Well, woke up at 1am for the second day in a row. Spent an few hours chatting w/ Jim and Cristina yesterday afternoon, which was fun and a good way to keep the mood light w/ a very tall order in front of me. Ate a bowl of rara noodle soup around 4pm and then got some toast and pancake to go and kept those in my room overnight and was in bed lying down before 6pm. This ended up being a better amount of time for sleep than the night before as I actually slept well all the way through my alarm at 01:00.
Woke up and made coffee and ate a small amount of food to settle my stomach and then just relaxed and did some reading and writing before leaving the hostel just before 3am. I knew at that point I’d be more like 03:30am than the originally planned 03:00am, but didn’t rush. Walk/jogged over to the Asian Trekking BC and warmed up well on the walk over. Luckily, I had the experience of yesterday morning to draw off of, so I knew to start in super light gear. I think I was just in a windbreaker and super light t-shirt by the time I headed over to the start of the route. I again did a short push of about 2-3’ uphill to get the engine really warmed up and then walked back down and let my HR come down at the start before finally taking off.
This was honestly a very challenging mental task -- I really had to pretend that I hadn’t done this exact same thing yesterday. I’ve always said that self-deception is one of my greatest strengths as an athlete and this was the perfect example of this. I can be extremely good at staying in the present moment and not thinking too far ahead nor too far into the past.
I also think I set myself up much better today mentally, as my plan was just to go to the summit as quickly as possible. I knew I wouldn’t have another shot w/ the big storm coming, so I wanted to just run hard, move quickly, but also there was no question about maybe saving myself and giving it another try. I was going to the top today si o si.
And somehow my splits cooperated. I honestly barely looked at my watch for the first chunk all the way to C1. I think I saw that my very first short split up to the main ridge trail was like 6’30 (vs 7’0x yesterday, a small but important difference). I think with that I gave myself permission to think that maybe this would be possible today, but again there was no point in looking at the watch after that for a while, as I knew yesterday it had just psyched me out.
I stuck to the main trail the whole time -- no trying to take the short-cut through the snow -- and felt great and was generally having a great time listening to good music and enjoying the effort and the beautiful night sky. It wasn’t until I hit C1 in 1h27 that I really knew it was on, as I felt like 1h30 was where I needed to be.
I had a very quick stop there (3’27) to put on my helmet, harness, and eat some food and then was on my way.
The next stretch was maybe the one that really made the record possible, as I was again under pace and hit my fastest split ever from C1-C2 (41’45), significantly faster than yesterday and I felt much better, both in my legs and also in my head as I was staying super positive.
C2-3, specifically the grey couloir, right above C2 was the section I was most nervous about from a safety perspective, as that’s where I almost got freaking decapitated on my training day (and Chris had also seen some very uncool rock-fall on his day), and it had honestly made me question whether I wanted to do this at all. But luckily, the gully was empty of other climbers (in fact, I don’t think I saw a single person up to this point, other than some climbers milling about at C2, probably wondering why I was in such a hurry).
I made it up to the anchor at the top of the gully where I felt fairly safe under the steep cliffs above me and then quickly put microspikes on and proceeded onto the little cat-walk section and felt even more comfortable than the day before and then up the steep pitches to the mushroom ridge. I felt again much better there and was in real flow state -- no fear of the exposure, no vertigo, just focus.
I hit C3 after 48’40, just a tick over 3h00, so I had 58 minutes to get to the summit, about 450 vertical meters. I knew that unless the terrain was much harder than I thought, I could do it but it would be very close and I had basically no time to spare. I could see at least two climbing parties ahead of me, so I knew they too would have an impact on my final time to the summit.
I ended up splitting my watch at every 6X12m (i.e. even factors of 100m to go). I knew if I could keep those to 10 minutes per 100 vertical meters, I would make it. The first few were right around 10’ and then there were 1-2 trickier pitches around the big ice bulge (“the dablam") and I saw I was losing time and getting nervous. That summit still looked very far away even at like 3h45 and I thought maybe I was going to just miss it (since you never know how much you can trust GPS), but the final few ropes were actually very easy terrain and I made good time passing the last few groups and finally topped out at 07:32am, 3h52 from BC.
I honestly thought the round trip mark might be too hard given that I was only 7 minutes ahead on the way up, so I was somewhat resolved to just claiming the uphill mark, but, just like the uphill, figured I would make as quick time as I could while not killing myself and just see where it brought me.
I arm-rapped almost the entire descent off the summit ridge to C3, which was honestly probably super risky in microspikes w/o a safety line a lot of the time, but it was very quick down to there and then I did use the safety for most of the mushroom ridge and the descent down to the catwalk. I think I ATC’d a few of those pitches as it was faster to be able to just abseil super quick vs. arm-wrap and walk down.
Again, the only scary section was the grey couloir, which I did ATC very fast and was down in just a few minutes and back at C2. I don’t even think I was aware of the timing at this point and just moved down as quickly as possible from C2 to C1. I did have to wait a significant amount of time, not sure exactly how much but at least 5 minutes, maybe as much as 10, before rapping the yellow tower, and I figured that meant the RT mark was out of the cards since I knew I was on a razor thin margin. It was coming into C1 where I remember for the first time starting to think about the RT time and doing some arithmetic and realizing I might be very, very close.
I knew I had run down in 47 or 48 minutes and I was getting there at like 09:16-17am (also worth noting that my watch had reset due to an “incident detection” at some point on the mushroom ridge, so I was in a new activity and just using time of day to try to do mental math, which was honestly pretty hard). But, so that was the first time I realized if I ran very, very hard down (i.e. 10% or so harder than I ever had), that I might just be able to sneak under the main mark.
And so I stopped for like 30 seconds to just rip off my microspikes and harness and throw them in my pack and just headed down. I took mega risk on this section from a trail-running perspective (i.e. not fatal risk, but serious break-your-leg risk) and made very good time getting through the boulder field and then really sent it from there all the way down. I remember seeing 3.2km to go and I had about 20 minutes and thinking “jesus christ I only need to run 2 miles at 10 minute pace” which sounds really freaking easy on paper but on this terrain was not trivial.
I hit the last little uphill and ran every step and then really tried to push as hard as I could on the runnable ridge-trail from like 1.8 to 0.4 km to go. I don’t think I really let up until I was actually done, but that last runnable piece went really well and I think I had 3 or 4 minutes to cover the last 400m on extremely steep and technical terrain back to BC to finish it up.
In the end, I finished just 2.5 minutes ahead of Mateo’s time and literally collapsed on the ground for a few minutes. It had been so much mental and physical energy over those previous 6+ hours that I was honestly kind of glad I was alone for a few minutes to get my shit together.
I walked across base camp where some rando started talking to and I was trying really hard to hold a normal conversation and not completely fall apart, and then I finally got back to the AsTrek camp and found Jim and basically completely fell apart and was balling like a child and then poured a lot of water on my head and sat in the grass and promptly threw up everything I’d just eaten/drank and then looked over to my right and saw that Erin and Cristina were standing like 5 ft away from me. Whoops.
Finally got some food and a protein drink in me and changed clothes and laid in the sun w/ the gang waiting for updates from Chris, who had broken my record from Pangboche and eventually the girls left and Jim and I headed back to the lodge.
What a day. This was the mark I knew would probably be the hardest of the entire trip (except maybe Manaslu, but certainly the hardest in the Khumbu). It’s been a hell of a season.
Total 20.1km, 6’20’30, 2254m+.