Brain Injuries

Had a lovely talk this morning with a few people from the Oliver Zangwill Centre in Ely, England, where they work with brain-injured patients and teach them memory strategies. I was able to enlighten them on what I've been able to do for my memory and how it can be applied to people with serious brain impairments. They all seemed very excited and interested, and are planning on having me become more involved with their work. Very exciting! For those of you out there that feel like you have a hopelessly terrible memory, fear not! I once too had a crappy memory. ANYONE, and I seriously mean ANYONE, can do what I do. It just takes a bit of learning and a tiny bit of effort :) Pick up Dominic O Brien's "Quantum Memory Power" audio CD and get started (this is what I started with).

On a side note, I've been training pretty savagely for the UK Memory Championship, which is at the end of the month. With the scores I've been getting in practice I should be able to boost my international ranking pretty significantly. I'm stuck at 101st place right now because the USA Memory Championship doesn't count towards any of those rankings. Crazy right? What the frick? If only the people who run the USA competition and the international competitions would join hands. It's a bunch of BS that it all isn't one and the same, honestly.

I've been writing a lot about memory lately and not so much about climbing. The next one will be about mountains, I promise.

New Job

Today I put in my 2 week notice for my current job. I have been thinking about how I want to approach the next year of my life for the past couple of months and have decided that to capitalize on all that I am doing, I need to quit my job and focus 100% on memory, memory training, and raising awareness. Part of my big plan is to compete in the 2011 World Memory Championships in December, in China. To do that (and to do well in the competition) I need to treat my training like it is my full-time job. I still have been training everyday and improving, but making it my main priority will allow me to improve in more.

I feel like getting out onto the world stage of memory competitions will raise more awareness for what I am trying to do. Winning the USA Championships was great, but has only taken me so far. So, in preparation for the World Championships, I will be using the UK Memory Championships (at the end of August) and the German Memory Championships (mid September) to practice and push up my rankings to hopefully top 20 or even top 10 in the world.

In addition to that, I will be freeing up more time to focus on my ultimate message of memory improvement and valuing the mind.

More exciting news coming up!

Memory on Everest Part II

I promised my explanation, so here it is. The reason I think my memory did so well up high on Everest is because of something that actually has nothing to do with actual memory. Because we slowly entered (hiked) into Everest Base Camp and beyond, everyday normal things slowly began to vanish. Things like certain colors (green, pink, purple, etc), certain smells (good food, earth, flower, animals, etc), and certain sounds (rivers flowing, thunder, rain, etc.), they all eventually became non-existant with my progressing elevation.

So with that in mind, I believe that my senses became dulled. At 17,000 ft (Base Camp) the air was so thin and lifeless, nothing around me was exciting (aside from the amazing snow and mountains, but even that lost its luster after a couple weeks). When I sat down to do my training, it served as an escape to a more lively, sensory stimulating world. Everything stored in my memory became greatly enhanced since it contrasted so much from my surroundings. Because of that, I believe that when I would memorize the images that presented themselves in my mind were that much more memorable and vivid, thus "sticking" better and forming quicker.

In brief, I don't believe it was my memory per say that was improving, it was more so my visualization skills (which I guess you could argue IS a large part of memory).

Memory on Everest

Before I left for Everest back in March, I reached out to a group of neuro-scientists who were doing a study on the effects of altitude on memory. I had read articles in the past that suggested that people who spent a large amount of time climbing at high altitudes (14,000 ft and higher), returned with minor brain deterioration, similar to patients with Alzheimer's disease. These scientists were trying to show that that this actually wasn't true and that spending time in low-oxygen environments had no effect on memory at all. Because oxygen levels in the elderly tends to be lower than average, they were out to prove that those low levels were not instigators for memory related issues, namely Alzheimer's disease.

Back when I climbed Denali in 2009, I had only just started dabbling in memory improvement and training. Last year on Mont Blanc, the trip was so short and busy, I never had a chance to train while I was there. But this year, on Everest, I was sure I would have a lot of down time. So I contacted the scientists and told them that I would be training my memory on Everest and documenting the results as I climbed to higher and higher altitudes. They were ecstatic!

So I managed to keep a strict regiment of memory training while on the mountain. The training was simple: in the morning, two attempts of memorizing a deck of cards and in the afternoon: two attempts of memorizing as many digits as I could in 5 minutes. The results were absolutely astonishing.

