The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 12: Karina Slimov (Russia)
What I learned was that the wide-open mental aperture of endurance training does help because it clears out the mental foreground. No matter what sport you do, the mental foreground is always — without exception — the ultimate destroyer of performance. There must be a total void there. When that is clear the nonconscious mind gets the green light signal to go on autopilot. Autopilot then accesses motor control that has been burnt-in at the deep, neural-consolidated level. This is why David [Rigert] began the whole process with several months of his Olympic lifting philosophy and endless perfected technique before putting a yellow bumper plate on the bar. The outcome is that when the deck is cleared and the green light is on, I can then go dark; my execution will precisely channel David’s entrained biomechanics. He picks the loads and I just go full robot with it. We built trust with honest feedback and that will only augment as Whistler arrives. We believe in each other, I am no stranger to building cohesive teams both with my military experience and on Red Zone expeditions where lives are at stake. I know how to do my job because I prepare for all known contingencies.
— Karina Slimov
Karina Slimov and her two climbing partners, South Korean Sook Kyung-Soon and Ukrainian Olena Bzovsky, had just summited Annapurna and were beginning the daunting descent at roughly 4 PM local time. It had been 35 years since an all-women team had attempted Annapurna. That expedition resulted in two women summiting and two days later two falling to their death. It did mark a major milestone for female achievement but it came at a steep cost and has never been forgotten by those in the close-knit climbing community. In 1978, Annapurna was viewed as being an easier 8000m peak based on the kindergarten logic of it being only the 10th highest in the world at 26,545 feet and, in 1950, was the first 8000m summited; this was one of those lessons of judgment that strikes viciously at one of human’s most lethal blindspots: appraisement of quantity versus quality. A mountain’s altitude is to its difficulty what your body weight is to how you look: it is a factor but by no stretch of the imagination is it solely deterministic or even the dominant factor. The inability to accurately quantify subjective risk factors infallibly leads to discounting of costs or impact in real-world, boots-on-the-ground contexts.
The danger of a mountain is not only determined by its altitude but also by its attitude: Annapurna is fraught with insane avalanche risks, technical climbing nightmares and ephemeral, lethal contingencies and synergies that fall outside the domain of ordinal numbers’ task of ranking — odds don’t work there, Annapurna is not Vegas at 8000m. Not to mention it is as remote and cold as hell. Annapurna takes one soul for every three summits, torments for life the surviving pair, and shows no prejudice, man or woman. Everest is no Annapurna or K2 — a number can’t kill, a tag team of grey swan risk factors do. And do a lot. Perhaps the reality is that Annapurna is not part of earth; it is more a little piece of hell stuck out on a limb. It is a bedeviled suburb of hell overcrowded with unburied dead; that perfectly explains why prayers fall on Deaf ears in this frozen, lifeless place abandoned by all species except the most curious one. Shakespeare in The Tempest nut-shelled Annapurna exact: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
This expedition differed from Arlene Blum’s “A Women’s Place Is on Top” Expedition in that this 2013 attempt was full-blown alpine style — no Sherpa help from basecamp upward, no supplemental oxygen, and it was approached the way Reinhold Messner would — travel light and fast as possible. To bag Annapurna alpine-style requires radical credentials of all involved — and stones. All six attempting the summit were not only elite, highly-experienced 8000m climbers but also world-class ultra-endurance athletes in Nordic disciplines from six different countries: Russia, South Korea, Poland, Canada, China and Ukraine. This all-star, six-pack of women had stones to spare.
Conditions were rapidly deteriorating, the wind was picking up fast. It is much too dangerous to rope together on the descent because one slip equals three deaths. Karina, Sook, and Olena were moving well given the gnarliness. The plan was to rejoin the other summit party that trailed them a few hours behind — Klaudia Kozlow from Poland, Jill Summerfield from Canada, and Jiao Zhao from China — at Camp 3 and then rope together in the non-technical areas and hoof it to basecamp and pop open two bottles of Chanoine Frères Cuvee Tsarine champagne. But Karina and company had no idea that Klaudia, Jill, and Jiao were killed in a savage avalanche 20 minutes ago at around 7600m. Klaudia was swept into a rock formation head-on at 60 miles per hour crushing her skull and pulverizing her entire spine and pelvis, dying instantly. Jill and Jiao, however, lived to tell about it for about 2 minutes after the snow came to rest. They were buried alive under a ton of snow five feet deep with just enough light making it through the translucent pile to tell which end was up and they were both upside down. After freaking out in abject terror in their claustrophobic sarcophagus, mercy came to their rescue by suffocation.
Basecamp was trying to reach Jill but nothing but hiss. Sook carried the communications and navigation gear in the lead triple and they got word that basecamp was having trouble contacting Jill. They still kept the pace up but in this particular Death Zone doubt is burnt into the snow and the O2-less air. Ten minutes later they stopped and realized they were going to have to make a decision, a bone-chilling one. Basecamp was getting nothing but hiss from Jill while Mother Nature was bringing in reinforcements in the form of an ensuing whiteout beelining for their only path to survival. Karina was the team leader and talked it over with basecamp who had a better grip on the conditions and they were getting evil. Annapurna may not be cold as hell, but on this day, it was. It was apparent that the only chance they had to live was to descend at light speed and that may be too little too late. They must abandon the others. There is a limit to how much death you can face and stomach at once or else you shutdown; stomaching the fates of Klaudia, Jill, and Jiao would have to wait its turn in the death queue. Just like that, they were in the fight of their lives in flight from the devil’s lair. Karina took point while spontaneously upshifting into an emergency gear. Olena and Sook internalized the vibe and mirrored the urgency.
Visibility was, remarkably, good enough if it can hang in there and they can maintain cruise control past the redline for another hour or so then maybe a hairy bivouac at camp 3 could be in the cards. They just focused, heavy thoughts would just weigh them down; somehow they made a pact with whatever is in charge not to panic now in exchange for an implicit promise to meltdown later. Balancing speed, fatigue and existential risk is beyond calculation, it is division by zero. When your head is clear of logic, on the threshold of panic but still on the safe side of that cliff, you are going at limit speed. When the mind perceives imminent death the body takes command and never runs out of rabbits to pull out of the hat as long as panic is kept at bay. You somehow miraculously find a way to stay in the saddle on a horse named Pandemonium. All three were tuned to the same freaky wavelength until shit happened and that didn’t take very long given they were behind enemy lines in a suburb of hell.
Facing a really steep couloir, which in some places would be called a wall, was the next obstacle. With a lot of fresh snow, maybe two inches of fluffy, soft pack on the less vertical surfaces, they put on their crampons and took out their ice axes and hoped they could chop deep enough often enough to not crash and burn. Under normal circumstances no human would attempt going down there without aid — no lifeline — under these wretched conditions. The smart play would be to pass and live another day but the hand they were dealt dictated doing it without support, now or never. No hesitation, no powwow, just power, sustained power for 90 minutes to get to point B. Even though this is clearly madness — spitting in satan’s face on his turf — it was rational. Rational but deadly. Sook misstepped at the same time her ice ice didn’t bite in a desperate stab and she fell. The wind was howling but Sook’s scream had more frenetic energy then the mountain’s for about 2 seconds — this lone scream was possessed, possessed by a blood-curdling, frenzied pitch. It is the kind of sound image that weevils its way into your skull and plays back as your greatest hit for the rest of your life if you hear it and Karina and Olena got it in high definition. Her body hit terminal velocity and after a 3/4 mile free-fall struck a cornice breaking her back and then continued to fall until striking a few séracs on the glacier before coming to a dead stop forever on a tombstone the size of a high-rise.
Karina and Olena were best friends; they had been on three expeditions together including Lhotse and Everest. All great successes. Nothing but champagne and accolades. They had been on many long, Nordic skiing, snow-camping trips together. Mega-doses of camaraderie, laughs and awesome training. Olena was a lot shorter and stockier, a fireplug. Karina was 1/3 Siberian Husky, 1/3 gazelle and 1/3 spider. At this point all that mattered was that they were together and that their trust in each other was total — because anything less than perfect synergy and life will end in a blink of an eye just like the others. Nobody keeps score here because this is not a game but it is always in overtime. Little did they know, but the chaos, emotional intensity and madness of this journey was just getting warmed up. First, a reality check: they had no communication or navigation gear. Sook didn’t take them with her but she took that with her. Fortunately, they knew where they were, maybe 30 minutes above Camp 3, if it is still there. Body and mind were numb, they were so numb that body and mind were one, unified by a universal numbness. It is something that Death brings in spades to those that still remain after a few fatal gut checks. They found Camp 3 and got psyched up for a sleepless night in an capricious place while in an mental state band-aided together by 85-billion fried cortical neurons that could no longer spell REM.
The sun did come up. One day it won’t but not today — life goes on. It was impossible to describe the feeling but a first approximation was what remains when all else is gone except your life and the presence of your best friend. Visibility was nightmarish; there was no way to know the way. They decided to just go down, that would reduce their exposure to Death Zone-class risk exposures and then, after getting down to 5000m or so, figure it out from there. Plan A = down, plan B = die. At Camp 3 there were five bottles of water frozen solid, three mylar emergency blankets, six bottles of white gas fuel, a portable stove, and self-inflating sleeping pads. No food, tent or sleeping bags but the mylar blankets retain 90% of body heat lost from radiation and the sleeping pads block heat loss from conduction — not comfortable but that combination will prevent death from hypothermia especially if they can get to lower altitude and the weather cooperates. Bivouacking here for several days without sleeping bags was untenable.
Day One
Today was the first day of the rest of their lives which will be countable on one hand or maybe ten fingers if god intervenes but all gods with good intensions are off limits here. In the Death Zone the life meter runs fast; depending on the calculus of your recent past and current exposures your remaining lifespan could be waning at 100% per day or 10% day. But no matter the number you are dying and it doesn’t matter whether you know it or not because your body does on a level untouchable to your rational, conscious mind. Karina and Olena were both dying and there was a fear of death but Death — real Death — was not yet present. Calculation of survival given the paucity of knowns and enormity of unknowns was not quantifiable; grim at this point but grim is better than nothing and you work with the hand you’re dealt.
