Bodily Excesses

I’ve never thought of mountain walking as an excessive physical activity. It’s just a slow movement through space and time, one foot in front of the other, and eventually you get to wherever you need to be that afternoon. A little sweaty perhaps, a little tired in the legs if it’s a long day, but it’s not exactly running a marathon. At most my definition of bodily excess would be putting voltarol on sunburnt knees.

However a jaunt in the Central Pyrénées in August has led me to conclude that there are excessive conditions that are best avoided, like a late summer heat wave. With plus 30 degrees everyday for a week, not a puff of wind nor a cloud, it was as if the earth had stopped turning. The locals shook their heads and looked to the heavens, muttering that it was unusually hot. Small comfort to know that I have symmetry in my holidays now with climate change buggering up my skiing and my walking breaks.

Nothing with sense moved. Even the vultures would just sit around waiting for the thermals to do all the work, to ruffle their feathers and send them up to spy the carcasses that the heat was doing bad things to. Only butterflies and crickets seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The poor sheep huddled under whatever shade they could find and I knew how they felt, although in the case of the walker with a gîte to get to there is no choice but to slog on.  After one day’s ten hour onslaught over a 2465 metre col, with not a scrap of shade for seven hours, the waitress in the first café I came to in Gourette appeared to be slightly nervous at my appearance and demands for ‘drink! drink!
now!’. And never has walking on bitumen felt so hot or been so slow when discovering my hotel was in fact 40 minutes away from the trail head that evening.

As all walkers know, there is nothing to be done about the weather; all you can do is wear the right clothes for the occasion or as few as possible in this scenario (none in the case of nudist hikers who have the right idea, and yes, they really do exist). You carry extra water and you leave as early as possible. In theory.

In practice, in France no self-respecting boulangerie is open until 7am which means breakfast was never until 7.30 and departure then not until 8am. Already too hot. Yet skipping breakfast to get an early start had its own consequences. Powered by two cups of black coffee and two bowls of tinned fruit (all that was left in the gîte fridge at 7am), I did get to the top of a col in record time one morning, but my metabolism was so confused all it could manage at a refuge for lunch was grenadine with 7Up, chocolate crepe and a beer. This did not put me in peak physical condition for the three hour descent to Cauteret. In practice it is better to lose 45 minutes and wait for the bread.

It’s not possible to complain too much though about the bodily excesses of walking in a heat wave when compared to how the runners in the Grand Raid de Pyrénées must have felt. With 80km, 160km or 240km routes, the latter taking in 10,000m of ascent, they happened to be using some of the same GR10 trail as me when the thermometer tipped 35 degrees. The 100km checkpoint was in Cauteret so I could sip on my beer and watch the leaders come through the main street looking like limp whippets.

The trails are a masculine space at times so there is no surprise that it tips towards excessive activity and a hierarchy of exploits: the Raid, climbers, then those on the HRP, the GR10 or 11, and day trippers way down the bottom. Refuge de Pombie in the Pyrénées National Park is a leyline for young, fit flesh from either side of the border attempting to climb Pic du Midi d’Ossau. Men may not necessarily outnumber women but they outweigh the conversation with tales of adventure. The next day, as I headed down to Gabas, I met a Spanish man adjusting his shoes. He was running the entire tour of Pic du Midi d’Ossau, and where it took me a leisurely ten hours over two days he will be home for lunch. Respect. In Gabas, two men in their 60s, stopped for lunch, were mountain biking over 1000km across the Pyrénées in two weeks, carrying nothing more than a day bag. They were part of a veritable peloton of mostly male cyclists that descend on the Pyrénées each summer, dreaming of riding like Chris Froome over its cols (only many of them seemed to be falling off their bikes, throwing up and oozing bodily fluids which I’ve never seen Chris Froome do). At Lac d’Oô a group of Spanish men staying the night were completing the GR10 and then returning via the GR11, all to be done in 80 days. Over dinner, a young man in Luz described his plans to do in one day what would take me two. He becomes legend on the trail as other hikers told stories of his efforts including a 35 kilometre day while wearing a knee brace after a nasty fall. Not to be outdone, I met an older woman from Utah who also had a lower leg brace that held her ankle together so she can ‘keep doing what I want to’.

It must be stressed that such levels of bodily excess, or determination, are not a precondition for accessing the mountains. There is no less grace in being a day-tripper as being a climber or Raid runner despite the claims of testosterone. I have come to the conclusion that the mountains do not require of us the same sacrifice. Whether a gentle amble to a refuge for a three course meal plus wine, or ice climbing the remotest peak you can locate, find your own rhythm, your own pace and your own way home.