Sugar Rush
‘I’m freezing Jerry. We gotta go down. We’re too low and when this wall starts warming up I don’t want to be in the firing line." Calum wasn’t scared, just frustrated and impatient. He might only have been 21 years old but he had the wisdom of Gandalf and a similar level of magic when it came to floating up steep bits of rock or ice.
I stood balanced on a sliver of snow and ice clinging to the Eiger’s rock shield looking up at the queue of climbers above me. There were at least five teams ahead of us on the "Difficult Crack". We had been forced to hang around on the mountain for more than three hours now, dressed in not much more than I would wear Christmas shopping in London. So much for a speed climb. Even though it was mid April, the temperature was -10°C and I was starting to shiver. My blood sugars had already gone from suicidally low to stupidly high and were now beginning to drop again as adrenaline seeped out of my body to be replaced by cold despair. My head and shoulders dropped, as my familiar low self-esteem fermented inside me.
That sort of despair, I knew very well, was a consequence of my type-1 diabetes, a condition I’ve suffered from since 2001. Before going on the Eiger, I’d told everyone I was going to speed climb the north face and raise a ton of cash for charity. But now I was going to look so bloody stupid on Facebook. My body was full of pent-up frustration. I said nothing to Calum and continued with my mental calculations on the chances of reaching the summit that day. The line moved a metre as another team completed the technical section above us and I shuffled forward too. It’s always so easy just to give in and bail out. I hate failure and I hate descending a mountain without the energy you get from the summit. But I was starting to accept that the lad was right. It was over.
The Eiger has an evil presence. A big sheet of black rock hanging vertically in the sky, like a canvas from the post-apocalypse film ‘The Road’ turned on its side. Imagine this painting as a room. It extends around the walls from floor to ceiling and when you walk in you feel totally enveloped in gloom. It’s alive and breathing. Its surface moves and changes as it rots from the inside. It consumes the sun and the moon; it consumes your life as well, as thinking about the room occupies every waking hour for months beforehand and then you creep tentatively inside.
When you step onto the north face, this black canvas of dirty rock-strewn snow, you feel sucked in, encased in a vertical vortex. And it’s lethal. The Eigerwand is the biggest north wall in the Alps and arguably the most dangerous. Since it was first attempted in the early 1930s more than 70 climbers have died attempting the ‘Mordwand’, the ‘murder wall’. Many good climbers aspire to climb it and many continue to fail. The Swiss mountain rescue helicopters whizzing around the face are a daily distraction to its more usual quiet emptiness.
Inspiration for our Eiger speed attempt had come in January from my friend Tony Whitehouse. Tony is a fell-running champion and climber who has spent much of his life in the mountains or else making climbing devices for his company Beta Designs. He and his wife Sarah were staying at one our apartments in Vallouise, as they do every year, cross-country skiing and climbing. Most afternoons Tony would put micro-crampons over his trainers and go for a run on the snowed-up trails. Despite being in his sixties, Tony is as passionate as ever about the climbing life and usually has a bone of contention to chew on. This year it was the Eiger and how armchair mountaineers on the Internet had been confidently discussing the challenge of the north face without going to the trouble of actually climbing it. As Tony ranted on, I found myself becoming equally fired up. I hate it when people voice comments and opinions about things they know nothing about, even though I’m often guilty of that myself. People should get on the mountain before they opened their mouths about it and that, I decided, is exactly what I would do. I’d climb the Eiger and raise money for Action4Diabetics, the charity I co-founded after my diagnosis in 2001. The climb would make a difference to young children whose lives were far bleaker and harder than mine and at the same time prove to the world, or at least a few digital scribblers, that the Eiger is more than possible, even for a 54-year-old fossil with type-1 diabetes. But why stop there? The normal time to climb the north face is still two days, or even more, and consequently most climbers take bivy gear. Why not leave the bivy kit at home and do the climb in a day: a speed ascent.
The next challenge was to find a partner strong enough to keep up with me and yet patient enough to understand my diabetic condition. I spoke to a number of pro climbers and guides who all declined for various reasons. And then I asked Calum Muskett. Calum was just 21 at the time but already the youth ambassador for the British Mountaineering Council and one of the most talented, fit and mature mountaineers I’ve had the good fortune to share a rope with. The first time he picked up ice axes, aged just 15, was the same day he climbed the Devil’s Appendix, the iconic hard VI ice route in North Wales. His maturity must have something to do with the death of his younger brother, who had been killed in a car crash some years before. He isn’t humble, but neither is he arrogant, just well balanced and unnervingly almost always correct. At the end of January 2015, I asked Calum if he fancied having a go with me at a speed ascent of the north face of the Eiger that winter. I waited for him to say no. I waited for questions about fitness, route conditions and partner ability (i.e. me). Instead he simply answered: ‘Yes, sounds interesting. I'd be keen.’
