We're revisiting a popular episode from our archives this week!
It's not easy to get to the top of the world. It takes a lot of training and determination, a willingness to endure pain and suffering--and no small amount of luck. Even the most prepared climber can confront a deadly avalanche or fatal turn in the weather.
Our guest, Jeff Gottfurcht, was the first person ever to summit the tallest mountain in the world--Mt. Everest--with rheumatoid arthritis. Hear his incredible tales of ten years of training (including climbing all of the world's biggest mountains); what a climber eats, sleeps, and wears on Everest (you'll never believe Jeff's diet!); what happened on his summit ascent in a -20 degree windstorm; and what it's like to sit at the highest point on earth.
Jeff also shares the lessons that have shaped his life that he learned while he was "dancing with fate" on Mt. Everest.
Want to learn more about Jeff?
Want to know more about What It's Like To...?
We're revisiting a popular episode from our archives this week!
It's not easy to get to the top of the world. It takes a lot of training and determination, a willingness to endure pain and suffering--and no small amount of luck. Even the most prepared climber can confront a deadly avalanche or fatal turn in the weather.
Our guest, Jeff Gottfurcht, was the first person ever to summit the tallest mountain in the world--Mt. Everest--with rheumatoid arthritis. Hear his incredible tales of ten years of training (including climbing all of the world's biggest mountains); what a climber eats, sleeps, and wears on Everest (you'll never believe Jeff's diet!); what happened on his summit ascent in a -20 degree windstorm; and what it's like to sit at the highest point on earth.
Jeff also shares the lessons that have shaped his life that he learned while he was "dancing with fate" on Mt. Everest.
Want to learn more about Jeff?
Want to know more about What It's Like To...?
Hi, it's Elizabeth Pearson Garr, the host of What It's Like To. I'm on vacation this week, so we thought it might be interesting to rerun one of our popular episodes from our archives. This episode is from December 2021. I hope you enjoy it. To me, the thing that was, I think, intoxicating for me about climbing in general. Is you can't make a mistake. You can't step wrong. You can't climb into a rope wrong. You can't clip your carabiner into something wrong. There are no re dos. There are no second chances. There are no second chances on high stakes, high altitude mountains. But some people believe the biggest risks yield the biggest rewards. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Pearson Garr, and this is What It's Like To, the podcast that lets you walk in someone else's shoes and live vicariously through their unique experiences. On this episode, we experience something I definitely never will in my own life, summitting Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, more than 29, 000 feet high. My guest, Jeff Gottfurcht, has been to Everest twice. You'll hear why. Everyone who climbs Everest has incredible stories. Jeff's are unique because in addition to everything else that mountain throws at climbers, Jeff has a condition called rheumatoid arthritis. He was the first person to ever summit Mount Everest with RA. I wanted to understand how and why he wanted to take on such an enormous challenge. Thank you so much for being here, Jeff. This podcast is about experiences that people have had that most of us haven't done or won't have the chance to do in our own lives. And I've got to admit that climbing Mount Everest is something that I would never do because I'm just not brave enough. I feel like no matter how physically fit you could be, mentally fit, there's that element of risk involved. what did you have in you that was willing to take that on? I think the trait that I had in me, there was a couple of them. Number one, the will to succeed. And I also understood as I lived by in my personal life, measurable risk. You know, people thought, like, climbing Everest and climbing all these other seven summits are crazy. I didn't view it at that. I'm not a daredevil. You know, people would say to me. Oh, it's great if I die on a mountain. I died doing what I loved, and that was not my vantage point. I want to die in bed looking at my great grandchildren. You know, that's, the idea of climbing big mountains is about celebrating and learning. amongst that journey. And after getting to the top of Everest, it really showed me that while initially I might've been climbing to saying, like, look at me. When I got to the top of Everest, I realized I can see the world and what can I do to change it? You know, really gave me great perspective on how small I was as an individual and being able to affect change in my life and other people's lives. And I would say that on all the mountains that I climbed, especially Everest, climbed with a lot of people who got there and would just say, not for me. You, you don't know the magnitude of that mountain and going through the Khumbu Icefall and doing all those rotations. And you know, we had a teammate who died on our team. So, I mean, those are surreal things that, like, if we were out hiking and you saw someone dead, you know, we'd stop hiking, you know, I