THE SNOW DROVE from the sky, a flash of lightning through it. And the foolish attempt to capture it sent a Damian Browne diving for cover in the white carpet below.
He had fully caught the bug for mountain climbing when the Iranian elements closed in around him to arrived to deny him an ascent to the peak of Damavand.
Then 37, he had run the Marathon de Sables, rowed across the Atlantic and it was time for a new gargantuan challenge.
“I can endure,” says the Galway man while almost apologising for his brevity.
In his former profession, phrases like ‘work-ons’ and ‘learnings’ are endlessly tossed around in between challenges. Yet the ex-Leinster, Oyonnax and Connacht second row can succinctly boil what he has learned since retiring from team sport down to the three simple yet powerful words above.
For his experience of life after rugby is a life without limits. Or at least the search to find precisely where his limits might lie.
The42 last caught up with Browne when he was in Antigua, recuperating after his epic solo row. This time around the long-distance call finds him on Australia’s Gold Coast, but these enticing climes are massive outliers in how Browne ordinarily spends his time; seeking and suffering through some of the most extreme conditions the planet can offer.
The Galway man’s current quest is to summit the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Five down, the apex challenge is next on his list.
Everest.
***
2019 was a devastating and deadly year around the world’s highest peak. 11 people died either in pursuit of or returning from the 8,848-metre summit. Two Irishmen were among them, Seamus Lawless and Kevin Hynes, experienced climbers. Strong climbers.
On top of a frightening death toll that equalled the sum of the two previous years there was the most alarming of farces. A lengthy queue on the Hillary Step as climbers waited for a window to make the final ascent.
“It’s a tough one to answer, because I had as many questions as everyone else,” says Browne when we put the matter of the mountain’s annus horribilis to him.
“That famous picture, I was going, ‘fuck, I just don’t want that to be my experience. That’s not why I’m doing it.’ That would be incredibly disappointing and obviously dangerous to be stuck in that situation.”
He has been in conversation with the tour company running his expedition, Jagged Globe, and found the dialogue a helpful assurance that he will set out with the best possible tools – better ability to predict weather windows, more experienced guides. The premium he is paying will mean reassuring quality, but leaves him constantly on the search for sponsors.
As with any mountain climbing, though, there is a large amount of trust he must hand over. Browne freely admits he is far from an expert on Everest, yet trusts himself with good reason too.
It’s not so much his rugby exploits, but the savage effort required to row the Atlantic and the time he has accumulated on mountains counting the distance back to sea level, that gives Browne reason to move boldly towards this latest challenge.
He is five steps along the way to completing the Seven Summits having scaled the 6,000 metre-plus peaks of Aconcagua and Denali and the sub-6,000 metre summits of Kilimanjaro, Puncak Jaya and Mount Elbrus.
“What I’ve done in the mountains, I’ve done a bit now, is probably on the low end of what you’d want to have done. Where I’m pretty secure is in my knowledge around my physical and mental conditioning. So I rely on that a bit.
“Even in making decisions like – should I have done another 8,000-metre peak before Everest? Probably. I’m comfortable enough in the way I’m doing everything at this stage, just from the last 20 years of pushing my body and mind, and with the mountains I’ve done.”
It’s the mind that so often has set Browne apart in these audacious adventures. The 39-year-old is a keen student of mental processes and practices. It’s easy to see why he has found work as a motivational speaker, and in his TedX talk last year, he spoke about how he finds flow through suffering, ‘meditation through pain’ and outlined how he also works back to his four controllable factors: ‘breath, effort, self-talk and technique’.
This is a man who is ever-vigilant for changes in his own trains of thought and mindsets. Follow him on Instagram (@Auld_Stock) and you will see a near-daily dip in the frigid Atlantic waters off Galway pier and strenuous exercise in his garage. The body is put through its paces, but never without the brain and the organs that drive it.
This past summer, his big lesson came around his lungs and how difficult it can be to fill them.
