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MADRID — In August, Spanish athlete Kilian Jornet climbed all 82 of the Alps’ 4,000-meter peaks in 19 days — a feat that has amazed the world of mountain running, a sport that has become increasingly popular in recent years.
Setting mountaineering speed records is a way for trail runners to add their names to history books to stay in the spotlight now that almost all the world’s mountains have already been climbed — from all sides. The age of cartographic heroism is over; it is no longer possible to set foot where no human being had ever set foot before. Everything is already well-trodden; it is no longer possible to be the new Edmund Hillary.
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Then came the age of paths and faces: climbing already climbed mountains but via alternative routes. That era, too, reached an end. Now, the only thing left is speed: doing what has already been done, but faster.
The Kilian effect
Jornet’s feat is certainly amazing, a new notch of success for human beings in our effort to surpass the limits of the species. And that is precisely the vocabulary the press uses to tell his story: pushing the limit, redefining it.
It also evokes annihilation: “Kilian Jornet wolfs down the Alps,” was one El País headline. He swallows them: he eats them up, he devours them, he erases them, he makes them disappear inside him, becoming a man bigger than the Alps, capable of imprisoning them and dissolving them inside his stomach.
Jornet is not one man but thousands.
Of course, this is hyperbolic. The Alps will still be there when the climate apocalypse or a nuclear disaster wipes us all off the face of the Earth. And they are there now so that whoever wants to can roam them at a quite pace, without seeking any chronometric orgasm, without swallowing the Alps but letting themselves be swallowed.
People after that sensation must, of course, make an abstraction from the not so enchanting legions of runners in fluorescent gear speeding past, spurred on by the so-called Kilian effect.
Human Formula 1
Jornet is not one man but thousands: all those who, inspired by him, rush to follow his steps on the scale of their abilities, to join the informal gang of boundary-pushers carving mountains into fast food items. Their desire brings huge profits to the companies that organize and promote the niche universe of mountain marathons, which attract runners from all over the world — in the Alps and other mountain ranges.
On Avicenna Peak, formerly Lenin Peak, a 7,000-meter mountain in Tajikistan, the Lenin Race — whose English name indicates the event’s international nature — has become the grand prix of this human Formula 1.
In the Cantabrian Mountains, in northern Spain, there are 85 races each year, said environmentalist Ernesto Díaz. Sharing his spreadsheet with La Marea, he notes that “if we could enter in the number of participants and where they travel from to calculate the carbon footprint, it would blow us away.”
Respecting limits
In recent years, after facing some criticism, Jornet has adopted a more ecological position that may well be a greenwashing operation of the one-man company that he is. But it may also be sincere.
He has set up a foundation for the preservation of the mountains and their environment. He recognizes that his “lifestyle as a professional athlete over the past decade has been linked to frenetic travel around the world,” and that he thus “directly contributed to accelerating global warming.” And he said he has reduced the number of races he participates in each year, favoring shorter trips.
This phobia of limits is not ecological.
Regardless of the sincerity of his motives, the overall impact of his activity is now smaller, and that is praiseworthy. But Jornet’s stardom also has a cultural impact that remains intact: the promotion of a voracious, predatory, extractivist view of the mountains — whether those at home or abroad — as potential hash marks in a compulsive tally; a mine to extract the oil of heroism, to refuel the egotistical rocket of Homo capitalisticus; an execrable limit to blow past.
This phobia of limits is not ecological — even for a man who recycles or who travels by train rather than plane. It is precisely because we have surpassed too many limits that we facing an unprecedented — and perhaps already irreversible — planetary disaster.
Environmentalism is also — it must be — a practice of respecting limits, of conforming and giving up. In the mountains, a true environmentalist will not seek a wall to break but one to admire.