mean, that's it. We're going home. We're dealing with that. Whereas, on Everest when that happens, it's a more surreal thing because there is someone there, a human life. And, I think for me, just, I have an ability to digest risk differently than other people. And I've climbed with a lot of people who'd get to Everest and would get. I don't know if you've ever seen the pictures of the ladders going over the crevasses, you know, they get to the, they get to the first one in the Kumbu of Icefall and they just say, nope. I'm not going to do it. You mentioned some people who get there and can't even get past base camp, maybe for acclimatizing or different reasons. Yeah. I read a quote from a woman who got there and said, getting through the ice falls is like slow dancing with the fat woman of fate in the ballroom of death. Does that resonate with you at all? Do you feel like the ice falls or any portion of it, was just so harrowing that you felt like this is the part that I just can't keep going or your resolve kept you moving forward? I think a mountain like Everest has the ability to strip someone down to their true authentic selves. Where there's no facades. When I remember when I got to base camp the first time, I was like, the Himalayas are huge mountains. I mean, this is a different animal. I mean, this is different. I remember being awestruck. At just, just how big it was. Just. I mean, I thought like the Cascades and Rainier was big enough. When I got to the Himalayas, it was just like, and I'm actually going to climb this whole, you know what I mean? It was just really frightening, I guess. But I think when you get to that first ladder and you have to go over your first crevasse and put your crampons in and go, I think that's really a moment of truth. Like you're definitely dancing with fate. And the question is, do you have the ability to push on? And not only push on once, I mean push on over and over and over again through all these crevasses and all these ladders and so forth. I didn't have that feeling about the Khumbu Icefall. I think that's a feeling just about mountaineering. It's not just about one specific component of getting to like that one part of the icefall, Camp 1 to Camp 2. I understood what Everest was. And I understood that, and listen. If you're going to commit to doing this, you got to commit. You got to see it through. It's dancing with fate the whole time on Everest because there's a lot of things, besides the icefall, that could go wrong. A lot, lot, lot of things. And I can tell you, like, on my summit bid, and that, when we're in the death zone, and they call that, that's 26-29,000 feet. You know, you read about that. You don't get to go experience that anywhere and kind of get ready for that. And in my summit bid. I could tell you I lost my eyesight in my left eye at about 27,000 feet at a feature called the balcony, and that was primarily because. You leave Camp four in the death zone. We left at eight o'clock at night and within about an hour my headlamp died and there was, when you're up that high, there was no way I could take off my gloves to replace the battery, so I had to climb in front of my Sherpa. Using his headlamp to illuminate the route. But I had to take off my goggles. Because I couldn't see so well. So we went up in this big windstorm. So the wind just kept battering. Was coming from the left side. Just kept battering my left eye. So I went blind in my left eye. Early into that summit bid. And had to climb the whole way to the top of Everest. From about 27 to 29, 000 feet. With one eye. And all the way back down. And that summit bid from 26 to 29, 000. We left at 8 o'clock on May 12th. We did not return to our tents until 9 o'clock on May 13th. You know, so we had 25 hours of climbing. And I climbed 23 of those with one eye. And then, that was just back to Camp 4. They had to climb down the whole rest of the mountain with one eye, so. And all the time, not knowing if you were going to get your eyesight back? Not at all. And my thought was, well, guess what? I got another one. It's okay. Got two of them. Wow, that's pretty good perspective, Jack. Yeah. I mean, that was kind of my thought, but, I mean, obviously there was a fear there that when I lost the eyesight was. I am very clear what happens if I would have lost the eyesight in the other. That would mean that someone else would be walking down my daughter's down the aisle at their weddings if that happened. So I was very clear about what that meant. And for me, that moment of, okay, one eye is gone. Can I still get to the top, you know, and get back down because these aren't choices that are like, okay. Hey, let me just go on my phone and order something off Amazon that saves this. You know, you're the umbilical cord is really stretched out really far. There is no umbilical cord. It's really at that juncture, so, but I was confident in my mindset and that I would probably say climbing Everest, especially when things get tough, it's, you know, probably, you know, 90 percent mental. You know, your head is saying, don't go, don't go, because you can't breathe, but, um, you know, you just have to be able to dig down deep and really want it, and I was pretty confident that, I figured my right eye would hold up. The temperature