North America’s highest peak Denali (6,194 metres) has proved to be Browne’s most difficult ascent to date.
And with clear weather.
“It’s a proper serious mountain,” Browne says of his Alaskan adventure, “it’s a 14-21 day expedition where you carry all your own food. So you could have close to 50 kilos on you at times between a backpack and a sled.
“On every other one of the seven summits you have porters and you can split your load, but on Denali it’s up to you to carry your own load and carry some of the team load the higher you get up the mountain.
“With it being a steep and technical mountain you exert that bit more energy at high altitude so it does get very tough.”
And tougher again when, while doing the nightly work of flattening out a patch on which to camp and sleep, Browne neglected that discretion goes hand in hand with valour. He horsed through the work like there was no push for the summit tomorrow.
“If you’re unlucky, you have to flatten out an area for your tent and for your tentmates’ tents. And when you’re at 5,000 metres it’s very easy to overdo it.
“We got to Camp Three, we started making camp there and I just over-exerted myself that night – took on too much work, flattening out ground and making terraces for our tents in the snow.
“I didn’t really eat that much or re-hydrate that night. And in the morning when we geared up and started the attempt on the summit I knew I had made a big mistake. Just overdid it the night before and didn’t replenish the calories and the energy I’d burnt.
“The next, kind of, nine hours were an absolute slog, really difficult, really chaotic physically and mentally.
“I just couldn’t get any composure, I couldn’t get any control over my breathing. My body was just in a very strange place.
It was a tough grind mentally, I couldn’t get any calmness in my thoughts and I couldn’t decipher why I felt how I felt. So it was quite a battle mentally.”
“It’s just when you find yourself in those states of extreme fatigue and when you’re at those altitudes you’re always at a hyper-ventilating state, your breath is always out of control.
“It’s a very thin line between being able to control that breath at those altitudes, to slow it and relax it just the tiniest bit. I just couldn’t get that control all day.”
Browne likens the hyper-ventilating state to a sprinter. The 40–50-odd seconds of full pelt running is over and the athlete is across the finish line, but the lungs must still work over-time to catch up.
Up on the mountain, the lungs are made to work even longer and harder to keep with the arduous effort of the climber.
“You’re in this extreme hyperventilating state, but you’re in it for hours and hours. You only get some semblance of control is when you take a break which might be every hour, hour and a half when you take a quick break and then you will take a longer break of 25 minutes to get some food and water in. They’re the only windows you get to calm it and get it under control.
When you’re in that state – when your breath is out of control your mind is out of control… and I’m used to those states! I put myself under them in training all the time.
“This was different. I was the wrong side of the line, if that makes sense. I couldn’t get any semblance of control even in that state of hyper-ventilation. You can have some clarity in your thoughts while in that state, but this day I just couldn’t understand, couldn’t get into the place where I was able to have a clear window into what my mind was going and use certain processes and tools to control that.”
What can you do in a situation like that only keep slogging away and take the lessons for another day. Well, many of us would panic a way to oblivion, but that’s how Browne’s mind works.
“The great thing about having done all these mountains is that I’ve picked up lessons from every experience: on Elbrus (5,642 metres), I had the wrong gloves, so my hands were in ribbons and were really cold all day.
“That just stresses you out all day.
“So you pick up all these things and you make sure you don’t make the mistakes again. With Denali being an unusual mountain, where your day’s work’s not finished when you get to camp. You have to keep working. I just over-worked at the very wrong time, before we went for the summit.
“Two big days in a row and it cost be big-time on summit day.
“I shouldn’t have been in that state, you have that experience. It’s hard to say I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve just learned I can grind through it. Even though it was 10-11 hours of panicked stress, just having that determination or drive to get through it even though I couldn’t get any calmness or clarity in my mind. it was constant turmoil. Not just physically, but mentally.
“Just having got through that, it should stand to me. but I wouldn’t want to… I’ll try my best not to experience that again.”