Day one was still filled with treacherous footing in the vertical passages of the South Face and the greatest risk was going down under great effort only to find themselves on a literal dead-end like a shear cliff forcing an ascent back to a place to roll the dice on another tack. Visibility did not improve but they made solid progress getting down. The sun was going down and the fatigue was moving to center stage. They found a nice place with a great wind break and settled in for the night. This was the first night where some sleep was possible. Wilderness survival has a few core needs and sleep is one of them. This was the first time in their lives they really understood the value of sleep; it is as dear to them as fish in a boat appreciating water when freed back to the sea.
Day Two
Visibility improved. Fatigue and numbness dominated. They could make water by placing snow in their bottles and melting it with the stove. They had no maps but they knew the big picture: they were on the vast Tibetan Plateau which is mostly above 4800m so there is no possibility to get down into a timber line or find a village anywhere close to Annapurna. Geographically it is a big, flat, alpine tundra with glaciated massive mountains poking through the surface. At lower altitudes it is more like a high-altitude prairie with grasses where there are a few wolves and smaller game but overall pretty lifeless. It features the largest volume of ice outside the polar regions and the water from these glaciers serve over two billion people. Their only hope — a faint hope — is finding one of the many teahouses on what is called the Annapurna Circuit, which is a Himalayan trekkers heaven. But this would require pure luck because they have no idea where they are and moving horizontally is extremely difficult until you are way off the glaciers and on flatter terrain and have visibility. Karina knew that the Annapurna Circuit was due west of the summit about 7 miles as the crow flies but that is out of the question; the only way was south following the fall line for several miles and then moving west where a glacial valley would allow passage without a serious climb but still formidable by metabolic standards — a “hill” could be 1000m of vertical unclimbed by humans. The good news was that the valley was mostly under 4000m. The bad news was that vertical difficulties and footing problems shrunk their horizontal efforts to just a few miles per day under Herculean effort.
Daily energy consumption was vast considering basal energy production to maintain a viable core temperature during the night and the energy to trek 10 hours per day at greater than 5000m altitude. The only source of energy was their bodies — muscle and fat — there is nothing to eat. Being world-class ultra-endurance athletes their bodies were highly tuned to maximize lipid power but these conditions placed qualitatively another catabolic load because they were fasting at altitude with all glycogen stores depleted. Hormonally muscles are broken down at high rate to gain access to amino acids that can be converted to glucose and ketones to support skeletal muscle and brain energy metabolism. The essential amino acid L-leucine is oxidized at a higher rate in the endurance-trained so evolution favors the loss of muscle to support survival in conditions requiring sustained power production and especially so at altitude. Given migratory conditions in the absence of food sources, this is logical, biological. All of this costs muscle mass but increases your ability to generate aerobic power under these demands — the cost of true endurance must be paid for as you go, no credit. If you do not have a world-class backend, you will face Death quickly in the wild. Per Darwinian lore, you are either highly conditioned or being digested by something that is.
They knew basecamp could not attempt a rescue to their last known position because there was no one to do it. There was no radio communication with anyone for over two days. The only logical places to search for them would be wrong and every hour Karina and Olena were moving in a direction no one could possibly anticipate because they did not know they lacked GPS — no one could possibly assume they would focus all their efforts going west instead of to basecamp.
Day Three
The weather was deteriorating. A light snow started and it brought visibility down to 100 feet. They decided to stay put. It was so cold. Olena couldn’t feel her feet. The exposure to severe frostbite was mounting by the hour but their best move right now was to do nothing but starve. The decision was to trade 20% of their lifespan to maintain a bad position as opposed to trade 25 to 30% of their lifespan to either acquire a worse position or a small chance of a better one.
So Plan A was starve; an awful plan but it was brilliant considering the hand they held.
Day Four
The weather was bad. Starving was still the optimal action. Five days ago death was unthinkable even though four of their teammates died; they were in the flow zone riding the Pandemonium stallion out of hell on the way to a Cinderella storybook ending. Dangerous, yes, but they could see the way out, no problem, but not now, the Disney script got hacked — that is how fickle and fragile life and death is out here. Today, death the abstraction, you know it well — that foreign concept that never weighs in on your ambitious life designs and blue-sky, lofty dreams, the one formed during your Precambrian elementary school years, went poof and Death the reality was making its personal acquaintance and it felt very different than even the grizzly final scream of Sook augured. Fear and Death were causing Olena’s mind to bleed out and its cost to her lifespan meter dwarfed the metabolic costs — mind is primary, body is secondary. Is this how it ends, making a logical decision to circle the wagons and starve and freeze to death — here?
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko was at the top of the food chain for organizing this expedition; basecamp phoned that all communication had been lost about two hours ago after Sook failed to respond on several attempts. Anatoly from his Moscow office immediately got in touch with his military contacts and pulled a few strings to get satellite eyes on Annapurna. At this point the Annapurna Expedition was becoming a global news story even without concrete facts. Right now it was a story about six elite women mountaineers whose live’s were in the balance on a big climb on Annapurna. The story at this point was mostly about educating the public on the extreme dangers of Annapurna and K2 compared to Everest and other big mountains. Most people only hear the Everest meme and don’t know that the real Everest is Annapurna. The suspense of the story just built and built over the next several days. At this point the sure-money bet was that all six were dead but news of hope sells much better news of truth.
Russia moved a military satellite into position and so did the United States. With extremely sensitive infrared sensors and super high resolution cameras the satellites looked for any heat signatures because on the Tibetan Plateau they are few and far between, mostly migratory wolf packs trolling the lower altitudes here and there this time of year.
Day Five
The weather improved and they decided to move. There was still a flicker of hope. Olena was in trouble right from the start; when her mind finally cracked her body echoed. Her leg and lower back muscles were tightening up and her feet were totally numb. She just muscled it but was markedly slower than four days ago. The vultures were circling inside her head. There was cloud cover which made satellite surveillance for doing wide-area search impossible. Karina still had it together, her mind was like a steel trap and wouldn’t let her body slow down but it was still a physical energy driving her forward, she still relied on ATP to contract physical muscles just like exercise physiology books preach. Olena’s stride had shortened remarkably over the day, her muscles were stiff and couldn’t let go. They stopped after eight hours and called it a day. The good news was that they had found the valley, they were descending, and had turned west. The bad news was in a few days they will be under 3000 and on their way to 2000m in a valley less than a mile wide; this is a textbook killing corridor for wolf packs and there could be some around this time of year given they travel north for the summer and early autumn as the snow melts at these lower altitudes. In Tibet there are an estimated 2,000 wolves and they do inhabit Nepal but the odds of wolves patrolling this particular valley at precisely this time was small.
Day Six
They awakened and you could stick a fork in hope, hope was stone cold dead. They could feel Death was close — palpable — but said nothing. Olena could barely move and couldn’t talk but off they went — west. They faced a barrage of nasty hills but overall it was a steady decline in altitude in pretty deep snow pack and Olena lost her balance and fell twice but got up and kept going — the eccentric contractions of the cumulative downhill mileage without hiking poles cause significant muscle damage to the quads that cannot be repaired on a few hours of sleep of shitty quality while starving to the tune of greater than 10,000 calories per day and in dire negative nitrogen balance. Three hours later she stopped and knew her clock had expired. Karina told her they could stop here for the night but that decision would bring Death to two instead of one. Most humans would go into shock once Sook’s blood-curdling scream was tattooed into the inner recesses of their cranium but this was soul deep because they were best friends and had been through so much together — the good, the bad, the ugly, and now Death. Olena couldn’t cry but Karina did and the tears froze to her face by the time they reached the middle of her cheek. Olena handed her her mylar emergency blanket, that was the final gesture of love and surrender. They met eyes for the last time, Karina gave her a soft kiss and left her there to die in the cold alone.
Anatoly had taken a military flight out of Moscow and after a few stops landed in Kathmandu. He knew President Putin personally but by this time he heard of the situation he authorized a Moskva-class helicopter carrier in the Bay of Bengal to move a Mil Mi-8 helicopter from the flight deck and fly it to Kathmandu. Russia got permission to fly over Indian air space and also to refuel twice because the Mi-8 has a range of 250 miles and the distance is around 450 miles and fuel would be needed for a rescue if need be. Anatoly and the helicopter were in Kathmandu by Day 2. Putin also had a Russian Antonov An-74 medically-equipped cargo plane fly into Patna in north India near the Nepal-India border. The satellites so far had sniffed nothing but a few wolves. The helicopter was prepped to be ready to be wheels up in 15 minutes. Every minute that goes by increasingly means this is all for naught.
Day Seven
Karina was alone except for the few remaining, starving, very scared bacteria in her intestines; they never signed up for this shit. It was overcast but visibility was good. With Olena’s mylar blanket she for the first time in five days was able to take her boots off and dry her socks with the stove. Her feet were in bad shape. Some of her toes would not escape alive even if she managed to find refuge soon. Her ears were in bad shape too.
Mentally everything changed. Her mind cross-haired west and the body obeyed. She became pure movement, not her movement, pure movement. What is life?: life is movement with purpose. Movement with intent, purpose, direction — west. Everything else was gone except vectoring energy west.
She only stopped to drink and pee and there was very little peeing in the last week. Twelve hours later the mountains blocked the sun casting enormous dark shadows. She decided to keep going, she embraced Death unconditionally in the same orbit as unconditional love for an abandoned infant; she was in a remarkable flow state and was able to motor over the hills as light as a ghost. The sun went down and the sky was cloudless and the moon was mega and waxing, a full moon tomorrow for sure. Plenty of luminosity to paint the way into the narrowing valley.