is what? Negative? It was probably negative 20. And then we had a, the, when we went up there was a windstorm, so it even made it more problematic for us. But that also kept a lot of people off the mountain. There was only six of us climbing that day. So you know, it was six Westerners and six Sherpa. So, and we had the whole mountain to ourselves. I was on the summit. By myself with my Sherpa and as were the rest of my teammates and so forth, which doesn't always happen. There's a lot of times, a lot of lines up there. And for us, none of that at all. It was a beautiful experience in that, it was just us and climbing in our own pace, no people to worry about and sitting up on top of the summit for the two minutes that we did. Oh, you were only up there for two minutes. I was wondering how long you got to sit at the top of the world. Yeah, we were only up there for literally two, maybe two, two and a half minutes. And because once you're at the top, the journey's not done. Right. I read that going down is actually more dangerous than getting up. Yeah. And I think that's a number of reasons why that is. Number one, you're tired. Number two, gravitational pull. It's harder to climb down because you're being pulled down a little bit. And you know, you've been climbing a long time. It's hard. It's a harder thing. And for me, it was equally as hard because I had lost the eyesight. I didn't have depth perception. So climbing down was a lesson in leaning over and looking at every single step, trying to figure out where do I place my crampon, where crampon are the spikes on the bottom of your boots. And over on one side, is it just a steep drop? Like if you take a wrong step? Yeah. There are steep drops along that whole way at certain parts and it, you know, to me, the thing that was I think intoxicating for me about climbing in general is you can't make a mistake. You can't step wrong. You can't climb into a rope wrong. You can't clip your carabiner into something wrong. There are no redos. There are no second chances. You know, it's a very. You can't do anything wrong. On Everest or on any other mountain, because if you do something wrong, it means you, you don't get to come back. And that's not the point of climbing. In my opinion, the point is to come back, celebrate, and apply what you've learned to, you know, the people around you and to, if you have children, to your children and to your friends and family and how they can maybe glean something from it. Can you describe what it was like when you were at the top for those two minutes? I would say those two minutes at the top were two things. If I can get down, everything in my life after this will be gravy. And the second thought was, get down. I have one eye, I have to get down. I want to celebrate this. With my wife and with my kids. To be honest, I really didn't celebrate it until I landed back stateside. Because I knew there was a lot to do and climb. So, I was ecstatic about being at the top. I took a video and it was a lot smaller than I had imagined. I'll put it that way. How big is it about? I read it's about the size of a dining table. The top, I don't know, 10 feet. You know, I just remember that last, like, 50 feet to the top as it was just getting smaller and smaller. And I was like, this is getting I was like, I thought this was gonna be, you know, rather large. But it was quite small in my opinion when I got up there. And there are a bunch of flags up there. Is that right? Yeah, there's a bunch of Buddhist flags and I put up pictures of my wife and kids that I took a video Oh that they were on top of the world and I was ecstatic but I knew that if I was gonna live the rest of my life like a champion that I had to get down and I knew that I had a Big struggle going down because again, I had one eye. And I could feel that the other eye was maybe starting to get a little bad. So I knew that time was of the essence and that it was going to be a lot harder climbing down. There was going to be a major struggle. When I was on Everest, I really figured out what happens when you die. And you know what it is? The people who love you will miss you. You know, that to me was my vantage point of climbing. I wasn't, The risk of me climbing, I didn't take it as an individual, like, if I die, this is gonna happen. I worried about those people, the people who love me the most, my wife and kids and my parents and my friends are gonna miss me. And to me, I think climbing Everest gave me a very unfair advantage in the business I'm in now, because the risk I face every day in a startup, in our life cycle, doesn't scare me. You know, I've already dealt with something really scary. Climbing every day knowing I can die at every minute. There's only so much, you can mitigate especially on Everest. You can mitigate having good equipment. You can mitigate being in pretty good shape but being in good shape doesn't really dictate how altitude is gonna affect you or or the winds or a sudden change in weather or An avalanche 100 percent I mean it was very interesting even a couple years after I climbed Everest. There was a major earthquake on Everest and I had a friend who died at base camp during the earthquake. A rock came and hit him and he passed away. You know what I mean? And that's where