Looking upwards to 8,000m with hope and optimism

I always enjoy New Year as it is the chance to look to the year ahead with hope and optimism. This year, as we celebrate the start of 2025, alongside my hopes for my family, friends, colleagues and the wider world, I am also focused on my next mountain adventure which is now only eight months away. I am filled with excitement, passion, determination and a lot of nervousness - always a good combination in my mind.

Cho Oyu, stands on the border of Nepal and Tibet and translates in Tibetan to ‘Turquoise Goddess’. It is the sixth highest mountain in the world, soaring to 8,188m (over five miles into the sky) and I hope to stand on its summit sometime in September. It had been closed for climbing for five years, driven by the pandemic, until it was opened in autumn 2024. I excitedly followed the teams attempting to climb it this past autumn and the challenge that I’m taking on became very real.

I genuinely don’t know if I’ll be able to reach the summit. I can’t control how the very high altitude impacts my body or what the weather is like and both of these aspects may stop me. I don’t, however, want to be held back by things that are in my control - my fitness and strength levels, my endurance and my mental and emotional strength. I want to be as prepared as I can possibly be and these areas are therefore my focus for the months ahead.

I’ve got a planning book where I’m keeping my training plans, my learnings from previous expeditions and my lists of things I need to do to get myself ready (a lot of lists!). The cover of the book has a quote that I love: ‘The best things in life are the people we love, the places we’ve been and the memories we’ve made along the way’.

Whilst I would love to reach the summit, and will work incredibly hard to get myself in the best position to do so, I don’t want to sacrifice the experiences. Being in the high mountains is a wonder, as is the time I spend outdoors training, with family and friends (who are so kind to support me) and I want to try and enjoy every moment.

My focus for the next few months continues to be endurance and strength training.

I’ve signed up to a 50 mile ultra marathon on the South Downs Way in April to help me have an interim goal for my fitness and endurance training. I’ve run two longer ultra marathons in the past but they didn’t have cut off times. This event does and I know it will be hard for me to meet all of the cut off times over an extended period.

Last year, my husband and I turned 50 and created a list of ‘50 things to do in the year we are 50’. One of which was to run the length of the South Downs Way. We did this in stages over the course of the spring and summer. We started in the spring floods and so had to wade through freezing water on our first stage! By the summer, we had some really hot stages where we would have loved some water to cool us down!

Over these stages, I could keep to (and sometimes go faster than) the timings needed to meet the ultra marathon cut off times but that was on stages ranging from 15 to 25 miles. Achieving this over 50 miles will be a huge challenge for me, but one I’m really looking forward to. To help my training, I’ve entered a half marathon in February and a shorter ultra over the same terrain in March (I never thought I’d run an ultra race to train for a longer ultra race!).

For my strength training, I’m continuing with my mountaineering personal training, which is incredibly hard work but I love. When I send pictures of my long runs to my family, they always say that they can’t believe I’m smiling in them, given the distance I’m running. It’s easy to smile, though, when I’m in beautiful scenery and I’ve stopped for a few seconds to capture the moment. If I took photos of my gym sessions, I’d either be looking in pain at lifting heavy (for me) weights or sometimes close to tears of exhaustion after a set of exercises. Needless to say, I don’t take those photos! Each session, though, makes me feel that I’m getting stronger and therefore closer to my dream.

One of the reasons I’m attempting this challenge is to raise funds for a charity that is close to my heart - Cancer Research. Over the last two years since my last mountain expedition, I’ve had several friends impacted by this cruel disease and I’m hoping that I may be able to play a very small part in fundraising to support this wonderful charity in the work they do to support those suffering today and to help find a cure to prevent future suffering.

I’m excited but daunted. If I allow myself to think about what I’m trying to do, I am incredibly daunted. I’ve never been particularly sporty (my school report PE comments still cause my family to laugh), I really don’t like the cold (the heating in our house is always up very high!), I am a slow walker and I am very much a beginner climber (as anyone who has seen me attempt to climb or heard my squeals and swearing). I don’t need to do this. I could continue to challenge myself doing marathons, ultra marathons and through my career. But I’ve always believed that we should do the things that really scare us. We grow by doing so. We don’t always succeed but we always grow. And there will be moments in doing so that are so precious, so life affirming and so beautiful that they are worth every bit of pain, fear and hard work that it’s taken to achieve them.

So I’m going to head back to the high mountains, to a world of indescribable beauty and I’m going to try my absolute best to see our precious world from 8,000m. A dream that my younger self, even five years ago, would have thought was beyond me. As we enter 2025, whatever your dreams are, I’d encourage us all to not let them remain as just dreams. With hope, optimism, passion, hard work and a huge amount of support, I believe that anything is possible.