The main issue for Calum was his schedule. The best time to climb the north face is in late winter or early spring, when the winter snows have cleared a bit but it’s still cold on the face to reduce rock fall and there’s still sufficient snow and ice to make the climbing easier.
‘When were you thinking?’ he asked me. ‘Because my spring is already looking rammed. I have a really short period of spare time between 20 and 24 April.’
We both knew that the end of April is right at the end of the cold season for the Eiger. By that stage the upper exit cracks leading to the summit ridge would almost definitely be melting out. Stone fall would also be an issue as the upper slopes would be in stronger sunlight. But it would have to do. I announced on social media at the beginning of February that my next insulin challenge would be a speed ascent of the Eiger’s north face. I wasn’t fit, conditions were uncertain and I still had to learn the technicalities of ‘speed climbing’ rather than just climbing – a totally different affair as I was soon to find out.
A part of almost every day from mid February until I left for Switzerland in April, was spent looking at weather maps. It appeared that the Swiss Alps was in the middle of a high snowfall winter. That was good news. But would there be too much snow? Or would the temperatures have already started to soar by the time we arrived in early spring? By mid February it was also high time I started my training schedule and learned how to prepare for a speed ascent. I contacted someone who ought to know best, someone I had communicated with before about various extreme mountain climbs in Switzerland. That man was Ueli Steck. His training and preparation techniques were innovative and hugely influential. His technique of ‘active acclimatisation’ involving repeated rotations from base camp rather than spending nights sleeping at high altitude is now used by the best high-altitude climbers operating today. He repeatedly opened minds and showed new approaches to long-established practices. I knew Ueli’s advice would be golden and we spoke several times about what I needed and how to succeed in a fast time. He made a huge difference to our attempt and I still feel deeply honoured that he gave me so much of his valuable time in helping me. His death on Nuptse in 2017 was a real tragedy.
Ueli’s speed record for the Eiger at that time was 2h 47m, climbing solo and recorded on 13 February 2008. On 23 February of the same year Swiss climbers Daniel Arnold and Stephan Ruoss created the fastest team record in just 6h 10m. I didn’t think realistically that aged 54 I could beat a team of men in their early 30's with Swiss blood running through their veins. I also knew no British team had ever got close to such a time. But I was hopeful of a fast ascent with Calum and certainly in one day, not least because we wouldn’t be carrying bivy gear. But we knew that even at these comparatively low altitudes, a night out could mean frostbite or worse.
So I started training under Ueli’s guidance. He told me how he trained for his world-class ascents and from this I got into what I call vertical running. Simplistically it is about ascending steep hills involving vertical height gains of 800m or more but over short horizontal distances. From my house I would ski 15 minutes to the start of a very steep forest trail going up to an altitude of 3,000m in just 5km of horizontal distance. The trail starts at 1200m so height gains of 1,000m are easily accessible. You just need the puff to get up them. My fastest time for 1,000m vertical on this trail was 58 minutes. And as I got closer to my departure date, I started training with a 10kg rucksack full of plastic water bottles, so I could ditch the liquid and save my knees during the descent.
I did basic core workouts and upper body exercises like weighted pull-ups and tried to go ice climbing at least once or twice a week. Living in one of the premium icefall locations in France definitely helped. My long-suffering wife Jackie got on with the day-to-day business of running our company, while dealing with my mood swings as my blood sugars began to oscillate. Exercise for insulin-dependent people is essential to help maintain stable blood sugar readings but extreme training requires a lot more input if the diabetic athlete in question wants to stay married.
Nighttime hypos are something I’m especially prone to because I’m often trigger-happy with my insulin. I tend to inject too much of the fast-acting kind, which metabolises with a three-hour profile, having forgotten to factor in the effect of intensive training. Usually I take five units of fast-acting insulin before each meal and 11 units of slow-acting insulin, with a 12-hour profile, before bed. When training I can drop these quantities by as much as 80%. Furthermore, the effect on my body after a big vertical run is greatest during the second night after the activity, not the first. So I am almost constantly in a state of forward planning with my insulin and if I get it wrong by just a few drops, I can find myself semi-conscious at 3am with the bed saturated in sweat and my wife Jackie patiently coaxing me to eat a honey sandwich, her day having already well and truly started. Too much insulin and my blood sugars go too low which at night can result in coma and death. Too high, and in less than five years I lose my eyesight or worse. It is a fine, hour-by-hour balance that last’s a lifetime.