you think, you know, that can happen on Everest when you're in your tent. And I remember my first night, when I got to Everest the first time in my first tent, and you would hear these major thunderstorms. And then like my Sherpa, great guy who I was climbing with, he said, those aren't thunderstorms. Those are avalanches. You know, and you're like, what? Like, what do you mean? And you're like, those are avalanches, you know, in the surrounding mountains. So, you know, for me, I had climbed Everest twice. I didn't make it the first time. The first time I climbed in 2010. I had some altitude issues up at about 23, 000 feet that were affecting me. What did that feel like? You just physically couldn't keep going on? I was having some high altitude coal air induced asthma attacks. Oh, wow. it was almost like climbing an altitude was already hard, but it was almost like constricted to like a straw. And I could not breathe at 23, 000 feet and I knew I mean I knew obviously if I went further that was gonna I would pass away, so. I had always understood that I lived by these things. Mountains endure not so much people. And I knew that Everest would always be there. So I knew when I didn't feel good, even though that was a punch in the teeth, and I'd have to train all over again. And I mean, it was really hard to kind of come to that decision. But, you know, as I'm saying it, I remember being at Camp 3 and looking to the top of Everest, turning my back and saying like, This is not my year. I need to sort this issue out. Before I come back again and, turned back, went back home, trained harder, figured out how to deal with the high altitude, cold, air induced asthma, and, I got back up to 23,000. The second time it was like. Oh oh, is it going to happen again? Yeah, the mental game kicks in. The mental game, you know, and I think those are things that. I just have this ability to push through those obstacles and handle those. situations in a manner that I lean into risk like it's chocolate milk and I just try to just be Measurable in that risk but. So when it didn't work out the first time, did you know right away, I'm coming back. This isn't over for me. The moment I took those first step down. I Knew that I was gonna come back. I knew I would do the things to figure out. Why was this happening? Because Everest was something that I always wanted to climb as a young child and I just knew I was going to go back. I was determined to do it. I was determined to get to the top and rightly or wrong when I got home the first time I did feel like a failure. I really did. I was like, I didn't make it. And, you know, my wife, Emily was like, you're not a failure. You turned, you know, you're doing things that most people. You know, they're not going to actually go out and try to do this. And I felt like a failure though. I was like, I didn't do it. But I, you know, I got over that rather quickly and I was just even more determined to go into that dark cave every day of training because I knew it held the treasure that I wanted. And I knew that treasure was getting to the top and back down and learning all those lessons along the way. And I knew that I'd be able to apply. back on terra firma, back on solid ground, you know, in my everyday life and so forth, so. What does that training look like preparing for it? Yeah, what I would do was five days a week and I did this for 10 years. You know, climbing Everest wasn't just, hey, I'm going to go climb Everest. Everest started with climbing Mount Whitney, then climbing Mount Rainier, then going down to Mexico and climbing the highest mountains there. Then I went to Russia and climbed Mount Elbrus. Then Aconcagua, which is in South America, which is the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas at 23,000 feet. So that journey was not just, Hey, I'm climbing Everest. I'm going to go do that. That took 10 years of climbing and training and the training that I would do. And again, this just is what worked for me. I would hike in the Los Altos preserve. There was a 3,000 foot mountain there called the Black Mountain. And I think it was 12 miles round trip and it's a 3,000 foot elevation gain. I would hike that with 35 pounds of water in my pack. Oh my goodness. And I would dump the water at the top to make it easier coming down. And I would do that in two and a half hours. So I wasn't hiking as in. You know, slow hiking. I was kind of jogging going up to the best of my, and then I was running, coming down. I do that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would go to a college called Foothill Community College. And on the football field, I would do interval training. And what that meant was from the end zone, to the other end zone line, which is 120 yards if you include the end zones. I would sprint that as fast as I can, getting my heart rate up. And then around the corner, I would drop to a jog to bring my heart rate down. And then I would sprint the 100 again. And I would do that 100 times. 100 times? 