Day Eight
Karina was still on autopilot and it was well past 1 AM. The source of her energy was not local, not ATP; it was wrong to say she transcended her body and found a way to tap into dark energy from the beyond. Instead, her sense of identity and the illusion of the body her sense of identity is sworn to protect vanished leaving only reality standing. Nature has a direct means to clarify and through its agent — Death — clarifies with surgical precision what is by disappearing what is not. Shakespeare in Hamlet said,
“for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.”
So it is for Death: Death is not a Force for Good or a Force of Evil, but, yes, it is a Force and is as unyielding as gravity; now she was fueled by Death on credit with a finite but unknown spending limit. Death manifests by taking the path of least resistance chosen by your mind: if you accept and befriend Death then the Force of Death concentrates the essence of your Life; however, if you internalize fear then you manifest panic and amplify Death as a Force of disintegration of the essence of Life. Olena and Karina chose different forks in the road of Death.
Life becomes most concentrated when Death is visceral and the Death of her teammates, the Death of her best friend, and now her own Death hours away, this stripped away all five-sensed perceptions of objectivity, all memory, all identity, all visages of biology, all the scientific dogma of atoms and the even tinier Potemkin mirages of charmed god particles, leaving only an infinitesimal region of Life vibration surrounded by the absolute stillness of Death in both time and space. But that vibratory space is so concentrated under the pressure of Death that that Life energy transmutes into a willpower not tethered to brain or brawn and is so potent that it spins its own gravity. As Death got in her face, her mind embraced Death at face value and merged with it. What was once perceptual became phantasmagorical and now shifted into the timeless, ethereal pervasiveness of the infinite Void. Death killed her ego, Death killed her sense of identity and when identity is gone fear has no place to attach and dies with self. By Death killing off each layer of illusion one-by-one, only the invincibility of willpower remained. The Death of willpower leaves only the Void itself, the beginning and end of all Things.
The US satellite tracking the Annapurna Sanctuary and surrounding region had state-of-the-art pattern recognition software that could discern the difference between a human and four-legged animal. There appeared to be a human form southeast of Annapurna I, which is the main summit of Annapurna, moving with a constant vector of 1.1 MPH in a westerly direction in a valley. The software also picked up two packs of wolves, one of them 11 miles away and moving away but the other one, 10 strong, was on an easterly vector moving in her direction with an estimated convergence time of around two hours. The US Air Force Colonel in command phoned their contact in Moscow and alerted them to the situation. Wolves very rarely attack humans and prefer ungulates like deer and elk but this particular set of circumstances has no chance of a pacific outcome. The US would provide updates and they would be updated in realtime to Anatoly’s tablet in Kathmandu. Now that her location was precisely known, a Russian satellite with a super high resolution video camera zoomed in and captured in a single wide-angle the transpiring event in real time and it was immediately clear this was going to be a coin flip. It was 3 AM local time when Anatoly was awakened and he immediately ordered to fire up the helicopter and get it ready for wheels up in 15 minutes. He requested that they bring a rifle with them just in case. Just so happened there was a Dragunov sniper rifle on board with plenty of ammo.
The satellite image was almost black except for a few shadowy grey regions showing the 2000m wide corridor created by the two mountain ridges with the valley in-between forming a killing field. Lit up were wolves and a human form, 10 small red triangles and one big green triangle moving towards each other. If she gets within a 1/2 mile or so and is downwind she will be eaten alive, a much more gruesome death than anything witnessed so far and is something the world watching on their phones and big screens would never forget.
The helicopter pilot had calculated several different flight paths into the Annapurna Sanctuary because there was another problem: the helicopter’s service ceiling of 4500m. No one had figured out a route going so far west, it seemed impossible anyone could go from the summit to there and survive and so was marked off as hatched red lines on the topographical search grid. There were a few areas to approach from the south-southeast but it will take longer and time is of the essence. Her life will come down to the pilot taking a few chances moving through the mountain passes with perhaps a traversal of a ridge requiring an altitude of 4700m. Other factors were: the headwind affecting the helicopter; the wind direction in the valley; the luminosity and terrain that affects the sight line between the wolves and her; and the keenness of the wolves’ sense of smell. Once again, there is no way to predict the outcome of such a wild concoction of morphing parts, paralysis via analysis.
Karina had been on a tear for hours on end; Death was a gale force squall at her back and she was on a one-way trip to oblivion. It was close to 5 AM and the sun was rising from way behind the steep mountain ridge casting surreal shadows into the valley floor. A couple of small hills away the wolves were moving toward her but slowly, they didn’t know she was speeding toward the lead half of the pack and would, at least for a pregnant moment, scare the shit out of them and might even spook them from sheer disbelief as if the bizarre perception of Karina could not tally an actionable vote in the hive mind of the pack. Her mind was so far out there that the wolves might be fooled thinking her body had a fuzzy green mist trailing behind it. Is it possible that her alien mental vibe fueled by Death will trick them into thinking she is some kind of UFO with her paradoxical energy halo? Wolves sense and account for invisible energy fields as much as they tune into body language while exploiting the terrain for tactical advantage but this energy form would feel otherworldly, not register on their collective radar screen. Will THEY be the fearful ones and steer clear or will she be a repast for the ages? The best move would be to pretend not to see them and just mosey right on by without flinching or giving off a vibe of fear or panic because that is the baby back ribs signal. In any case, in 10 minutes, maybe less, they will see or smell her.
In the distance, from behind her, she heard a most unusual sound emerge from the dead silence: a plane? Must be a plane at a low altitude. She broke out of her trance. And stopped and turned. It was a helicopter! Death would have to take a rain check. She never thought she would ever see another human again let alone Anatoly. No one except Anatoly knew that Karina would be the one to survive. The Americans said she was moving like a 4-legged animal but on two legs, too crazy fast and smooth to traverse hills for a 3 AM jog after a week’s purgatory in hell. That’s when he knew they were describing someone who was 1/3 Siberian Husky, 1/3 gazelle and 1/3 spider.
She told them to find Olena. They would be cutting it close on fuel but she insisted and it was the right thing to do. The medical team got her clothes and shoes off and got some heated blankets going, an i.v. of electrolytes and nutrients, and started working on getting circulation to her badly damaged ears, fingers and feet. After the second pass they spotted Olena’s body. Ghastly, she was frozen solid. She must have died quickly. They loaded her body in and took off for India and then a flight to Moscow. The helicopter ride featured both the highest and lowest moments of her life, an emotional intensity and complexity few could comprehend. The other four bodies were forever unrecoverable.
The front page of the Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times had the infrared image of the wolves and Karina on a collision course. The Moscow Times headline was:
Карина 1, Смертной казни 0
which is Karina 1, Death 0. That is a very telling score for a great hockey game, something all Russians understand almost as well as fantastic survival stories like surviving a week unprovisioned after summiting Annapurna in hellish conditions. But most newspapers around the globe cast a morbid pall along the lines of Death 5, Life 1. No matter how you spin it, Karina was immediately a global icon for doing the impossible; she moved the needle in the same mind-share neighborhood where walking on the moon resides. Some speculated that part of the reason was that she grew up in Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, Russia. Yes, Siberia — that is where the 1/3 Siberian husky comes from. It is one of the coldest metropolis in the world with maximum temperatures during the winter months of -13 F. That may have been part of it. But the true discovery here was the realized superpower when a phenomic mind controls a phenomic body in the Red Zone while fueled by the Force of Death.
The medical team got to work immediately after getting to Moscow. She ending up losing three toes to frostbite and they were replaced with some excellent prosthetics that were of experimental design. A quarter of each ear was removed and reconstructed with plastic surgery. She lost 16 pounds from her previous race weight of 142, mostly muscle mass from the expedition given her low body fat at the start. At 6–1 and 126 she looked like a gazelle and spider; the Siberian Husky part needed to be resuscitated.
Anatoly showed her videos of Phenomic Games event selection and with a World Championship scheduled for the summer of next year. She didn’t see anything imposing, Anatoly didn’t need to hard sell her, she was all in. Anatoly would put together a Russian team to prepare her for Whistler even though they could squeeze her into Turin next season. The idea was to design a periodized plan that could accommodate two annual cycles of frontend training and then bring the backend up prior to the Phenomic Continental qualifiers.
President Putin was extremely proud of Karina and really showed his support by backing Anatoly with everything he needed to prepare her for Whistler. He was astonished when he learned of her background while he was advised of the dire situation on Annapurna: growing up in Yakutsk and then served in the Russian Army for three years on active duty in the Arctic regions mostly on Alexandra Island near the North Pole. She spent weeks at a time on skis training and on patrol in such adverse conditions that Annapurna’s climate was old hat. She officially was and still remains in the Russian Army but after her initial three years of active duty she competed in 20km race walking events in the summer and 30km Nordic skiing in the winter culminating in a Silver medal at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. The idea of returning to the Whistler area to compete at Phenomic World Championships had a particular charm. They met with David Rigert, a living legend in Olympic weightlifting who had set 68 world records during his career and was the Russian National team head coach at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. He was thrilled and honored to be her strength coach. David knew full well that the limiting factor at the elite level in strength sports is the mind and there was no human on the planet with a more powerfully connected mind to the Beyond than Karina: Karina’s mind had domesticated Death.
For four months David inculcated lifting philosophy and technique while she rehabilitated her feet. She did countless interviews after the expedition and came to terms with the emotional aftermath of the deaths of her friends and comrades. She flew to the Ukraine to attend Olena’s funeral and gave a gut-wrenching, cathartic eulogy in her hometown.
Karina met with Andrei Popov, one of David Rigert’s lieutenants, who will be in charge of her Olympic lifting training on a daily basis. Although she had done some Olympic lifting for Nordic skiing, Andrei started her from ground zero on the David Rigert system. From the Russian Olympic track cycling team she met with Nikolay Utkin who will be in charge of her training for The Burn at the Krylatskoye Sports Complex Velodrome in Moscow. David suggested bringing in a gymnastics coach so they got Masha Dubov, a coach from the Russian women’s team.
