What a day! This one had been on the list for a while and I was very excited to give it another go. I think this was the first longer, hard thing I’ve done since the Mera-thon and I wanted to see how my body was recovering and also see if my improvement from last year would carry over at this point in the season. Turns out it did!
I woke up at 03:00am and was late leaving, as usual, as it was freezing. I remembered “star brr to endure” or “be bold, start cold” and definitely was. My hands were in serious pain for the first 20-30 minutes as my body warmed up. Once I did warm up, though, I was pretty comfortable for the rest of the day temperature-wise. I ran almost every step of the approach to BC and made excellent time.
I hit the bottom of the big climb around dawn (58’ to there) and made excellent time from there to the glacier. Really strong climbing on this section, 48’50 for 9.3KSch up to 5850m, which was ahead of the pace I’d projected. I had a quick stop there to put on my harness and crampons and eat some food (6’48) and then continued onward and upward.
Luckily, there was almost no traffic on the route, so I was able to move very quickly over the glacier and got to the base of the headwall in about 15 min and then another 15 min up there and to the summit. Only a handful of climbers there and they were nice and let me go by / around without issue.
Hit the summit in 2'31'56 and had it entirely to myself. Spent 7 minutes on the summit because it was beautiful and I wanted to enjoy the moment and then headed down.
I was way ahead of schedule, so took my time coming down the headwall and then made excellent time across the glacier, took off my gear, and headed down to the valley. Made it down in 26’ and then ran every step of the way back very hard in 44’. That felt really good to finish strong and brought me back to Chukkung in 4’17’34.
This was just about as good as I could have expected, especially feeling quite hit-or-miss/tired the last couple weeks since Mera. Really, really stoked as this is WAY faster than last year (5h29) and finally made me feel like I was ready to commit to Ama Dablam. Let’s do it!