100 times each Tuesday and Thursday. So that again, that would just greatly elevate the heart rate, you know. Bam, bang it up and then bring it down a little, bang it up. My goodness. And that's what I did for my training. It depends on where you live and what you do. And, but that's what really worked for me and for getting my cardiovascular system ready and my legs, because I knew, especially when I went back to Everest the second time, I knew there was never an issue with my legs. Meaning that I knew my legs were going to get me through wherever I needed to go. And I knew that when that eye went, I knew I just said my legs will get me there. And not slow legs, you know, not like, hey, I can take 50 hours to do. I knew my legs were muscle memory. You know, I knew they knew what to do. And that's what I think allowed me to get up to the top with the one eye and get back down. When we talk about all those things, having one eye. Climbing in the death zone, not being able to breathe, it's cold, you're tired, you haven't, you know, we didn't rest for that 25 hours, and, you know, I also have rheumatoid arthritis. Yeah, how did that affect everything? How did you deal with that through this entire climb? You know, I have the ability to handle suffering. And, guess what? You know, people often ask me, why do you do it? And, I think when I was climbing Everest. Putting my feet on the floor every morning were for the people I knew who couldn't do that. I know there's people who have my affliction, who have rheumatoid arthritis, or has other conditions and diseases who are at home and they can't do things. You know, they just can't and that's not their fault. You know, they're just not able to do that. And for me, I was like, I can do it. I can endure the pain. I can endure the suffering. That's great. And it still gets me out every day in the morning when I put my feet on the floor, because I know there's. There's people who are climbing Everest with a really rough affliction. That affects for me personally, my toes, my ankles, my knees, and my hips. That's predominantly what we're using to climb a mountain. Not to mention all the training. I mean, you dealt with that pain through all the training as well, I'm sure. All the training and every day. Still do every day. So that was an added obstacle. To have to endure, you know, I was fortunate that. You know, maybe i've just been lucky. I have a characteristic that helps me digest pain and suffering different than other people, you know, if someone gets feels pain and they're at a 10 well. And they have to stop i'm at a 10, but I think I can push till it's a 50. You know, and that's just something that you know I'm, just lucky that i'm able to do that, but to be honest with you not getting to the top the first time. Was probably the most valuable part of the journey. Because when I got to the top the second time, and you know, got back down, back stateside. It made victory even better. I know a lot of people who go to Everest and they don't make it their first time, and guess what? They don't go back. You know, they just don't, because it takes lots of determination, lots of tenacity, lots of energy, the ability to handle a lot of suffering. And the atmospheric pressure up there is one third what it is at sea level. So, yeah, the oxygen you're getting is one third of the oxygen you're normally getting. And it takes so long. Is this right? I read that that last mile can take 12 hours to climb. Yeah, I mean we took 25 hours that just that 26, 000 to 20 minutes, 3, 000 feet. But that last 3, 000 feet. And remember that's not 3000 feet. It's 6000 Feet because you got to go up. And back. So that's just an incredible feet and there you are with one eye and you're struggling with oxygen even with the supplemental. And you can't breathe and I mean, and I almost put it, it's like running with a straw in your mouth and a bag on your head. It's just really hard to breathe. That altitude is the great equalizer. You know, that you can go as trained as you are and with the greatest attitude, but if that altitude hits you, and it hits people, I mean it, it kills people. So what's the process when you decide you want to go? Do you have to get a permit? Do you sign up with a guide? Or how do you find the Sherpas? Yeah, you know, I think when you want to begin that journey, there's some steps you have to take, especially because hiking is not mountain climbing, mountaineering. Those are two different sports. Mountaineering is different in that it entails altitude. It entails crevasses, avalanche, how to cook with melted ice. How to carry big loads. I mean, it's just a different thing. So when I started, I initially, I had climbed Mount Whitney as a kid during the summer. So that's the hike basically. But then I went and climbed Mount Rainier and that's, was my real taste of mountaineering. And how to do it. How to survive climbing. How to sleep at night. What do you deal with going to the bathroom and you got to come out of your tent at night on steep terrain? Dealing with all of the equipment. Getting accustomed to layering and how to deal with that. With taking breaks. What do you do? Do you put on jackets? Do you put on more cloves. Can you go into some of that? I really am interested in that. I mean, I've watched a lot of documentaries in Everest and all that. Yeah. What do you, what do you wear? What do you carry in your pack? And how do you sleep at night in these steep places? It varies in different mountains on Everest. Our base camp was at 17,000 feet. Then