Indeed, there was plenty about his time on Denali that was best forgotten. When Browne reels off the items he was carrying he left out the item that left the most putrid impression on his senses.
The logic behind a ‘clean mountain can’ is solid. Excrement doesn’t naturally get subsumed into the landscape when that landscape is ice. So climbers take their crap off the mountain with them when they leave.Unfortunately, that means they must grin and bear an unmerciful stench that emanates out when the can is opened for a new lodgement.
Browne resorted to rubbing Tiger Balm under his nostrils in an effort to mask the musk.
At least on Everest the clean mountain can is not a requirement. Not yet anyway.
***
The thing with being a former professional rugby second row, of course, is that you never can quite give up being 6’5″.
That sort of height and reach can bring all sorts of advantages in sporting pursuits, but the further one goes from sea level, the more burdensome every ounce of muscle and the frame supporting it becomes.
The Galway man lists his regular weight in or around the 120kg mark, but that must change before he sets off for Base Camp – with the winners of a raffle he has organised to help fund his mission – in April.
Since reaching the summit of Puncak Jaya (Carstenz Pyramid (4,884 metres)) in September, he has returned to his regular programme of training. But all the strength-building resistance work will have to cease come the New Year. Then comes the serious and stoic work of growing accustomed to discomfort in tough terrain, dropping weight and continuing his work on breathing techniques.
Preparing himself, inside and out. The tangibles and intangibles.
Just harden myself and get fit for purpose spending six or seven weeks on the side of a mountain in Nepal.
“I try and drop as much weight as possible and that is a big issue for me because of my size. My size isn’t really conducive to altitude because the more mass you have the more oxygen you need to function optimally The higher you go the less oxygen there is in the air.
“That’s a huge factor between me and what I want to achieve. The goal is to get down to somewhere around 105 kg before I go to Nepal, which is maybe 15 kilos below what I’d walk around at.
“If I can get lighter that’d be great. Whatever’s going to put me in the best position to get to the top, that’s what I want to do.
“Calorie restriction and some long hours in the mountains putting time into my feet in those situations. Put some weight on my back and build that up, peak my training in March and then ease off for a few weeks before I fly out.”
That long runway to a task is a far cry from his earlier brushes with mountaineering.
Browne wasted little time in swapping studded boots for hiking boots in 2015. He had already beaten a path up Kilimanjaro (5.895 metres) and his first treks into a life beyond rugby were not far from his then-home in Oyonnax. But they were most certainly uphill battles.
“I attempted Mont Blanc literally a week after the (rugby) season finished in 2015. I went up to Chamonix and spent a week there, we climbed a mountain called Gran Paradiso (4,061 metres) which is the highest mountain wholly in Italy. Took a couple of days rest and then attempted Mont Blanc.”
‘Attempted’ is the operative word there and Browne, not a man who is willing leave tasks incomplete, uses it again when accounting for his travels after his great ocean row.
“Unfortunately, I was blown off both of those mountains; Mont Blanc and Damavand.”
The caution of his guides swayed him out of the teeth of 100mph gusts that were due to swirl in the Roof of Europe. On Damavand, north-west of Tehran and south of the Caspian Sea, he tried and failed the climb with the best of them.
“It was just a bit early in the season,” he says, “it was a bit of a risk and it didn’t work out because we got a big snowstorm the night we were at base camp and it was a no-go the next day.
“We attempted it. The whole Iranian mountaineering team were there too and everyone attempted it the next morning, but turned back at different intervals. The snow was so heavy, you were breaking trail and up to your knees in that.
“It’s a quick summit, you can do it in two days. So there’s very little acclimatisation and you’re trying to break trail at those kind of altitudes, it’s absolutely draining and debilitating. It didn’t work in our favour, unfortunately, but a good experience all the same.
“There was a close enough call now: the day getting to base camp we hiked through a storm and there was thunder and lightning on the mountain and it was hitting pretty close.
