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8,000M QUEST


Señor Citizen


He’s the only mountaineer to have climbed nine 8,000m peaks after the age of 60. He holds the world age-record for K2, Makalu, Gasherbrum and Broad Peak. But, as Jules Stewart discovers, 75-year-old Carlos Soria has no intention of stopping just yet.


t is shortly after six am in the foothills of Madrid’s Guadarrama range and Spanish mountaineer Carlos Soria is about to begin his daily training programme for his assault on Himalayan giant Kangchenjunga. Soria has reached the summits of 11 of the world’s 14 peaks of 8,000m and above, the ultimate mountaineering challenge.


What makes Soria’s achievement rather special is the fact that he is 75 years old. Everest at 62, K2 at 65 and now Kangchenjunga, a relatively “straightforward” affair after his failed attack on Annapurna in 2012, which he has left for a later date. “That’s one of the most dangerous of them all,” he explains. “I was hit by three avalanches in less than two days.” Soria came within a whisker of Kangchenjunga’s summit in 2013, but turned back above 8,000 metres when problems with the fi xed ropes, which had been provided by other teams, made a safe return to a lower camp too risky. “This year I won’t be depending on anyone else’s ropes,” he says. “We’ll have more than enough of our own to avoid a repeat of last year’s mistakes.” Soria has just fi nished the fi rst stage of a hearty


breakfast of kiwi and pineapple slices, and a bowl of porridge cooked with raisins and pine nuts. “A major challenge for me is to get to bed no later than 10pm (when Spanish restaurants begin to fi ll up) but I need to make maximum use of my free morning hours,” he says. He starts off with 20 minutes to get his pulse rate up to 135 on the static bike in the garden of his house in Moralzarzal, an upland village 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Madrid. After that, stretching, standing on one foot to improve balance, abdominal crunches, a session with weights and some work on hands and forearms. In all, about two-and-a-half hours every day. Then back to the second half of breakfast for two slices of wholewheat toast topped with cured meat and garlic, washed down with energy drinks. His main meals of the day are “quite normal”, though he prefers seafood to meat. “My knees have put me off running, but I do a couple of quick marches with ski poles up a 350 metre hill near my house,” he says. His fi nal training usually entails a trip to Norway’s ice walls. Now in “retirement”, Soria, a former upholsterer, says he has more time to look after himself. He tells me that he suffers from Menière’s Syndrome, a disorder of the inner ear that can affect balance and which has left him slightly hard of hearing. At that point a whoop goes up in the next room, where his wife Cristina, who also climbs, has found in one of her ski boots a hearing


SUMMIT#73 | SPRING 2014 | 83


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