our camp one, and you do what are called rotations on Everest. So you just don't climb Everest and go from. Cat Man Dude a top of Everest. You have to acclimate as you're doing this. So it takes us two weeks to hike in to Everest Base Camp. And you have to spend two weeks hiking to Base Camp and Base Camp is at 17,000 feet and you, then you'll climb up to Camp 1 at 19,000 feet, spend a couple nights, then back down to Base Camp and you'll spend like three nights down there and you climb back up to Camp 1 for three nights. Then you go up to camp two for three nights. Then you'll climb all the way back down for five nights. Then you'll repeat that and then you go up to camp three. So it's this, so when people see like ladders, they think you're just going over like 30 ladders once. You're really going over like 200 ladders because you're doing it so many times and your tent and your sleeping are different at different parts of the mountain. At base camp you have kind of your own tent and you have your supplies in there and you're able to have more in there. The higher you go you have less with you. You just carry less about what you're going to do and you know it's a learning process but there's, you can read any book or any magazine or any guides that you're with and you know you'll take these necessities with you which are obviously you know. Whatever, you know, your crampons, your ice axe, your different layers, your different sets of goggles. But I mean, but like I indicated to you, my headlamp died. And there's nothing to stop that. Maybe you have an extra headlamp. I did have an extra headlamp, but I lost it somewhere along the way. Just in the process of climbing with an oxygen mask on and so forth. And those are the things that you have to adapt to. After climbing for those 25 hours and getting into my tent that night and upon stopping. It was very apparent that within an hour things were going to go bad for me because my clothes were wet from sweating and I was going to become hypothermic from being wet and now sitting still in a tent and, you know, having to adjust and figure out, okay, all I want to do is go to bed, but now I got to figure out who on my team has some clean, you know, who has some dry clothes that I can wear because I'm not going to make it through the night. I remember. Only a couple people had some clothes I could wear and I was so cold that night that I actually put my gloves on my feet because it was, you know, it was so. What an anecdote. But those are the things that you just don't, you can't prepare for. Like you just can't prepare for losing an eye. You can't prepare for on that summit bid. There was a guy who had a Japanese guy who had passed away at about 28,000 feet and seeing that body up there just hooked into a rope, just, and he had gotten, either HACE or HAPE, those are called. HACE is high altitude cerebral edema. HAPE is high altitude pulmonary edema, and when you do that, you have a tendency to think you're hot, and you take your clothes off. So he was up on the top, like pretty close to the top, with, you know, his down suit unzipped, his gloves off, all of his layers off, and, you know, and seeing those things are, You know, surreal things as you're doing the same thing he's doing. It makes me think of the Sherpas, because it is nice to have comrades in arms there. And these guys have climbed many, many times. What are your thoughts about the role of the Sherpa on the mountain? Yeah, I think number one, you know, people think that the word Sherpa is associated with someone who carries things, and that's not what it is. The Sherpa are the native people to the Kubu region of that part of the Himalayas. You know, and obviously some of them are still in Tibet and some of'em are on that, in that Kubu Valley, it's called the Solo Kubu region, and they are a magnificent humble people and especially as we would hike into base camp. He would stop by these buddhist monasteries and go in there and it was just an incredible lesson for me seeing a warm easy people where you know they might not have the luxuries that there are no cars up in that area there's no there's no a lot of things let me put it that way. I encountered a wonderful Sherpa, whose name was Danuru. And we climbed that mountain together, and his ability to know the mountain, and, you know, here's where we go, here's what we're gonna do, and, you know, I think that was refreshing, I would also say, on that summit bit, obviously, we're wearing an oxygen mask. Because it was so windy, those oxygen masks have like a regulator on the side that's kind of open to the wind. So it releases the co2 when you breathe, you know so it goes out and that was freezing on that night of the summit bed. So about every 15 minutes Dhanuru or I would have to take off our mask and we would put our mouth on the other person's mask. And blow into it to clear it. I mean, it's like right here on your mouth so I mean. You're getting like the inner workings of the person next to you. We had to do that for 10 hours, doing that. A very intimate experience with each other. Those are experiences, again, that you don't get to learn about. It was just like, hey, how are we going to make this work to pull this off? So, um, I, I think for me personally, I learned