For a full nine months she will focus her training on the frontend and her metabolism will be tuned to the anabolic pathway: no extreme long duration training, just some relatively short mountain bike climbs, BMX training, enduro rides and short, 3 to 4 hour hikes in hilly terrain here and there. Project Karina is an anabolic immersion story for an ultra-endurance athlete: shift energy flow bias positive to amplify anabolic informational signalling instead of her usual catabolic info flow and do it in parallel with positive nitrogen balance at consistently high levels no matter the training. Anatoly’s idea was to keep the gazelle and spider parts on hold and maximize the Siberian Husky part and then do a 180 and catabolize away all the muscle mass that doesn’t pull its weight when they shift emphasis to the backend to pull everything into exquisite phenomic balance. Michelangelo was a master at the same process but he did his work in marble, not human tissue and sinew. When the big switch takes place she will relocate from Moscow to Mt. Elbrus base camp where she had spent plenty of time in her Olympic training days. At that point, she will meet and compare notes with her Russian comrade — Ivan — her metabolic and structural mirror opposite.
With her being 6–1, possessing spider arms, and a massive aerobic engine, the rowing will be an easy project. Svetlana Lagunov, one of the senior Russian Olympic rowing coaches was blown away by Karina’s freakiness: she said that if she focused just on rowing she could easily be in one of the Russian boats as a lightweight for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Instead, however, she will be doing The Erg at Phenomic Worlds. Her four coaches, Andrei, Nicolay, Masha and Svetlana, met with Anatoly and David to coordinate strategic goals and intermediate milestones as well as address any strength training deficiencies as they emerge in the process of phenomic training for the frontend. The Adjunctive Tool Pool became the source of some interesting techniques but this group of world-class coaches had no shortage of training ideas to throw into the mix. With such awesome clay to mold, everyone aspires to be a sculptor.
Karina for just being 27 years old had an incredible athletic résumé. Besides being an Olympic Silver medalist in 30km Nordic skiing, an expert downhill skier, national-caliber 20km Olympic race walker, elite high-altitude climber, and having expert rock and free climbing skills, she also had done paragliding, extensive long-distance treks at altitude and mountain biking. Now she was adding rowing, BMX and track cycling, gymnastics, and Olympic weightlifting to her catalog.
The Phenomic Secretariat fully recognized and appreciated the extraordinary overall fitness requirements for Nordic skiing: they have to be strong like swimmers and rowers given the duty cycle of Nordic skiing and mandatory upper body strength and endurance for the poling but also have enormous aerobic power for long durations like a marathon or The Climb. Unfortunately, a Nordic skiing event couldn’t be in the Phenomic 5 because Phenomic Games is a summer sport but no one is surprised to see someone of Karina’s abilities and body structure throw her hat in the ring. After all, the reigning world’s fittest woman is Airi Jokinen from Finland, also with an extensive Nordic skiing heritage.
15 months later.
Anatoly got a call from John Beasley, the same reporter from the London Herald that interviewed Ivan Petrovich and him a few months ago at the Mt. Elbrus endurance training basecamp. Anatoly alerted President Vladimir Putin to the interview and in a most unusual request personally called John to ask if he could attend. Putin grants very few interviews so this is wildly unprecedented to ask for an invite. The interview would be at the Krylatskoye Sports Complex Velodrome in Moscow, a site used in the 1980 Olympic Games. David Rigert will also be participating. President Putin wanted to make a few comments and then would leave early so that the complexion of the interview would be in-line with previous London Herald Phenomic Games dispatches.
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July 7, 2015
Emailed transcript to the LONDON HERALD for the weekly column:
Portraits of The World’s Fittest Humans: Preparing for The Phenomic Games
Karina Slimov, Women’s 30km Nordic skiing, Silver Medal (201o Vancouver Olympic Winter Games)
Dispatch from Krylatskoye Sports Complex Velodrome, Moscow, Russia
— — — — — — — —
by Dr. John Beasley, PhD
Scientific Journalist
My mission is to track down the leading contenders for next season’s Phenomic Games World Championship in Whistler, Canada and bring their dreams, beliefs, and training approaches directly to you every Saturday.
Who are the world’s fittest humans?
What do they do to prepare?
Why do they do it?
_________________________________________________________
Karina Slimov
Phenomic Human Ranking: unranked
Age: 28
Height: 6–1 (1.85m)
Weight: 144 lbs. (65.3kg)
Birthplace: Yakutsk, Yakutia, Russia
Education: n/a
Occupation: Russian Army
Background: summited Annapurna, Mount Everest, and Lhotse; world-class Nordic skier; expert downhill skier; national-caliber 20km Olympic race walker; expert rock and free climbing skills; paragliding, extensive long-distance treks at altitude; mountain biking
Started training for Phenomic Games in 2013
Favorite event: Nemesis
Most challenging event: Clean and Jerk
Favorite exercise: Nordic hamstring curls
Coaches: Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko (head coach/advisor), David Rigert (head strength coach coach), Svetlana Lagunov (rowing), Andrei Popov, (Olympic weightlifting), Nikolay Utkin (track cycling), Masha Dubov (gymnastics)
Diet: omnivore
Favorite food: duck borscht with fermented tomato sauce
Status: single
Children: none
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
Nickname: none
Interview
Note: translated from Russian by Yurchik Zharykhin (for Mr. Putin) and Fyodor Glagolev
Dr. John Beasley: This is the penultimate stop on my world tour of elite Phenomic Games competitors for the upcoming World Championship in Whistler, Canada. Today I am at the Krylatskoye Sports Complex Velodrome in Moscow, Russia and am here with an incredible cast including Karina Slimov, the sole survivor from the 2013 disaster on Annapurna; her longtime coach and advisor and one of the most knowledgeable people in the world for ultra-endurance, Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko; one of the most famous Olympic weightlifters of all-time and head coach of the Russian Olympic lifting team at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, David Rigert; and a very special guest, Russian President Vladimir Putin. President Putin, welcome to our Phenomic Games World Tour. Two of my twelve interviews are with Russian competitors as I’m sure you are well aware.
President Vladimir Putin: Dr. Beasley, thank you for inviting me. Yes, I know the backgrounds of Karina and Ivan [Ed. Petrovich] well. The idea of a global competition to determine the world’s fittest person has been wanting since the onset of civilization and I am glad that it has finally arrived. But I am here today to voice my appreciation of Karina’s achievements. Karina has become an icon of the Russian people because of her interminable willpower to overcome all odds in a dire predicament. The entire world was holding its breath for a week and the experts said no one could possibly survive yet here she is. Karina, you are not just an inspiration to me but to millions of people around the world. You have set a very high bar, a new bar, for humanity both mentally and physically. You showed that one person can vanquish the impossible and open the door to another dimension; to re-write the definition of human performance in a biologically-hostile environment.
Karina Slimov: Thank you, President Putin. I am honored. But if it weren’t for your rescue efforts I am sure I wouldn’t be here today. My military survival training near the North Pole prepared me for circumstances similar to Annapurna; we were taught that no matter what, do not panic. However, that is easier said than done. Thankfully, I was able to avoid having my mind go in the direction of an unrecoverable flat spin. Deep down, I knew I was going to die but I was able to thwart the mental reverberation of that by accepting death. I don’t think there is another way to explore our limitations. Once you fully embrace death there is nothing left to lose but your life but it is that very act of acceptance that allows you to venture off into uncharted territory. Once you have broken through that barrier you cannot be stopped except by death because you have abandoned all sense of caring; when you die under these precise parameters then your ultimate limits have been reached because death is uniquely qualified as the judge and executioner of our most extreme efforts.
Only if you care for something will you hold back; to not hold back is to be totally free of all false limitations which then reveals your true limits and your destiny. It means that you no longer care about anything, anybody, or yourself except for a simple goal. In other words, in a situation where death is certain it is imperative to strip away everything that is false or illusory until all that is left is your willpower and a goal; you are one step away from death at this point but your willpower is very concentrated and pure once all your weaknesses and beliefs are abandoned. I eliminated all forms of leverage that death could use against me by killing off all visages of care or reservation. By abandoning everything there was to abandon I experienced the maximum degree of aliveness that is possible. I was timeless and I was free and I was unstoppable.
President Vladimir Putin: Personally, I believe that we are capable of far more than we realize. I have found this to be true with my martial arts training. I did not hesitate to mobilize all capabilities at my disposal to execute a rescue. Karina, because of what you did, you single-handedly changed the decision process of search and rescue operations. You transformed hope into fact and by expanding the scope of fact you also expanded the scope of hope which is the concrete basis of decisions for large-scale rescue operations. You always must allow for some tolerance beyond what has been done and now the perimeter of what has been done is at another level.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: After Karina finished her three years of active duty near the Arctic Circle we met at an endurance training camp for Nordic skiers at Mt. Elbrus. I could tell immediately that she was something special. Everyone that experiences my training knows that that the first thing I do is break your body to bring your mind to its knees. This is the most direct means to understand that the mind has many levels beyond the comprehension and limits of the Western approaches to sports psychology that are anchored by the belief that the mind is of biological origin. Karina did not break, she broke us. Yes, we sent the helicopter to pick her up but only because she wore us out! Thank the lord she had GPS or we wouldn’t have tracked her down!
[everybody laughs]
It became apparent that I had nothing to teach her about the nature of endurance.