“We had to sprawl on the ground a few times before getting to the hut at base camp, which is the coldest place I’ve ever spent a night in my life. It was absolutely Baltic. it was colder inside that hut than outside.
“I remember trying to take a video of the conditions; snow, thunder and lightning striking pretty close. And I just had to dive into the snow and have one of the guides shout at me for taking a video.”
Chastened, yet his craving for adrenaline hits like it was a long way from being satisfied. As a species, humans ought to be naturally predisposed to fearing lightning, thunder and other elements we intrinsically connect to the phrase ‘Acts of God’.
Fear isn’t quite the word Browne chooses when speaking about what he’s planning to do and what he’s preparing against in the months ahead.
“I’m daunted by the challenge, because I know there’s a big possibility that I could fail.
“I’m daunted by that because I want to achieve and keep proving to myself that I can go to these limits, but there’s no real other fear.
I don’t want to feel anyway dismissive of the fact that it’s a very dangerous thing to do. I’m absolutely aware of that, but I don’t fear that. I control what I can control and I concentrate on mitigating as much of the risk as I can.
“That’s the best I can do. That’s all within my armoury and that’s something that gives me power. Anything outside of that I actually let it slide. I don’t dwell on it too much.
“I’m very aware of it, there are certain things: if they happen and I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, there’s nothing I can really do about them.
“I just focus on controlling what I can control, putting myself in the best physical and mental position, place to give myself a chance to achieve the summit.
“That’s more than it might sound. The mental side is a huge component of it. Visualising certain scenarios – be they positive or negative – and dealing with them in your head, so to have lived them before you even get to the mountain. Some of them would be very negative situations and some wouldn’t be, but that’s something you can control.
“So if they do come to pass you’ve lived them and you know – or feel you know – how to deal with them. That’s something I put a huge amount of emphasis on, I put a lot of detail in around that side of things because it’s inside my control and there’s a good chance, certain situations, I will have to deal with them.”
That includes the situations he really doesn’t want to envisage. The possibility that he might come up short, be forced to return to Base Camp without having reached the top of the world. Discretion for future valour.
“There may be a situation where you’re not capable of going to the summit or you’re too slow on a day when you’re pushing for the summit and you might have to make that decision to turn around. Just making sure you’re untethered from any ego or white-line fever, summit fever. Because that’s when bad shit goes down.
That’s the sort of stuff that I can control and that’s what I’m concentrating on and preparing myself for.
“Anything I can’t control I respectfully let it slide by me. Because it’s just taking mental energy that I can use in better ways.”
And therein lies the ‘learnings’, the work-a-day language of his former profession now turned towards something far more than a game.
He has slogged across the desert, clung for dear life while his boat capsized in a mid-Atlantic storm and felt his mind and body suffer a rare disconnect in the wilds of Alaska.
Each lesson is carefully banked and stored in such a way that he can lean on it again.
Right then, what has he learned? Since going lighting up his adventurous spirit and seeking out the earth’s extremes. Since pushing his body to its limits and methodically coaxing his mind into following it.
“It might be a really simplistic way to answer that, but I’ve learned that I can endure.
“No matter what is thrown at me, I can endure it.
“I like the person I become the harder stuff gets. That was quite evident on the row, because a lot of things went wrong that normally don’t go wrong.
“How I was able to process those things and get back to the task at hand and doing what was within my control. That was something that came up quite a few times.
“Really big scenarios, things that you might think would knock you back for six and take you a long time to process them and reset and come back at them again. No matter how many times I was knocked back or knocked down, it was nearly immediate the way I processed the situation and got back to task and back to what was in my control.
“I enjoy seeing that, because I don’t see that often. We don’t get tested and challenged to those limits in life very much.
“I enjoy being tested and challenged in those really tough places. When I see how I react – and I don’t know yet how I’m going to react – it gives me a huge surge of, I suppose, self-confidence and security and, almost, worth.
“It constantly keeps surprising me and proving to me that I can continue to live in those spaces.”
