How the Hell Did I Get Here?

The book I chose for the 2023 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Sport is How the Hell Did I Get Here? by Pamela Lynch, 2019.

For her 60^th birthday in 2013, Pam Lynch decided to celebrate by trekking to Mt. Everest base camp. Why and how a woman who was not a hiker and had never travelled alone would start such an adventure is the basis of this book. And it’s quite a story.

Lynch describes her younger self as very shy and somewhat timid – never taking risks and not interested in trying anything different when she did travel. She married at 19, had two children, and lived a fairly conventional life in Australia. But when she turned 40, she started feeling restless and decided to enroll at university. Fifteen years later she had a PhD in Classics and Ancient History. Her focus on her studies strained her marriage, and she was divorced by the time she earned her degree.

The experience increased her confidence, although she felt “there was still that niggle, the voice of the child I had been kept pushing through, telling me I wasn’t really that smart, my success was just a fluke and I didn’t deserve the title I’d worked so hard for. I was a fraud and would soon be found out.”

That sounds so familiar to me; I’ve heard that from so many women who have achieved amazing goals. With her 60^th birthday approaching, Lynch spent a lot of time deciding what she would do to celebrate. Finally, it was a number of factors that helped her decide, including the coincidence that her birthday would be the same year as the 60^th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay becoming the first climbers to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.

She writes, “I couldn’t think of a better way to prove to myself in my sixtieth year that I could step outside my comfort zone and push my boundaries just a little then to step lightly in at least some of Hillary’s footsteps. I’ve always felt a certain affiliation with Hillary and Everest, so when I saw this trek advertised I knew straight away that I had to do it. I didn’t really stop to think it through, I just knew it was for me, whatever it was going to take.”

What amazes me is that she started training for the trek only 11 months before the trip! She describes the kind of training she did, which included preparing for both physical and psychological endurance. She also describes finding the right gear and equipment.

Most of the book is about the trip itself, from flying to Kathmandu to heading home three weeks later. She writes in the form of a travel journal, with a lot of information about the places she stays, the people she meets, and the landscape and weather conditions. She gives quite a lot of detail about the physical aspects of the climb, so that it often felt as if I was hiking with her (and it was often agonizingly strenuous!). This also made the exhilaration of her success and the anniversary celebration at Base Camp seem so real.

After such an adventure, she was restless again. “I don’t think you can really settle after a trip like that,” she writes. “It changes you in subtle but significant ways – you can’t put your finger on exactly what it is that’s changed, you just know that something has.”

So, although she writes that she doesn’t know why she did it, she decided to make another trek to Everest Base Camp 3 years later. But it would turn out that the second time would be even more challenging. And at the conclusion of her trek, she would be in Kathmandu on 25 April 2015 when the largest earthquake in over 80 years would strike Nepal. More of an adventure than she expected.

Through all of this, she still wondered, “how the hell did I get here?”

There are over 40 color photographs of both treks, most taken by Lynch herself. The book is a very interesting read and I learned about both Pam Lynch and about trekking the Himalayas.