April arrived far too quickly. I had done fewer than 10 vertical runs and not nearly enough ice climbs. But it was time. My body was already complaining and injury is a real possibility for the over 50s. I loaded up my trusty Subaru and headed for Switzerland. Towards midnight and driving on fumes, I finally quit trying to reach a gas station. I had reached the crest of a col and thought that even if I ran out next morning I could free wheel down the other side to a garage. I parked up and went to sleep in a field in the middle of the Alps.
Six hours later I was woken by the sound of exaggerated mooing and loud cowbells in my ear. The car was surrounded and I was trapped. Newspaper headlines flashed through my mind: ‘Himalayan climber dies in cow stampede in remote Alpine valley.’ Looking into their eyes I saw malice and anger. I was going to miss my Eiger attempt because of a bunch of cows. Everything was going wrong and I hadn’t even started. And then, luckily, somewhere deep in my hypothalamus, a voice screamed: ‘Stop! Test your blood sugars.’
When my blood-sugar level drops and I go into a hypoglycaemic attack, I can suffer black moments like this, when I feel that people, events, even cows are ganging up against me. I feel like I am under siege by whatever happens to be in my brain at the time and I start to sink into my own self-created pit of despair. I tested my blood and found that indeed I was low: exceptionally low. Carbs are to diabetics what chalk is to a rock climber. You don’t need much, but when you do you need it fast and in just the right quantities to bring your blood sugars up. Too many carbs and it clogs you up, too little and you fall down – literally. If I am not testing my blood sugars, I am measuring how many grams of carbs I am about to eat so I inject the appropriate amount of insulin. Because I needed carbs, I ate a couple of honey and nut cereal bars, put my shoes on and gave those cows a large bellyful of pent-up emotion.
I met Calum on the Chamonix road above Martigny. He dumped his gear in the car and we shot off to Grindelwald. It was so good to see him. His youthful confidence ran like a riptide of hope over my dark mood. I parked at the Eiger train station and headed for the nearest restaurant for a large plate of Rösti. Little did we know it but this would be our last proper meal for three days. We looked up at the mountain. It was enveloped in a deep blue polar haze and actually looked inviting. The sombre canvas was sprinkled with white flecks: I started to feel positive for the first time in a long time. All the stresses of preparing for this challenge were melting away. I knew Calum was in a totally different headspace. For him this was little more than just another route. Yes, he wanted to do it, and he wanted to help me raise a lot of money, but this was his office. And anyway, what could he be afraid of compared to a partner 30 years his senior?
The mood changed as we took the cable car to the base of the mountain and its presence started to weigh down on us. I realised that even Calum was susceptible to the fear it provoked. If I weren’t careful, this monster would suck out our momentum before we had even started. We climbed quickly to the Eigergletscher train station and checked into the refuge. It was already early evening and we still had a lot of prep before we could sleep.
The alarm went at 5am. We brewed up, gulped down muesli and packed the last remaining items. I had one last task to check off: my insulin injections. I normally inject both the slow-acting type and the fast-acting at 7.30am during breakfast. Now I decided to inject just 25% of my normal slow-acting dose and 40% of my fast-acting. I should have spent more time researching and testing these doses because unfortunately for me I had guessed badly. We shut the door to the refuge quietly behind us and climbed towards the dark shape above us.
We moved quickly and unroped up the initial 45° snow slopes but within two hours of leaving the hut I knew I was low on blood sugar. I stumbled upwards but knew if I fought my hypoglycaemic state it would only end badly. Reluctantly I stopped and dug a snow ledge to test on. Calum immediately understood what I was doing.
‘Low blood sugars Jerry?’ Somewhat embarrassed, I mumbled agreement and then ate two cereal bars. Annoyed with myself for such a stupid mistake, I bashed on and within the hour we reached the Difficult Crack, the start of the technical difficulties. Here we discovered five teams lay in front of us and joined the queue, frustrated and annoyed at this inconvenient delay. It was late April. Conditions were good but this might be the last time this winter when they were good enough to climb the face. During the few hours at the refuge I had spoken to a helicopter pilot who had just brought down an exhausted climber. His English wasn’t good, but I understood clearly enough when he said ‘snow is too warm. I think no more now, this time.’
