Mr. Jornet, as a long-distance trail runner and mountain athlete, you’ve ascended hundreds of peaks around the world. When did you first fall in love with the mountains?
It’s been since I was a kid basically, my sister and I grew up in a mountain hut in the Pyrenees. That’s around 2000 meters. My father was a mountain guide and my mother was a teacher, but she was also doing a lot of mountain sports, so we were always outside, playing in the woods, swimming in the river even during the winter. Every evening we were going out in the woods in our pyjamas, it was dark but my mother would turn off the headlamp and say, “Okay, let’s get back home and listen to the sounds of the forest.” I remember the first time, we were very scared, sticking so close to my mom, but eventually we knew there was nothing to worry about. It’s just nature, it’s plants, animals, it’s the wind… We felt so close to nature. I really appreciated those times as a kid because it was never about climbing or reaching the summit or anything, it was just about being in nature.
You once described that mountain connection as a feeling of being totally yourself, regardless of the location.
My feeling of home is being in the mountains. If I’m in the Pyrenees, I feel at home. If I’m in the Alps, I feel at home. If I’m in the Himalayas, I feel at home. But if I’m at in Barcelona, which is only one hour from where I was born, I really don’t feel home. I feel like a foreigner there. But if I go to the mountains, I feel like home no matter where it is. It’s where I can really be myself. We always put on masks on ourselves when we go to places, when we meet people… But for me, it’s when I’m in the mountains that I don’t need any mask.
“All you can do is breathe and try to get a good rhythm again.”
But despite that familiarity, of course you can’t just switch your mind off during an ascent or descent, right?
No matter what, even when it might seem effortless, I need to be concentrating, I need my brain totally turned on to make decisions all the time: Where is the root? Do I place the hand like that, or like that? Do I climb here? How solid is this rock? If I hold on that rock, will it fall? It’s a constant decision making all the time with extremely high consequences. Especially in a project like my Alps Connection, for example, where I summited all 82 of the Alps’ 4000-meter peaks in 19 days… The consequence of making a mistake in that scenario was death. That’s a really big consequence. Your brain is working all the time, it’s spending a ton of energy. In fact, during that expedition, we did some physiological texts and after a couple days in the mountains in that state of focus, my cognitive state measured the same as if I was in car crash.
How do you train your brain for the mental side of these climbs? Is it just about repetition to get accustomed to that feeling?
That’s a big part of it, yes but it also means that you need to feel very comfortable on a terrain that is very exposed. You have to ensure that you are not stressing when you are in a situation that is literally life or death — but it’s not something that I would recommend to everybody! Don’t just go and put yourself in these situations. Something else I practice is reflection and meditation, I believe it really helps with the mental side of things, calming you when the weight of the consequence is too big. You’re trying to get to a state where you are taking the decisions as if you were somewhere safe, almost like a playing a video game, you know, you’re not feeling affected by the consequences if you make a mistake. So there’s a number of ways to approach this sport, but at the end of the day, you’re right that it’s often about experience.
Fear is a really important factor in these moments, no?
Fear is important! We have to listen to the fear, because it is a sign. It’s telling us that we don’t have the capacity to do something, or that the conditions are not good for it. It could be alerting us to something we are not confident about, so it’s really essential to listen to that fear and say, “Okay, I’m going to turn around and go back home and either prepare myself better or wait for good conditions.” Fear is important in that sense. What’s actually not good in these situations is panic. Panic is different.
In what way?
I think panic is more like you are in a bad situation and you get overwhelmed, you let that panic get you, because that’s when you can really make a bad decision. It’s happened to me many times when I was young, climbing without a rope and thinking, “I will fall here,” and then you start to push too hard. All you can do is breathe and try to get a good rhythm again. In those moments it’s where you really need to keep a cool mind and act rationally, and that’s what comes from experience, like I said before. Something else that’s interesting is that euphoria can be just as dangerous as panic. If you climb a summit and you reach the summit and you feel superhuman, super strong and almost invincible, you don’t see the dangers the same way. It’s much easier to make mistakes, it’s extremely dangerous.
“You have to be in the moment and enjoy the small things.”
In your climbing journals from your Alps Connection, you also talked about this feeling of complete flow. What was that like for you?
It’s pretty visceral, almost like a feeling on the skin. I was on the Swiss side and for five days I had been climbing the same ridge. I was so concentrated, I was alone and isolated, I was climbing 20 hours a day, the fatigue was incredible both physically and mentally. But when I reached the summit, it was just beautiful, the sun was setting in one side, and in the other side it was clouds, there was this whole rainbow around, projecting in the in the clouds. It was mystical. I had an injury a few days before that, but I couldn’t feel any pain. I didn’t feel the fatigue. I didn’t feel anything, and it was so surreal I was actually wondering, is it really me that is climbing here, or have I fallen down and I’m dead, and this is what death is like? It was totally incredible, this feeling of your consciousness traversing those landscapes… You don’t feel connected with your body but you feel connected with everything else.
How do you go about pushing your body to its absolute limits like that? How do you keep going even in those moments when you want to stop?
The thing with pushing your body past endurance is that it’s maybe not pleasant in the moment, but it’s necessary to access what I want to access. You have to be present on those moments because when we stress about things like I’m tired now, I’ll be too tired in four or five hours, how will I deal with that, how will I deal with the next thing? That makes it impossible. You have to be in the moment and enjoy the small things. I try to make myself always enjoy the moment and remember that I’m in a beautiful place. I have seen a reindeer or like a mountain goat, and that’s beautiful. I want to get back to the present moment and it gives me energy. Think about the next step, not about three, four steps after. It’s almost like if you are playing an instrument or playing a sport, you’re just focused on your movement, on your breathing, the next note, the next thing… Sometimes you finish a climb and you don’t even know what you were thinking about during those 10 hours because you were so present.
You hold over 15 fastest known times and several world championship titles. Are you still thinking in those small steps when you’re breaking and setting records?
My approach to records and wins has changed a lot over time. The first times I won a big race or something like that, there was big adrenaline and emotion. You’re trying to find your place, to find your identity, and racing gives you that very easily. You are the first, you are good. It’s very hierarchic and it’s not really showing reality. These days, I’m more about finding appreciation of my progress, feeling like I’m pushing my own capacities, and having a race or a record that you want to break is the excuse or reason to do that. I need the carrot in front of me, I need the thing that’s pushing me. Having goals like that allows us to keep going many times, but I think what we realize after time is that the goal really doesn’t matter, but the fact of having a goal is what allows us to really push ourselves and opens you up to doing other things. I always think that the best thing is tomorrow.