First let's talk about cards. This year I set the USA record for memorizing a deck of cards in the fastest time (63 seconds), but in practice I had been in the low 50, high 40 second range (things are different in training vs stressful competitions!). As I climbed from 9,000 ft to 26,000 ft (Camp 4) on Everest, my scores increased to an average in the low 40 second range, even maxing out at a personal best of 38 seconds! Here is a plot of my times vs days (this is from mid-March to mid-June, a bit before Everest till a bit after):

As you can see, the times vary, but an average trend of decreasing time is visible. You can see that as I got to higher altitudes (which is the middle part of the plot), my times were faster, and then when I returned to sea level, the scores rose again. What's interesting is that certain peaks (where I was slower) coincide with days where we were pushing our bodies to a new, higher altitude. But once my body had acclimatized (say, a day later), the scores plummeted. It was as if my brain was like "oh shoot, hold on, let me figure out this lack of oxygen thing....ok got it...." then boom, overdrive memory ensued. Let's take a look at my memorization times vs. altitude:

The fitted line I calculated shows an obvious downward slope as the altitude increases, which is amazing. This was my experience on Everest, that my memory improved with elevation. Now, there could have been multiple factors here other than oxygen. I could have been experiencing less stress, I could have had less things clouding my mind, or I could have had had more time to focus on the single task of memorizing. I don't think that any of those are the case though. I really believe it was the altitude affecting my memory. How else can you explain it getting "worse" again when I returned to normal elevation? On top of that, I just felt a clarity of memory that I had never experienced before. Not only was my working memory doing incredibly well, so was my autobiographical memory.

As for memory of numbers, the results were similar. At sea level, I had been scoring about 260-290 digits in 5 minutes. On Everest, that increased to between 280-320 digits. Quite an improvement.

Tomorrow I will delve into the reasons why I think that altitude was the main factor in improving my memory on Everest.

Cheers.

Please post any thoughts on this, I'd be curious to see what other people think.

New website!

Hey guys, hope you guys are digging the new website look! Made it more simple and elegant. Easier to read, black-on-white font rather than the blinding green-on-black. Ha!. Also, added Everest pics as well as a "videos" section. You can now also comment on my blog posts....I've been dying to have that available.

More to come over the next week:

- memory related pictures (competitions, alzheimer fundraisers, etc.) - articles section with all of my and Climb For Memory's newspaper/magazine/online articles - more videos! - memory section devoted to outlining different memory techniques (to separate them from my blog)

Cheers everyone!

Death Zone Memory Video!

Here is the video of me attempting to memorize a deck of cards in the Death Zone (26,000 ft) on Mt. Everest. Enjoy!

Memorizing a deck of cards in the Death Zone from nelson dellis on Vimeo.

Death Zone Memory

Throughout my expedition to Everest, I kept on with my memory training. Some strange things happened to my memory up there; things that I will not go into yet, but stay tuned - a blog post about this has been long over due. What I wanted to mention though, was that I attempted to memorize a deck of cards at 26,000 ft (also known as the Death Zone). In the Death Zone, there is about 1/3 of the oxygen in the air as there is at sea level. It is one of the harshest environments on earth; a place where the human body can no longer acclimatize and where your body basically wastes away every minute you spend in it.

Yeah, it's pretty brutal on the lungs and the brain. Definitely a tough place to keep your mind straight. Even with supplemental oxygen, it's tough to stay alive. On top of that, you get to cram yourself in a cozy little tent, looking like this:

So anyways, I gave memorizing a pack of cards a go. Actually a few goes...to no avail, unfortunately. I came close though, which to me still seems pretty impressive. The closest I got was memorizing a deck in 54 seconds, with only 3 mistakes (which was really 1 LARGE mistake that alternated 3 cards), other than that it was perfect. I think this shows that there is definitely something to be said about memory techniques and visualization - that it can push the brain even in places where it shouldn't be functioning properly.

Keep your brain active, guys!

I'll be posting a video of me doing it, later today. Stay tuned!

One.Deux.Tres.Vier.

Quick tip for you runners/swimmers out there (this can be applied to anything where you have to keep a running count over a long period time). When I run or swim laps, I often forget what lap I'm on. Either because I'm thinking of something else or just not paying attention. But in recent years, I've used a memory technique that never fails. I have no name for it, but it works like a charm. And it's really simple and silly.

Every time you complete a lap, say the number out loud, but every time in either a unique voice or if you can, a different language. For example:

Lap 1: "one" (said normally), Lap 2: "deux" (in French), Lap 3: "THREE" (said in a deep evil voice), Lap 4: "vier" (dutch), etc.

The point is that when you're in between say, lap 13 and 14 and asking yourself, "what lap was I on, 13 or 14?" you'll have a strong image in your mind of you saying the lap you are on, purely because you said it weird. You'll say, for example, "oh I'm on lap 13 because I said "thirteen" in a high pitch girly voice." Sounds silly but it works and is so useful. I hate losing track of laps while I exercise.

A Different Reason.

I am constantly trying to convince people about why my memory techniques are so useful and important. Improve your memory, potentially delay Alzheimer's, be sharper, etc. But today I want to write about a different reason. A reason that I think is honestly probably more important than any of those. We had a rest day on Everest on the 20th of April and I had decided to take a one hour hike to the nearest village to Base Camp - Gorak Shep. A little comfort food (namely a Coke, some Sherpa Stew, a Yak Steak with Chips, and a Kit-Kat bar) and some internet awaited me. Little did I know that I would be about to find out that one of my close family friends, Omar Pasalodos, had passed away from a heart attack. He was only 60.

It was an extremely tough thing to deal with on that day. Being so far removed from the real world and having to deal with a death (something that I have only had to deal with once before when my Grandmother passed) on my own while also remaining focused on the climb was not easy. Luckily we had a few rest days and I was able to get it out of my system before we climbed again.