a lot from the Sherpa people. And you know, I've hoped that. What I learned, I've brought that humility back to with what I do in my professional life as well as with my personal life with my wife and my children. And getting to the top is great, but to me it's seeing the world and how you want to change it. Is what matters. It's not about, hey this is what I've done. A practical question, what do you eat? How do you eat while you're climbing? That's a wonderful question and I definitely was a lot skinnier when I was climbing. Because I now get to eat McDonald's and french fries every time I want because I celebrate. Easier access to food right now. 100%. For me, when I was climbing, when you get up in altitude, your appetite changes. So for me, what I loved to eat was candy. I don't eat candy, ever. So I'd get everything from Milky Ways, Hershey's, Twix, M& M's, Jolly Ranch, I mean. Like Halloween, every day. Just this huge bag and that's all I would eat, was just wheat candy. I didn't eat. Not protein and healthy food? No, because you don't need the protein, you need energy. You don't want to burn sugar. Oh. You know, you're just burning, burning. So you got to keep the, you got to keep the tank going. So protein is great for, of course, muscle building. And at base camp, yeah, I might have, we had a tendency to have a lot of spam. Yeah. So I might have, uh, These are some of the most unexpected answers. You ate candy and spam ham. A little spam at base camp. But other than that, it was, oh my gosh, a hundred gram bars. Nestle Crunch. Smarties, you know, Smarties. Oh yeah. Smarties. I would just throw in my mouth and I would literally just take a swig of water and just, it's just sugar, you know, just, just keeps, just keeps you going and so forth. I remember when I. After two months, because the trip is two months of climbing. When I got back, when I flew from Kathmandu to Hong Kong, the only thing I wanted after two months was milk. They had like Ben and Jerry's in the airport in Hong Kong. And all I did between my flights was just eat ice cream. You know, my body just yearned having, you know, that calcium. But for me, on every climb, it's always been candy. And lots of it. When you're at the height of where jets are flying, which is where you were, you're going for candy. You're going for candy and just Jolly Ranchers and Swedish fish. Oh my gosh. And gummy bears and cola bottle. So before I let you go, I'd like to circle back. You mentioned you learned so many lessons while you were on Everest. Can you share some of those with me? Yeah, I think the main lessons I learned are number one, don't let anyone walk through your mind with dirty feet. I think that was something that really, that I still apply today in my daily life. That most of the people who are criticizing you are people who are doing nothing. I think that is something that I live with. I also live by a great Muhammad Ali quote that I love. It's not the mountain that wears you out, it's often the pebble in your shoe. And I think the last one is, The dark cave you fear often holds the treasure that you want. Not to be a broken record, you know, you climb mountains, not so people can see you climbing, so you can see the world and change it. And, that was my experience on Everest and that's, and as well as other mountains. And that's what, I've learned and that's what drives me forward every single day. And I consider myself very lucky. I know there's a lot of unfortunate souls that lose their life mountaineering and, um, they don't get to celebrate like I get to and, you know, continue life. Well, thank you so much. This has been so enlightening for me. I really appreciate you telling me about this because like I said, I'm never going to climb Mount Everest, so I really appreciate experiencing it vicariously through you. Well, it was a pleasure. I'm glad, glad it was interesting. And thank you. I'm simply in awe of people who take on such huge physical and emotional challenges. I can't imagine ever climbing to the summit of Mount Everest, but still much of what Jeff said resonated with me. Here are my takeaways from our conversation. Number one: Not achieving a goal on the first try is sometimes a blessing. Keep trying. Victory tastes even sweeter the second, or third, or eighth time around. 2. Preparation is key, but you can't mitigate for every possibility. 3. Be adaptable. Sometimes you need to wear your friend's dry clothes and wear your gloves on your feet to keep warm. 4. If you're going to commit to something like climbing Mount Everest or something else in life, see it through. And finally, number 5. Even if you're on top of the world, literally or figuratively, the important thing isn't that you're there. It's what you can do to change it for the better. I'd like to thank Jeff Gottfurcht for sharing his inspiring stories with me. If you'd like to learn more about Jeff and his company, go to cyberdive.co. Please visit our website, whatitsliketo.net, to explore other episodes, sign up for our insiders' list, and find out how to follow us on social media. And if you liked what you heard, please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. It helps others discover us. I'm Elizabeth Pearson Garr. Thanks for being curious about what it's like.