico Duarte this weekend. Santa Fe in March. Nepal in April. 17,600 feet by mid-April. I’ll post updates from the trail if the WiFi gods are merciful (and at that altitude, mercy is not guaranteed). If I don’t make it back (great, now I jinxed myself), tell my family I love them.