That's a pretty harsh characterization of their motivation. I'm guessing when you're standing on the top of that summit you establish a connection with nature that you can't get from simply running a marathon. I'd absolutely celebrate anybody who achieves that. The world needs more people who are willing to step so far out of their comfort zone to achieve seemingly impossible things.
> I'm guessing when you're standing on the top of that summit you establish a connection with nature that you can't get from simply running a marathon.
I don't claim to know anything about their motivation, but the accounts I've read are somewhat different than the romantic image you seem to have. For example, I submit this:
"The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of Ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. Twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired."
establish a connection with nature that you can't get from simply running a marathon
That's bullshit talk. What does that even mean?
I think mental illness is much more appropriate, because you can "connect with" nature just as well by climbing smaller mountains. No, these people are attracted to Everest specifically because it's so extraordinarily difficult there's a 2% chance they won't come off it alive, or possibly lose body parts.
There's something wrong with you if you're willing to risk your life that easily.
What does connecting with nature even mean? It would seem that at the peak there'd be relatively little of what I call "nature".
Seems like if you'd like to connect with nature in an extreme way go on a safari or to a rain forest, or even just Yosemite. You may be able to brag, "I survived Yosemite", but it seems a tad more sincere.
More evidence that we have trouble thinking about probability as applied to our daily lives.
That's a 2% chance over a four day period. I don't know if that number is accurate- it's from the article, if you've read it- but even though it looks small, it's actually huge.
For comparison, in the US 6860 people die per day, and we have a population of 312 million. That means over a 4 day period, you have about a .009% chance of dying; that's a 200,000% increase. And keep in mind that's the death rate for EVERYONE in the U.S., including 90 year-olds riddled with cancer. I don't even want to think about the percentage difference in death rate using the Mt. Everest cohort, which tend to be younger, healthy males.
I can't think of a single activity that's riskier, except for actively trying to kill yourself, which by the way, only has a 5% probability of death.