President Vladimir Putin: Anatoly, that is perfectly understandable. Karina surviving Annapurna wasn’t really a survival story as much it was setting an example for the true meaning of endurance. In the past, most thought a marathon or the Tour de France were the ultimate tests of human endurance. They are mistaken. The foundation of being alive is to persist. It does not matter what else you can do if you cannot persist. To be fit you must first be alive, you must first be able to endure whatever blocks you from succeeding to the next moment. In warfare the first objective is to remain alive which is rarely explicitly stated. We have lost this most basic property of fitness due to incorrect assumptions we have made about modern society. Modern society provides food for free, it provides protection from the environment for free, it provides movement and navigation of our body for free. All of these are taken for granted because of their transparent availability at zero biological cost. All of these things define the true biological cost of living but have been hijacked by technology and fossil fuels. Given that, it is easy to distort the definition of fitness. The costs of persistence — the true cost of living — must be paid first and foremost to be alive.
Without the stakes being high, endurance is not tested, it is much more about speed, about crossing a known finish line relative to others as opposed to crossing an unknown finish line relative to what matters in real as opposed to superficial fitness metrics — life or death. That is what the world witnessed by Karina’s performance, not about survival in the usual sense of just waiting out a bad position in the elements until a white knight magically appears but about having to move quickly for days without knowing how long would be long enough to survive, all while unprovisioned. Karina, once again, we are all grateful for your heroic performance, a true beacon of leadership by example.
[President Putin and his translator leave]
Karina Slimov: It is the absolute uncertainty of not knowing how long is long enough that brings into play the true definition of endurance. In other words, there is a vast difference to the stability of one’s mind between an open-ended versus a closed-ended effort. Any mind can summon the body to move if you have a concrete sense of the distance but if you do not, a weak mind is soon crushed and folds up like a cheap tent and the body loses all access to energy. What Olena and I decided after coming down from the Death Zone was to set a goal of the Annapurna Circuit, a series of teahouses about 7 miles due west. Anatoly always taught us that to harness the mind you need to integrate imagination with willpower, that neither alone will sustain life if your survival is taken to the wall.
Imagination is about a mental picture of your goal, in this case the Annapurna Circle became the finish line, a pure mental construct. Since we had a goal now all we had to do was use our willpower to whittle down the distance between the goal and our position. The mind can keep the body in the game if you approach it that way, it is powerful if presented with a divide and conquer obstacle like a dog enthusiastically chewing on a bone. But realistically we knew the odds of finding a teahouse with people around was terribly remote. With the snow fall we wouldn’t see any tracks, we knew of no landmarks and visibility may be poor. Also remember that on a physical level we were getting close to empty by the time we got down to 5000m and then there were 6 days until the helicopter arrived.
Dr. John Beasley: What if there were no Annapurna Circle to shoot for?
Karina Slimov: It would have been Berlin or oblivion! There would have been some goal. For us it was get down fast, go west, find the Annapurna Circle. Nothing else mattered.
Dr. John Beasley: Tell us more about how you use the force of death to access emergency endurance.
Karina Slimov: When you absolutely know you are going to die you must accept death without a shadow of doubt. The reason is to kill the source of fear. All fear is rooted in the fear of death. The fear of heights, of snakes, of public speaking, and so on, are ultimately rooted in the fear of death. Fear can be healthy or it can be unhealthy. Fear can force you to decide on a course of action that takes you out of harm’s way. Great. Then do it. If you stand on a cliff and look down and are scared, then back away. You succeeded because you avoided the risk of death. But when the circumstances are such that there are no options then fear becomes deadly and will get you killed even faster than your real endgame.
This brings into play the power of the mind that is independent of body and brain. To do that you must unconditionally accept your death without the possibility of any hope slipping through the backdoor of your mind. Hope will kill you just as fast as fear so understand deeply that hope is your biggest enemy to accessing emergency superpowers. That is counterintuitive and, because of that, it is the biggest mistake domesticated people make in dire predicaments. Anatoly always taught us that “mommy ain’t coming” — if you expect no white knight you must become the white knight.
Ok, once there is a total absence of fear you now have the ability to engage the force of death. And, yes, death has a force, and no, it does not fall under the domain of Newtonian physics. In my experience, the structure of the force of death is like a cyclone that has a center from which the force violently circulates. Understand that what I am speaking about now is totally mental, it has no quantifiable physical property so it is beyond science and science’s causality of material objects.
First, position yourself relative to death and, second, crank up your awareness of death using willpower until you are totally consumed and vanish into it. Willpower always functions as an amplifier for a signal of your choosing. The relationship between willpower and awareness is as follows: willpower is the amplifier of awareness. So, in your mind you move to the center of the cyclone where it is dead calm and from there you can control the force of death to your advantage, or, if not, then you will be quickly destroyed by resisting death. I believe that once you position yourself there then you max out your awareness of death and that triggers the access to energy; what I mean is your high-intensity, amplified awareness opens up this channel for energy to flow freely when you are centered. No awareness, no energy; radical awareness, radical energy.
Dr. John Beasley: So you are powered by the force of death?
Karina Slimov: It is more about being empowered by death. The difference between “powered by” and empowerment is that empowerment implies a requisite position by which energy can flow in a controlled manner whereas “powered by” does not imply a structural relationship. In other words, depending on this event to occur magically — meaning without intent — may be possible but I wouldn’t count on it. When you are no longer powered by ATP, you are either dead or empowered by death. There may be other options but I have no knowledge of them. Our ancestors and some people under dire conditions accepted death and gained access to the override. Mentally I can just go there now.
When you absolutely know you are going to die you feel so incredibly alive, your normal and extra-sensory perception is pegged in the red and you are so opened up that it feels like energy enters your body through a vast network of pores. You become a sink — a lightening rod — for all frequencies of energy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. You become an energy sponge the moment all that mental noise that creates an artificial barrier between you and the environment vanishes. It can become your baseline state if you are out there in the vast nothingness long enough.
Dr. John Beasley: Janu, the Sherpa from Nepal said something to that effect but explained it very differently.
Karina Slimov: No question about that. It would be his normal state to absorb everything.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: That makes perfect sense. He doesn’t need to train it either. His entire lifespan resonates with those abilities and properties. His life is encompassed by the three dimensions of endurance.
Karina Slimov: For people foreign to that existence, however, you first have to be highly conditioned to be able to just flip the mental switch and become empowered by the force of death or absorb external energy sources. You can’t just show up and nut up, you must have the nuts to up first. That means you must develop endurance: physical endurance first, mental endurance second, metaphysical endurance third.
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, are you saying that someone with no fitness background cannot gain access to this energy?
Karina Slimov: No. There is evidence of people with no conditioning doing things unexplainable by science. What I am saying is that if you want to train with the objective of gaining reliable access to this energy then you must pay your dues with conventional Western methods to build extensive endurance capacity first. That means a lot of low heart-rate, high-mileage conditioning over years. You cannot cut corners there. Ancient peoples were migratory so they had deep endurance from the time they could walk. Exercise is a modern invention that only became necessary due to technological intervention and has since evolved into such distorted practices that we, as a species, have become alienated from our root function which is walking for hours per day.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: I agree with what Karina is saying. The best means of developing the backend is an integration of mental and physical training that intertwines the state-of-the-art in endurance and recovery methods along with proper development of the mind. You can’t take a rank beginner and ask them to confront death! The first step is prove that the body can move once the conventional sources of physical energy are long gone. They won’t be able to move fast but they will be moving and be able to do it for a long time. Let’s say today’s training is that you are going to go that way [he points] until you decide to quit. Not me deciding, you. You decide how far is as far as you can go. Now rewind 10,000 years and hit replay. Every day’s training is exactly like that except for one thing: Instead of the thought process being, “Ok, I’ve had enough” it is going to be, “Ok, I’ve lived long enough. Enough is enough.” And you die. The point is simple: how far you go is not how far can you go, it is how long you decide to go. It is the stakes that determine your endurance capacity, not your perceived limitations. In fact, I don’t really have interest in knowing your limits as much as knowing — with certainty — that you know you don’t have limits, that you can keep going forever or until death intervenes, which ever happens first. That is the essence of the endurance mindset.
Dr. John Beasley: So your training style is not really that brutal. It doesn’t come close to what we can do because we could do so much more on a routine basis before, meaning eons ago.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: John, that is what we are. We just lost touch with who and what we are. So given that, now it easy to see that once this is developed we can step up the threat to physical survival. There are many steps until there is only one step left: death. The real endurance training begins once the body has cracked and the mind is on the threshold of cracking. Physically there is an anaerobic threshold and mentally there is a willpower threshold. When I train elite endurance athletes I train their willpower threshold and unlike the anaerobic threshold there is no limit. The closest thing to a limit I have seen was Karina on Annapurna. Once again, just like Mt. Elbrus, there I was picking her by helicopter when her body didn’t get the memo to stop!
[everyone cracks up]
In terms of competitive ability you may be, say, national or regional level. You have several years of solid backend training under your belt. Then you are ready to train to not mentally crack. In your mind, even if your heart stops your legs keep going. No humans can compete with you, death is the final opponent and Karina won, just like the Moscow Times said: Karina 1, Death 0. Russians understand this. Our national memories of the Siege of Leningrad during World War II are not forgotten. Finnish Sisu is exactly the same on the cultural level, a culture of perseverance where “endurance” becomes synonymous with the ability to persevere.
Dr. John Beasley: What about genetics? Somebody like Ivan, a national-caliber Olympic lifting athlete, theoretically should be poor on the backend. Is that a variable or a constant?
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: Theoretically from the Western view it is a constant. Ivan should never be competitive, say, on Nemesis. But we are talking about something that is foreign to Western ontology of which science depends. I have never worked with strength athletes before so I can offer no definitive guidance here and so this is a totally open and unanswered question. Phenomic Games is bringing to the forefront so many big questions never addressed before simply because there has never been a formal competition that addressed fitness with consummate scope and definitive events before. When dealing with Phenomic Games, the final arbiter is mental training. Focusing on the physical can only take you so far.