Slowly the climbing teams in front of me inched forward, their large rucksacks rubbing against the rockface as the scratchy fabric of their sleeping mats produced grating sounds. There was little talk, just a line of men awaiting their fate. The sweat started to cool on my back and under my arms. I started to shiver. In the Alps speed is safety as you try to get up, and off a snow face before the sun hits it and certainly by midday. Now it was approaching that time and we all knew the sun would be hitting the upper snowfields releasing its deadly fusillade. I looked at the snow slopes around me and saw tell-tale black pockets littering the whiteness.
Experience told me that if you push on it usually works out okay and is invariably better than descending. Just going that extra mile can often result in victory. But in my heart, I knew I was kidding myself. Eventually, with a heavy heart and a feeling of exhausted failure, I climbed back to Calum and we started to rig the ropes for our descent. It was slow tedious work, like walking in quicksand: purgatory combined with zero motivation.
By the time we reached the refuge in the early afternoon I was covered in a cold sweat. I just felt exhausted. Calum went straight to sleep, but I collapsed in a chair and contemplated what had just happened. Was I still good enough to do this game? A lot of people had supported me on this challenge and now I was disappointing them. Mentally and emotionally I was destroyed. I had put a lot of time, energy, and determination into this challenge and now I was right back at square one. I sat with my head in my hands. I pondered and thought. Then I got up and started ambling around the refuge as my mind churned through a lifetime of challenges. Could I really be bothered? Could I really summon up the energy to have another go? How much did I really care? How much strength was there left in a rusty tank full of out-of-date gasoline?
Then I reflected on why I was here in the first place: raising money to help impoverished families with children who had type-1 diabetes. Graphic images of emaciated, struggling children came into my head. I saw their parent’s faces, as awareness dawned on them about what was happening to their children. Right there in the middle of the gloomy refuge hostel a boy’s name popped into my head: Nimuel. He was an eight-year-old boy I had met at a diabetes camp in the Philippines a year earlier. Nimuel had arrived on our first day, his eyes wide and full of fear. His mother was very poor and the two had been kicked out of the family home by the father. Insulin medication in many areas of SE Asia is often beyond the reach of most households and without it a newly diagnosed type-1 child will die slowly and painfully within 6 months.
‘Nims’ as I called him, was one of those amazing children who just do not give up. He tried his best to learn and understand from the team of healthcare workers and supporters around him, but it wasn’t easy. When he arrived at camp that first day he was dying, and he desperately needed help. His blood sugars were over 400mg/dL, or milligrams per decilitre: a death sentence given that the average for a non-diabetic person is just 100mg/dL. He knew that without help something bad would happen and he just tried and tried. By day four his sugars had dropped significantly and starting to stabilise. He had a long, difficult, and dangerous road ahead but he now had hope. It was so obvious his childhood was returning, and it was really amazing to see. If Nims could do all that, then I had to be able to do as much. I had to match his courage with my own and have at least one more crack at that bloody mountain. I wiped my eyes and woke Calum up.
‘What’s up, what’re you doing Jerry?’
‘We are going back up. Set your alarm for 1am. We're going for it.’ I had given myself another chance. I had a huge barrier to overcome but I had a direction, and that was all I needed. Calum, of course, was fine with my decision. He dealt with it all logically. The weather forecast was fine for the next day. He knew we had the technical skills to tackle anything on the face. Calum had all the confidence you’d expect from an international fell runner and one of the best technical alpinists of his generation. Me, on the other hand, had much to think about: I hardly slept a wink.
The alarm rang seemingly before I had set it and we were soon up and running. At 1.22am my blood sugars were at 60mg/dL: that meant it was time to eat – a lot! I have seldom been first out of the tent or snow cave. I’m always frantically scrambling to get all my bits and pieces together to avoid embarrassment. This time was no different. I hurriedly tested my blood once more at 2.26am: 75mg/dL. This was still a little low but it was rising fast and I knew that my carb-rich breakfast would counter the effect of the intensive exercise coming up. I injected myself with two units, two tiny drops of fast-acting insulin, slammed the refuge door behind me and ran into the cold night after Calum, who was already ahead of me, striding across the frozen whiteness.
The black sky was a million tiny shards of light and I gulped it in as we raced across the base of the beast. It was cold, around -10°C, but already our hearts were beating quickly. The lower snow slopes seemed to pass in an instant. We arrived at the Difficult Crack to find it empty and inviting. Soon we were pulling ourselves across the legendary Hinterstoisser Traverse and I saw the sun for the first time: a smoky yellow ball hanging low on the horizon. Freed from the bubble of light of my headlamp, I no longer felt the unreality of moving through the dark wrapped in layers. I understood this was really happening. We were on the Eiger.
