Food. Better yet, a rational organization of food intake, that is, a diet. I had to equip myself with a diet. I have been a vegetarian for years but if I can act better on my diet, I have to do it.
I act on food but also on the body. That is, training and checks.
Checks first of all on myself, on my own body, on the levels of physical effort, on the levels of stress and even on the levels of pain tolerance. As Mr Kesh rightly observed in one of his emails, it is one thing to do twenty kilometers of a route at fifteen hundred, two thousand meters, but quite another thing at four, five thousand meters. At those altitudes, the rarefaction of oxygen is the real problem.
And who has ever been at four thousand, five thousand meters of altitude? I consider myself tested for an altitude of three thousand four hundred, the top of Etna, where I was the year before and where I did not feel anything except normal physical effort.
Four thousand. Five thousand. Those numbers whirl before my eyes like delirious dervishes. They fascinate me like siren songs and at the same time instill in me a deep, deep-rooted fear. I have been to the Grand Canyon and crossed the Arizona desert in perfect solitude but I was still on 'consecrated' ground, if something happened to me I would find a place to rest but in the peaks of the Himalayas? Up there it is easier to find a dwarf palm than a doctor. In that area, in the Langtang valley area, the highest town is Dhunche, two thousand meters, the rest are villages with few inhabitants and I would have moved higher and in much more remote places. Kjianjin Gompa, the most remote village, is located at four thousand meters and the closest town, Syabrubesi, is three days' walk and two thousand meters lower. The awareness of and on my body must be total.
From there, beyond my control over my own body, the medical checks.
Despite having been hiking for years, I have never had any specialized medical checks before, in total trust in my body: no electrocardiogram, no spirometry, no eco-doppler, no hemokinetics however, as a blood donor for several years, I have always monitored my physical balance with the medical reports that I periodically receive.
I decide to undergo a cycle of specialized checks. Between the bureaucracy and the downtime and the actual auscultations of my physiology, the former win. The latter give me their go-ahead. My body is ready.
The departure date is approaching. Summer is coming. It is so hot. The muggy heat tightens the esophagus, nevertheless I do not deprive myself of constant and necessary training: many excursions, many kilometers under the scorching sun and the relentless sirocco of the Sicilian summer. To stem the heat, I dedicate myself to excursions in the late twilight: necessity meets the nocturnal charm of the summer sky and its stars, with the lights of distant villages perched on the hills, sparkling flashes that amplify the space and silence around, a mixture of smells and sounds and sensations that deepen the expropriation of the self, the constant release of absence from one's mind and spirit, a release that lightens the body.
June passes. July passes. August passes. We reach the end of September.