Karina Slimov: My insight is that it will be more difficult for a strength athlete to advance their mental development to the point of empowerment by the force of death than an endurance athlete. Someone with a world-class backend can maintain a very high pace for a long time which grants more time exposure to switch gears from ATP to beyond ATP. This switching of cosmic gears is not an instantaneous transition in my experience, it has a grey zone or at least it seems so. I could be wrong because the means of conventional, biologically-founded perception is lost in the process so any remnants of memory are not reliable or nonexistent. Just like being in the much lower-level mental zone of time trialing in a flow state, your recall of events is largely lost in a blur sensation. But once you are empowered by death I can tell you ATP and genetics no longer matter because the body is ultimately an illusion and disappears, you become a ghost. Ghosts have no need of ATP! In other words, the realms of ATP and beyond ATP are mutually exclusive.
Dr. John Beasley: When you are back in civilization for awhile, do you have difficulty in accessing these higher mental spaces?
Karina Slimov: You mean switching it on? No, it is more about switching it off! As we all know, in domesticated conditions like in modernity the ability to switch it on is lost to the point of absurdity. Just imagine having a discussion like we are having now with someone randomly picked off the street in Paris. They would think I either escaped from an insane asylum or I am satan’s apprentice. But the fact is that they are clueless to their potential due to the inherent and stealth harm of domestication and a misguided educational process. To the average person death is a taboo concept that carries a ton of evil baggage, not a force to be treated as a tool and then mastered like our ancestors did.
On the other hand, when in the wild, the ability to switch it off, at least completely, is impossible and for good reason. Naturally we have this ability highly tuned. Therein lies the difference and the task for mental training in the modern world. In a superficial, automated world free of danger, atrophy is not limited to body but also to mind. The norm is a weak mind housed in a soft body; there is no endurance, no strength, no quality of life or consciousness of well-being, only the husk of former magnificence remains.
Science and technology then comes along and fills these gaping voids with band-aids, hollow addictive pleasures and half-measures. Scientific studies are published declaring high-intensity interval training as the best means of building endurance and burning fat. Marathons are declared long-distance endurance events. Athletes and fitness experts ask me about how much “cardio” I do and I tell them I have never done “cardio” in my life and they don’t have a clue what I mean! Despite being inundated by all of this nonsense, our former magnificence and superpowers can be reawakened; life can be breathed back through Phenomic Games, the most direct vehicle to our former greatness imaginable. That is precisely what Phenomics Games is, a means to achieve a phenomic mind and body, something that was stock equipment while in our natural habitat. We have become strangers in a strange land and paid dearly for it.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: That is the key point, Karina. In our natural habitat, we were phenomic by default. Now that we are several generations deep into a technologically-based civilization, much of our phenomic abilities have been lost due to atrophy and may eventually be lost permanently. My approach to training is to reverse the damage and bring us back to our natural state. Karina is a walking, talking example of what that means. She is special and rare because humanity has sunk below the dregs. When you look at last year’s medalists at Turin, you see what is possible. Around the world today people like myself and the coaches of Airi, Jōtara, Gabriela, Lake, Ji, Janu, Ivan and others are putting the pieces back together to re-build Homo sapiens back to original specs and, I think, beyond that very shortly.
Dr. John Beasley: We live in exciting times. I have learned so much by interviewing such incredible athletes from such diverse backgrounds. Airi from Finland has a similar mindset when it comes to the nature of overcoming death with Finnish Sisu which is part of their culture.
Karina Slimov: Airi and I have similar backgrounds being from the far North. She is the reigning fittest woman in the world and I have a lot of respect for her accomplishments in Turin. Few men can beat her. I look forward to the competition. Whistler will be a great challenge.
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, what I am interested in knowing is how your mental approach and abilities vary as you shift from the back to the frontend. Are you able to fluidly control mental aperture?
Karina Slimov: That is an excellent question, a complex one with several moving parts. On the endurance side I can shift gears and be empowered by the force of death at will. I have a feeling that whatever blocked it earlier in my life has been cleared out. Domestication and civilization I think are the cause of its loss. In modern society we have total atrophy of powerful, natural faculties that originally were there to rise to the occasion when we were endangered such as no access to food for weeks at a time and having to move over difficult terrain under hostile conditions 10 hours per day. Our ancestors did it easily and I am now like them. Everyone treats me like I am superwoman but I know I am not. I am merely a throwback! I must admit that I gained access to conventional flow at a very young age and that made it much easier to access higher levels. When Nordic skiing in featureless, austere environments the mind automatically resides in flow. It is hypnotic. I did that for years. I grew up in Siberia and then went to the Arctic Circle. The Inupiat Inuits [Ed. “Eskimos”] have a word for it:“koviashuvik”. It means: “living in the present moment with quiet joy and happiness, full of joy at the wonder of life and the environment, and experiencing joy in the awareness of being one with the environment, or, simply, in harmony with nature.”
Dr. John Beasley: That has a Zen or Taoist ring to it.
Yes, it does. But the North has different roots. We all talk about East versus West but there is also North and South, which are the planet’s Poles. The Poles are not ideological polar opposites like East and West; the South is Antartica which has no indigenous peoples, so the discussion is about the North or the Poles, the aboriginal peoples near the Arctic Circle. East and West are founded on ideologies spawned in the crucible of nascent, ancient civilizations, China and India for the East and ancient Greece for the West. These cultures and belief systems evolved from roots traceable to roughly 2,500 years ago. North and South, however, are founded on ancient understandings of the environment that are very strange to the West and much of the East. If you want to compare it to something it would more like the East’s Taoism which also has a basis in the balance of natural cycles and man’s relationship to the flow of natural processes.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: Karina, what you are referring to also relates to Vladimir Vernadsky’s work but in a scientific as opposed to a cultural or philosophical fashion. Vladimir Vernadsky, of Russian Ukrainian heritage, wrote a very important book called The Biosphere in 1926 of equal importance to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It is not known to that level of significance because it wasn’t fully translated into English until 1997. Darwin is iconic for his theory of life’s evolution through time whereas Vernadsky posited a theory of life’s evolution through space. Only once you have integrated evolution through time and space do you capture the big picture comprehensively. Although Eduard Suess coined the term biosphere in 1885, it was Vernadsky who developed the idea of the biosphere that we appreciate today. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis came much later. Vernadsky said it was life that forms our geology and its cycles as he integrated the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and ionosphere to their interconnections in space.
Karina Slimov: Yes, I am familiar with Vernadsky’s work due to Olena, she was Ukrainian. Tying Vernadsky together with the Northern zeitgeist and the mind, what stands out is the effect of vast space on the mind in a frigid environment that features life only sparsely; the stark absence of features and radical changes in light/dark seasonal cycles alters perception enormously. The powerful presence of wind, snow, darkness, and cold and the absence of lifeforms — both flora and fauna — cultivates a different understanding of life and death. Life and death shift in meaning from solely the biological to the cyclical changes in seasons and landscape. Death always triggers fear because that is a knee jerk biological connection on a deep level but death in the North also becomes categorically on the same level as wind, snow, darkness, and cold. What I mean is that death is an independent force on a more fundamental level like wind and cold, not just death being the absence or loss of life like in the Western belief. In the West death has no intrinsic suchness, it is just a placeholder for the transition from life to the absence of life for an organism whereas in the North death categorically is more like gravity. Death has a parallel structure that manifests mentally if your mind is void of noise and thought. What a cyclone is to the physical environment death is to the mental environment, both have circulatory energy that kill you if you confront them. Just like their is stillness in the eye of a cyclone there is also stillness in the center of the mental cyclone of the force of death. Life and death are forces that intertwine on a deeper level that can be felt but not seen; death is not just an empty word depicting the absence of life. Death has no meaning in the sciences because it flies under its ontological radar.
There is an organic unity between nature and man, no separation as in the West’s technological underpinnings that implicitly state that nature is at the disposal of man’s utilitarian desires. Instead, there is reverence and sacredness in life and the taking of life. There is a fear of death but death is neither good or bad, it is like wind or gravity. It can be your friend or enemy no differently than wind, snow, or gravity. You can either embrace death or fight it. Most people fight it because when fear escalates to panic you involuntarily lash out against everything including yourself and nature. That which goes against nature comes to an early end. If you can still your mind by stepping to the center of death’s energy field you can be empowered by it and can gain access to energy beyond ATP. In the ancient North I bet this was second nature like ice fishing. Today, people think I am crazy because they cannot relate to such an alien perception.
Also what dominates existence in the North is the migratory nature of man and the need for navigation in vast space with no natural landmarks. The Inuits built navigational landmarks called inuksuk to aid travel across vast spaces between remote locations of civilization. These landmarks are some of the oldest evidence we have of the migratory nature of man; they are symbols of prodigious endurance across vast passages of space and time.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: They are representative of two of the three dimensions of endurance, the horizontal and the temporal. Annapurna adds the third: the vertical dimension. The way to think of an inuksuk is as an intersection point of time and space in migratory travel. Darwin would appreciate the temporal element and Vernadsky the spacial element. They are monuments to humanity’s ability to persevere in harsh, vast environments, a tribute to our only superpowers: endurance and ingenuity. In Phenomic Games, the Phenomic Secretariat pays homage to the three dimensions of endurance with Nemesis, which symbolizes the foundation of human fitness. Migratory endurance capacity — a true superpower — is the principal underwriter of our species persistence.
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, you just mentioned about Northern peoples having access to energy beyond ATP as being an ordinary capability in ancient times. Given the vastness and harshness of the environment, that makes sense in raw survival terms even though it doesn’t fit into the current exercise physiology paradigm which fails to account for the relative independence let alone the pre-eminence of the lipolytic energy system. In the mental space, what is your view on conventional flow versus that higher level of energy access beyond ATP?