We climbed on, swapping leads, racing past Death Bivouac and soon we were into The Ramp. Unluckily for us its magic veneer of ice had gone and we were forced to take turns dry tooling technical sections of blank rock, pulling hard on ice axes hooked on millimetres of crumbly limestone. I loved this section the most since it reminded me of mixed climbs in Scotland. At the top of The Ramp I led the Ice Chimney. This overhanging slot rears up at you and was totally dry, devoid of all ice. The steep corner became a balancing act, each crampon claw scraping frantically against the smooth vertical sides. I had to take off my gloves so I could rock climb in places where I couldn’t find purchase with my ice axes. Having always been more of a rock climber than an ice merchant, the smooth, slightly crumbly surface of the rock felt good underneath my fingers and I felt agile, loving the movement over cold stone.
I emerged panting in the dry air and suddenly felt a little weird. Normally that’s the sign of an approaching hypoglycaemic attack. I tested my blood: 70mg/dL. My instinct was right. I immediately chomped down a Lion bar and then a small fruit bar. I had 12 cereal bars for the entire climb and hoped I wouldn’t need more. I then swallowed a swig of water and carried on taking in the rope. Calum passed me with a grunt of acknowledgment.
‘Good lead Jerry; Brittle Ledges now.’ Why did he always make me feel like he was the adult and I was the kid? So annoying. We climbed together up easy snow slopes that lead to the flat plates of decomposing cat litter that make up this part of the face. Calum led this, running round to the Traverse of The Gods. Things were going well but I needed to maintain focus. We were already into mid morning and I could feel the temperature beginning to rise. I led round quickly into the bottom of The White Spider and suddenly felt immersed in a time-warp. So many climbers have written about this ragged white carpet, tilted at 65° and littered with small black grenades. We were climbing together now, with no protection between us. If either of us had been hit and fallen, we would have pulled the other off.
Calum was suddenly struggling and after shouting down I realised he had a nosebleed. I headed for a rock cleft at the side of the Spider and clipped a piton or nail hammered deep into a crack. He joined me and I asked if he was okay. Just that once, for a tiny instant, Calum acted his real age with a dismissive shrug, as if to say, ‘It’s only a nosebleed. What’s the problem old man?’ I asked him if it was okay if I led the Quartz Crack just above us.
This is the final barrier before the summit ridge, right at the top when it really is the last thing you want after all that precarious and mentally exhausting climbing. It’s technical and smooth and your crampons are skittering on blank rock. I led round to a block and then had to wait with another team as a slow climber struggled above us. I could see the ice melting above me and knew each climber would take more of it away. When my turn eventually came the black crack was bare and I was forced to hook my way up, precariously fighting the cramp in my calves.
We were now above the technical difficulties. All that remained were a few hundred metres of steep ice that fell back in angle as we moved up it until we popped out onto the summit ridge. We were now in the sun and it was still only early afternoon. We knew we had time. At the summit Calum looked like he had just got out of bed. I looked like I had just done 15 rounds with Mike Tyson. But it didn’t matter. We were a team. Our time up the face was 7h 56m. It wasn’t a world record; it wasn’t even close. That didn’t matter either. We took a selfie and I tested my blood again: 132mg/dL. Perfect.
Calum took over as he was responsible for navigating the route off and soon we were bum sliding down the east side of the Eiger whooping with delight as we descended at speed. We were unroped, lying on our backs, legs held high so our crampon points didn’t dig into the snow, using our ice axes like a rudder to keep us on course, sliding right under glacial seracs. It was like a scene from The Chronicles of Narnia: life felt very good indeed. We had climbed the north face in the fastest known time for a British team and had raised over $45,000 for Action4Diabetics.
On the walk down to Kleine Scheidegg the following morning we passed a reservoir just above the train station, a tranquil spot overlooking the Bernese Oberland. Walking along the shoreline, we both noticed that the boulders along the edge of the tarn each had a name chiselled into it. Each name was a climber who had died on the Eiger. The line of rocks was more than 100m in length on both sides of the rectangular pond. The first date was 1930 and the last was 2012. I ran back to the start of the line of rocks and picked out the name of Toni Kurz. A death of a climber is always tragic but what hit me was how many people would have been affected by these deaths: mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, partners, sons and daughters. So many affected by so few. I looked across at the surrounding peaks now bathed in early morning light and sank to my knees.
Calum had gone, racing off down the hill, eager to be reunited with his car so he could get back to Chamonix in time for the last cable car. I dropped him in time above Martigny and went in search of a café and a big slice of cake. This time I wasn’t worried about the carbs.