Straight up
5.5 miles doesn’t seem like a huge run. In fact, you’ll probably run that much in the course of a game. As hockey athletes, we should be able to cover that distance in a reasonable time.
Now think about that distance up a hill. Perhaps that thought is a little more daunting.
Now think of it straight up in the air, without stopping. Think of running uphill, the entire time, 9,676 times the length of a field. Or, if you prefer, 4,838 200’s. That distance is roughly the height of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on Earth. Everest has given its name to a concept of a task so grandiose, so amazing, that it has become synonymous with an incredible achievement. To summit Mount Everest and stand—literally—on top of the world is a feeling that can only be fully understood by someone who has done it.
Anne Parmenter, head coach at Trinity College, summited Mount Everest, reaching the top on May 25, 2006, completing a journey that had started a generation earlier when she was a schoolgirl climbing rocks with the boys in her class, never once doubting that it was a perfectly normal curiosity of a child to dream to climb, and that she should be able to pursue such an ambition.
A native of England’s Lake District, Parmenter fell in love with the outdoors and sports at an early age. As a college student,
she pursued a degree in outdoor education at Chelsea while playing on the university side that won the first national cham- pionship in the British system. She continued to play with local clubs, looking to parlay her love of the outdoors with others as a teacher. When a strike in the United Kingdom temporarily halted that pursuit, Parmenter accepted an invitation to travel across the Atlantic to work at one of the Merestead camps in Vermont. Without the prospect of working in England, the journey turned into a year-long pursuit of education that gave her the chance to not only play hockey and teach while studying, but also reconnect with climbers in the mountain-rich lands of New England.
“I am so thankful that I was able to meet so many wonderful people who supported my early years in Massachusetts,” stated the Brit. Many of those women are still supporting the cause to this day, teaching the sport and continuing to give back to others as strong ambassadors for the game.
Parmenter first took the journey to the Himalayas in 1999, taking a trip that was not to the USFHA Hockey Festival for the first time since her arrival in the states in 1982. There she climbed Ama Dablam for the first time, with the crest of Mount Everest visible 9.5 miles to the east.
In 2004, Parmenter returned to the Himalayas, taking the journey with a group she admittedly did not know very well. But
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