Karina Slimov: I think that conventional flow more or less optimizes body and mind in an organic sense, that science can understand it if theoretical physical efficiencies are ideal — in other words, if the stars align just right all can be accounted for by the book. Under flow conditions fatigue comes into play, perhaps it is delayed a little from conventional fatigue curves but still has a similar rate of power decay. But empowerment by the force of death is way beyond that, there is no possible explanation in the ATP model when you have been glycogen depleted for days, dangerously dehydrated, sleep deprived, and electrolyte balances obliterated yet you are able to operate at what seems to be maximal lipid power indefinitely. That isn’t what is going on really but that would be how exercise physiologists would attempt to analyze it; they would try to put a round peg in a square hole because “round” is their one and only model but remember, it is only a model of reality. Keep in mind what statistician George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Metabolic models are very useful but are by no means universal truth. All models have boundaries and limits where they fail. Columbus’ map of the world in 1492 was more accurate than science’s model of the world is today. My life just happens to be the story of what happens when you consistently navigate beyond the boundaries of the map.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: If I may, what she just said has been documented because we have the satellite data that plots her GPS to 1 meter precision vs. time in seconds vs. altitude gain and loss in meters. The other consideration, and it is big one, is that she was wearing heavy mountaineering boots which do not allow ankle extension and this is very destructive to gait mechanics, particularly someone world-class in race walking. They are slow and fatiguing!
Karina Slimov: Anatoly, it amazes me you can track a ghost! Anyways, when it comes to strength it is different. On the backend I move in flow and then upshift from there. In strength training, there is no equivalent smooth baton transition. It truly is a binary switch as opposed to an analog switching function.
David Rigert: I find this entire subject matter of mental training fascinating. I have always been an experimentalist and working with Karina has been an amazing learning experience for me because of the problems I face with her are so different than with any athlete I have worked with in my coaching career. What she just said is correct, in Olympic lifting, you must be able to block everything out and go into a zone, a mental space, where physical events and efforts are absolutely spontaneous. No thought, pure force, perfect timing, and robotic form.
I find for me and for other national or world-class lifters I have known that we have another mental state that we inhabit prior to a meet that is best described as a mood or state-of-being where the mental foreground is highly tuned to a visualization of perfect performance. I could be eating lunch but my mind is tuned to how my body feels as I perform a big lift. Then, as the meet commences, the warmup phase before the opening lift is far more mental than physical. This is an important element of the sport of Olympic weightlifting. The television always shows the lifters from all the different countries warming up and you can see and feel the mental intensity. From there it is going out on stage in front of the crowd but the crowd, the noise, the lights, your thoughts, your physical actions, all of these things do not exist and are not remembered after the lift. If you do recall any details of this, you either failed or your opening lift was too light.
Karina Slimov: I can understand that from my race walking and Nordic skiing competitions. There is a mental foreground of visualization leading up to the event and especially so during the warmup. It really eases the transition to a heightened state of conventional flow.
Dr. John Beasley: In the Tour de France you see the same thing before a time trial as they warmup on rollers. Also, with swimmers during their warmup laps and the walk to the starting blocks.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: It is universal in sports to approach it like that. The big deal is moving into the next gear. When it came to training Karina’s mental aperture and depth of focus for the clean and jerk and other lifts I left the mental training up to David and Karina.
David Rigert: Karina and I came to the conclusion that what we needed was to simulate showtime conditions and have her practice mental upshifts with loads around 95% of 1-RM [Ed. relative maximum] in blocks of 20 lifts including ingress and egress from a simulated warmup area. One set of 20 mental training intervals where the physical aspect is secondary. Most of the time we would just do the initial pull from the platform. Not even do the clean. Just focus on the transitions and mental switching with full intensity. In my world, that is super high-intensity interval training!
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: David, well put!
Karina Slimov: Hey, that is about all the interval training I do these days! This was very experimental and intriguing. The load has to be real or else the effect is not trainable because you are not threatened. The load is sort of like death, a heavy load is like death getting in your face. No, it doesn’t have the imminence of death like I felt on Annapurna but it is close enough for me to flashback a visualization and kinesthetic memory of Annapurna… what I am trying to say is that I can simulate the feeling accurately enough to switch gears. It works well enough to work on it.
What I learned was that the wide-open mental aperture of endurance training does help because it clears out the mental foreground. No matter what sport you do, the mental foreground is always — without exception — the ultimate destroyer of performance. There must be a total void there. When that is clear the nonconscious mind gets the green light signal to go on autopilot. Autopilot then accesses motor control that has been burnt-in at the deep, neural-consolidated level. This is why David began the whole process with several months of his Olympic lifting philosophy and endless perfected technique before putting a yellow bumper plate on the bar. The outcome is that when the deck is cleared and the green light is on, I can then go dark; my execution will precisely channel David’s entrained biomechanics. He picks the loads and I just go full robot with it. We built trust with honest feedback and that will only augment as Whistler arrives. We believe in each other, I am no stranger to building cohesive teams both with my military experience and on Red Zone expeditions where lives are at stake. I know how to do my job because I prepare for all known contingencies.
Dr. John Beasley: Mentally what is in common between the clean and jerk and Nemesis?
Karina Slimov: The one thing that is in common is the depth dimension of mind, the depth of focus. The depth is infinite and the body disappears into those depths. Like a black hole, you get sucked in as you approach the event horizon, you don’t need to push your mind over the edge, you just go with it.
Dr. John Beasley: I know what a black hole event horizon is but how do you mean it?
Karina Slimov: Listen. Say I am on a the edge of a cliff 8000m high — a physical cliff — and I look down and I am so scared I have vertigo and almost puke. But instead of backing off I jump off. Say my body never hits the bottom. Your mind is past the event horizon and that is precisely where your mind has to go.
Dr. John Beasley: I can just imagine what…
[Karina cuts him off]
Karina Slimov: John, precisely. You just imagine that feeling but with willpower floored.
Dr. John Beasley: So what about mental aperture?
Karina Slimov: Mental aperture is about sensory awareness of your environment on two scales: one scale from tranquil to imminent death and other addresses attentional breadth from single-point, laser focus to panoramic awareness. If you train your mind you can navigate the coordinates between those two scales by visualizing a two-dimensional grid and feel what’s happening at different places. Ok, that’s the sensory side. Then you have the motor responses from limit strength to emergency endurance. In emergency endurance circumstances, mental aperture is a freaky super-awareness from a nonbiological source. People talk about a sixth sense. Yes, it is sensory but not those senses. Military personnel that frequently experience intense, lethal situations and indigenous peoples know all about this. Obviously, in the wild while on the move you need to be highly tuned to your surroundings and, accordingly, you have eyes in the back of your head and can hear an ant take a pee.
[everybody laughs]
Yeah, I know its funny, but true. With extreme strength efforts it is exactly the opposite: a closed mental aperture means a bomb can go off and you won’t hear a thing.
The other dimension is willpower’s variable amplitude enacted on a subject. Subjects include but are no means limited to strength, endurance, jumping off a cliff, peace or death. For example, when you are meditating use your willpower amplifier to increase the intensity of peace particularly when you connect to the peaceful force of the environment like with koviashuvik I mentioned earlier with the Inuits. Zen-like experiences are precisely this from the inside-out as opposed to the outside-in. Willpower amplifies the mental depth of focus and you can reach a deeper peace by going inward. Beginners can only scratch the surface because they can’t voluntarily crank the juice on the willpower meter, only involuntarily. If you have no depth of focus then you stay in the physical realm of the body and science dictates what you can and cannot do.
On the other hand, if you can crank it past some threshold, then the illusion of the body vanishes as you connect to the environment. You venture off science’s map I referred to earlier. When the lady lifts the car off the baby she found the override switch and access was briefly available. Meditators do the same thing but the energy is directed differently. It is just using the mind in a different capacity. Anatoly discussed training the willpower threshold earlier in gradations of survival threat until only one final threat remains: death. It can also go in the other direction: deeper states of peace. Energy can take many forms and most of those forms we cannot perceive biologically but many we can perceive by other means like an ant peeing. Awareness of environment at the extreme end of the environmental continuum includes awareness of the force of death like I experienced for several days on Annapurna.
Then, of course, there is mental background and foreground. But that goes away when biology is jettisoned because that is a model of Western psychology that is meaningless once you go past the event horizon.
Dr. John Beasley: Are limit strength and emergency endurance truly polar opposites?
Karina Slimov: In terms of mental aperture, yes, absolutely. As for relative performance I don’t think I am qualified yet to say. What I mean is I’m not sure exactly if there is a direct equivalent for being empowered by the force of death for strength. I would have to say theoretically, yes, there is with the common example of the mother lifting the car off her baby. If I were in that situation I probably could do it but that is not the question. The question is can I mentally access the latent, strength superpower while doing the clean and jerk. Right now I can’t but I can see getting there. I have a big advantage because I can build a higher mental bandwidth connection due to my actual exposure to imminent death on Annapurna whereas others cannot. They have to build a visualization synthetically. That is an uphill battle.
David Rigert: If anyone can do that on command it will be her because of her mental immersion in mental spaces that faced death directly as opposed to trying to visualize it from scratch. You can’t intensely visualize what you haven’t experienced and the quality of visualization is predicated on experience. When skiers visualize, they visualize how their bodies flow through a given downhill course. Olympic lifters do the same thing with how they feel during a lift. But death takes the amplitude and resolution qualities of our visualization faculty outside the realm of the corporeal body. Like she said, death is categorically like gravity but gravity you can visualize easily because of constant exposure to it but the threat of death must be pretended and even that is based on personal speculation.
Karina Slimov: David, I think you brought up an important point. Visualization is a dial, not a switch. Most athletes, even great athletes, can turn on visualization very well and tune it to proper biomechanics in sync with precise, cyclical movement patterns. But what they lack is being able to crank the dial because nobody told them there is one. It doesn’t come naturally. It is not second nature to most people to use their willpower to amplify visualization so they don’t. I only found out about the presence of a dial when I got into situations near the Arctic Circle in my training that were pretty solid and realistic. I got scared shitless several times out there. I felt vulnerable as hell like being a sitting duck. That turns up the available juice involuntarily on its way to panic but that is functionally just a live wire, you have to learn how to focus the juice or else you shut down and go all deer-in-the-headlights and then it is lights-out. That is mental conditioning at the highest mental registers I have experienced so far, when I started to panic but instead of losing it I took that energy, merged it with willpower and plugged it into a useful outlet like awareness or visualization in the mental dimension or strength or endurance in the physical dimension. Of course, there is no limit.
