We're Coming For You, Mt. Rainier!

I am training to hike Mt. Rainier with a hiking drill sergeant. His name is Michael. He is a fifty-something Catholic bachelor pharmacist, and he has ascended Rainier 8 times. 

I met Michael through Melissa, his co-worker and my friend, who is a 35-year-old married Mormon woman who works as a dietician at Children's Hospital.

They are both intense.

When Michael did STP (the Seattle to Portland bike ride), he rode all the way back to Seattle the next day.

Melissa has completed two Iron Mans and hiked the Appalachian Trail.

The first time I hiked with them, I stopped halfway up the trail and pulled out of my Nalgene. Michael said, "Oh, we don't do that."

I asked: "You mean you don't drink or you don't take breaks?"
"Neither," he replied.

One of his mantras is: "If you're having fun, you're not working hard enough."

We have been doing about one training hike a week since November. After work. And until recently, completely in the dark. With headlamps. Needless to say, daylight savings time and the advent of spring have greatly increased the pleasure of our training hikes.

On Saturdays, we do longer harder hikes, like the one in the pictures above. On that hike, up to a peak called Mailbox, the last 500 feet of the 4,000-foot ascent were completely exposed.

Horizontal snow and ice numbed my face and pelted my eyeballs.
I slipped on the icy rocks a few times and face-planted once.
My CamelBack nozzle froze to the magnet, so I couldn't get any water. 
The snot on my face blew up into my eyes, blindly me temporarily.

I don't know why I'm smiling in that picture.

Whenever we passed someone on our way down, I would think, "Who are these people and why are they doing this?!"

I guess I'm one of them now.

Projected Rainier ascent: June 23-26. Stay tuned.