Once again, like awareness having amplitude driven by willpower, it is the same with visualization. Willpower is the amplifier of visualization, you got to connect the two together and train it. Once you can handle that then you use imagination to define a goal and then that becomes the subject for visualization. That is the mental approach you build on to expand the human performance envelope into the next adjacent possible. By the time I got to Mt. Elbrus and Anatoly’s mental training school of tough love I took him by surprise, didn’t I?
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: As I said, she blew me away and I realized I had nothing to teach her about the endurance mind. She was on active military duty and came to the training program with the rest of her squad to learn how to increase survivability by mental and physical training for ultra-endurance. That was before she started to do big 8000m Himalayan expeditions.
Karina Slimov: On Annapurna everything was starkly different because it wasn’t training. Death took his gloves off and brutally killed 5 out of 6 world-class ultra-endurance athletes and had me in his crosshairs with wolves and the weather elements moving in for the kill shot. By positioning myself at the center of the cyclone and away from its fatal turbulence I was able to be empowered and harness the energy and direct it in my favor thus sidestepping checkmate.
Getting back to the original question, in order to have symmetry between strength and endurance, the energy for a maximal strength effort must come from a nonbiological source, otherwise limit strength is similar to conventional flow of endurance athletes, merely a theoretical optimization of organic mind and body. At least, that is my opinion given my experience so far.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: I don’t think anyone really has the answer to that. David?
David Rigert: I am not aware of anyone in the Olympic lifting community or even in the strength community at large that has the answer to that. In my career as both a lifter and coach in Russia, the discussion of limit strength has always been based on performances relative to training loads. That context is far away from a performance whose energy is beyond biology and physics. If anyone can make this become an objective reality it would be Karina. Honestly it would be the strangest sight I will ever witness if Karina — 1/3 Siberian Husky, 1/3 gazelle, and 1/3 spider, not to mention a slow twitch monster as tall as the men’s world record holder in the unlimited weight class — cranks a big lift at Phenomic Worlds one day and then smokes the field on Nemesis a few days later. It is appropriate that Nemesis is a goddess of the Underworld, the realm of dead spirits.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: You never know. The mind has far more spaces to explore than have been explored. Most humans do very little with their mind besides puny mundane daily chores. Imagine your mind is a hallway with 5,000 doors and you regularly use 50 of those doors and only know where those go. Karina’s mind is picking locks all the time. Just like there are pioneers in outer space she is a pioneer of inner space. She might be going through a door tomorrow that leads to a new capability or discovers another way to solve an existing difficult problem.
I think a big problem is that people assume the mind is a closed system because in their experience the doors they use all lead to rooms that go nowhere. The mind is anything but a closed system. Maybe the first level of doors are limited but most are not. Ask yourself, “When was the last time you did something fundamentally new with your mind?” Meditation is one series of doors that can have profound impact on your life. Karina today spent time discussing how she used her mind to deal with panic, fear, death and physical limits. All of these are mental facets that require training. That doesn’t just happen.
Karina Slimov: I am always pushing beyond my mental comfort zone and exploring the edge of my personal unknown inner space. This is not the same as exploring physical unknown spaces. Don’t confuse them, they are two different worlds! I always try to connect a new mental space with how it may impact my physical limitations. Right now, for example, I am focused on discovering new mental tools to enhance my weaker events of the Phenomic 5.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: That’s for sure! It is obvious that Karina’s weakness is the clean and jerk. Everything works against her there on paper: no experience, super long limbs, years of endurance training at low intensity, and predominately slow twitch. But there is a silver lining: torque versus force. The clean and jerk measures specific strength which is really a measure of force whereas the other four events are about torque. David has been coordinating with Nikolay Utkin and Svetlana Lagunov for The Burn and The Erg, respectively, for functional-strength training Karina to produce torque in the joint angles that matter most for locomotion and greatest yield of potential ΔP [Ed. delta performance]. In The Burn the difficulty is the start coming out of the hole due to inertia complexed with bad leverage of her long limbs and that is a big obstacle for her so we are attacking it. She can crank on the rower and as for The Climb we are closely matching her biomechanics of Nordic skiing with her position out of the saddle so she can get on top of a big gear and embody her 1/3 spider part. Her leverage for producing torque is an advantage there.
On Nemesis she has a big advantage on the entire field because unlike other humans who have five natural gaits — walk, jog, skip, run and sprint — she has a sixth, the unnatural, trained gait of race walking which is very different than walking or jogging. There is a lot of hip rotation to develop more torque and she can go at a 7 minute mile pace on level ground but the advantage is when you can’t run. Running is much better when you are able to because its stretch-shortening cycle is more energy efficient but she can use that gait even with some vertical challenge where running fails and collapses to a high-step jog. Plus it is a change up. Given that on Nemesis you only walk, jog, and run, Karina essentially has a 4th biomechanical gear which matches exquisitely with her metabolic 1st gear tuned to maximal lipid power. And, of course, 12 hours is a blink to her. Watch out!
David Rigert: It has been an incredible experience to apply my knowledge of strength training to enhancing the performance of the other events. As a total team, we have been able to expertly address weak links as they pop up. With the challenges imposed by the Phenomic 5, we have had to draw from many resources including the Adjunctive Tool Pool. I knew gymnastics would come into play so we relied on Coach Masha Dubov heavily especially for The Burn and The Climb.
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, we all have heard about the importance of mental toughness especially in military circles and particularly with elite special forces. What are your thoughts on mental toughness?
Karina Slimov: Toughness gets you through the first level of adversity and maybe the second but beyond that, no. Toughness means having a mind that tolerates physical adversity but it achieves it through resistance. Mental toughness uses your willpower amplifier to focus on pain tolerance or dealing with the unpleasantries of the uncomfort zone in a stress management mode. It is like Newtonian physics but of the mind instead of the body. A force is met with an equal but opposite force. That is how mental toughness works mentally. It works well until a force exceeds your capacity to oppose it.
If the opponent is another man like in combat, toughness often is an effective approach. But if the opponent is nature, however, it fails. Higher forces have to be addressed by avoiding them entirely or accepting and merging with the resistance, not by fighting them. And this has nothing to do with the physical body and its tolerance of abuse. If you can’t do that, you will be destroyed. Applying mental toughness techniques on Annapurna when things go bad will get you killed. Assessing mental toughness works as a screening process like for selecting recruits. You can set a standard to say 1 out of 100 pass by calibrating the stress level until 99 crack. The last guy standing is a tough guy.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: Yes, the military certainly values and trains mental toughness but that is not my approach. My approach to mind is to transcend the perceived limits of the body as opposed to meeting them head-on. Even if you are tough as nails and attempt to outlast a situation that is true endurance-oriented, meaning where the time frame is open-ended, you will fail using that approach. You cannot focus your energy opposing nature. As Karina alluded to, you cannot fight the windmill, you have to become the windmill.
Endurance is judo, not boxing. There is no knockout punch you can deliver and you cannot be a punching bag if the fight goes 100 rounds. When the military sends me tough guys I will crush them every time. Once they are broken we can begin. The special forces guys are eager to learn the difference between where toughness works and where it doesn’t, they are trained to do what ever works given the conditions on the ground. They are trained to adapt and have seen death and delivered death so they learn new mental approaches quickly. They are fluent pragmatists. They have already learned how to use death as a weapon which is a projection of energy directionally external to ones self, that is, a sink of energy. Now they need to learn how to use death as a source of energy. It is just energy with different utilities. Nature just is, it doesn’t care or judge. So you shouldn’t either. There is no good or bad, just your belief or perception of good or bad. Delete them so you can push the needle of your mental and physical perimeters into the red zone and beyond. Your mind can be a metaphorical net to capture energy out there. But you have to build the net’s mesh just like anything in the physical dimension.
Karina Slimov: That is a good way to put it. When sustainability is required, you cannot waste your energy opposing anything, let alone locking horns with nature. If mental toughness is the only skill set you have developed, it will work against you in wilderness conditions. You have to know how to tap into the vast energy of the environment, not bleed out energy into the environment. The body cannot do this, only the mind. Ancient, indigenous Northern peoples did this instinctively. As President Putin said, endurance means persistence from moment to moment until your last moment. Your body does not have enough energy to do that for long; even someone like me who has been doing long distance forever would collapse. Olena wasn’t able to go beyond the physical.
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, are you ready for Phenomic Games?
Karina Slimov: I will be there.
David Rigert: I’ll be ready.
Dr. Anatoly Vinnichenko: I’ll be ready too.
[they start laughing]
Dr. John Beasley: Karina, I bet you are a pretty heady poker player!
Karina Slimov: There is ice water running through my veins, John.
Dr. John Beasley: Hey, I believe it. Karina, Anatoly, and David, thank you so much for providing your insights into the deeper aspects of the strength and endurance mind. Karina, I know your fans deeply appreciate your thoughts on the nature of death and putting that in a perspective of aboriginal Northern peoples and the effects of the Arctic Circle on the meaning of life, death, and endurance relative to the vastness of time and space. See you all in Whistler!
<end transcript>
The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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John has only one more stop on his Phenomic World Tour, the Big Island of Hawaii to meet the world’s fittest human.
What is it like training with the world’s fittest human? John pays Lake Jacoby a visit at his training facility on the Big Island at the base of Mauna Loa. Lake has upped his game in his vision quest to pull off the impossible: to be a repeat champion at Phenomic World’s in Whistler, Canada. But can he do it?
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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