I have come to terms with it now. Omar was a great man and a great second-father figure to me. Everybody dies, and it was just his turn at that moment - it's the process of life.

A big part of what has helped me through the mourning process was the fact that Omar played a pretty large role in my memorization system. He was (well, still is!) the 10 of Hearts in my cards system and "008" in my number system. One of the things I love about memorizing, is that it lets my mind escape to things from my past and present. I remember memorizing a few decks of cards during the remainder of my expedition and getting so excited when I saw Omar (or the 10 of Hearts) in my mind doing some silly action. It started to make me feel like he was living on inside my head.

It was a great feeling, and it served a double purpose. One, it allowed me to go visit him whenever I wanted. Two, I could memorize faster because seeing his image while I memorized was extra "sticky" for my brain. The emotions tagged with his death and being able to see him again in my mind seem to amplify what I am memorizing. It's incredible and it makes me happy that he is there when I need him.

The same is applied to my journeys. My Miami home has just been sold and I will never be able to have a family christmas there, a quick swim in the pool, a jog around the block, a memorization session in my room of the past 8 years. It's a sad thought that someone else will be living there now and I won't be able to visit it whenever I please. But au contraire...I have a few journeys that I use for memorization that are mental walkthroughs of different parts of the house and the backyard. Whenever I want, I can jump back into that place and walk around and interact with it.

The fact that I practice memory everyday, means that these images and journeys get fixed into my brain more and more strongly. When I'll be 80, they will still be there. And to me, that is such a comforting feeling - to know that I can escape to all the places that meant so much to me and to see all the people I've loved through my life, just by memorizing things.

In brief, the point is this. Memory training has a ton of advantages, but one that may be often overlooked is the fact that it reinforces the memories of your life and they begin to live inside your head, free to be explored at a moment's notice with large amounts of detail. So get training! :)

Throw the pen!

The other day I got in bed with a million things on my mind. One new thought popped into my head suddenly that I knew I best not forget (it was really important). The problem was I was too lazy to get up and write it down somewhere in order to not forget it. So I used a favorite technique of mine called the "throw the pen" technique. This memory technique is so stupidly simply and incredibly effective that I just had to write about it. Take a pen (or any random object) and throw it on the floor. Make sure it lands somewhere in plain view in an area it shouldn't be (well, yeah, the floor). The mere fact that that random object will be lying on the floor in the morning will remind you of what you wanted to remember. It's ingenious. And dumb. But it works like a charm.

For more complex things that you need to memorize, you can think of an image associated with what you want to memorize and then "stick" it on the pen (or whatever).

Ex. - "Send in the rent check!!!"

Say I chose to throw a magazine on the floor. I would picture a check-book being stuffed inside a magazine. Or something like that. So when I wake up and I've forgotten everything, I'll see the magazine at my feet and BAM, I'll see the image in my mind of it being filled with check books. Check books = sending the rent check.

Try it. It works.

DISCLAIMER: It may not work that well if you are messy. You might throw the pen on the floor where there are already tons of things on the floor (probably many other pens). In that case, maybe "pick up the pen" would work better. Pick up the pen and put it where it's supposed to be haha.

Aftereffects of Altitude.

So I've been getting back into running. Trying to make sure I don't develop much chub from eating so much! Just wanted to share a couple odd things that have been happening with my body after being at such a high altitude for so long. 1. My heart rate is extremely low. I also feel really out of shape and when I run for 20-30 minutes I feel so exhausted, yet, my heart rate still remains below 100 bpm. Weird. 2. My breathing, even when I'm tired and exhausted while running, is super slow. It's strange because my muscles are cramping easily, which although it makes sense because they are asking for more oxygen, my body isn't breathing harder. I guess it's used to breathing a lot at altitude, and down here since there's a ton of air, it doesn't try at hard. Anyways, I don't know. But it's strange.

Back to real life?

I'm back in Boston. Back to real life work on Monday. Not thrilled at all to be stuck at a desk for 8 hours a day, but hey, I gotta make a living. I've been steadily putting back on the LBS....probably too much though. But I started running again today. I missed running. It's so similar to climbing, it gives you time to be alone with your thoughts. I love that.

Anyways, it's a bit strange to not really have a large goal visible in front of you. Everest 2011 took up my life for a year and a half. Now what? Well, the first thing is I'd like to officially announce that Climb For Memory is going back up Everest in 2013. This time on the North Side through Tibet.

What else? Well, the World Memory Championships is this December in Beijing, and I plan to be the first American to ever rock it (Americans have been known to be dwarfed by the competition). I've still been training my memory every day and getting better so I'm confident I'll do well. Other memory competitions will be going on before then and I plan on getting into those to help build up to the world competition. I've got a lot of interesting things in the cooker for Climb For Memory, trying to further spread my knowledge of memory improvement to people of all ages. Stay tuned.

Summit Day

Sorry for the delay. I have been relaxing and recovering, eating 10 times a day (mostly junk food because it tastes good :)), and rebuilding the tan I had on Everest. Trust me, I've deserved it (not the tan....the relaxing). Anyways, I've been meaning to share with you what happened on my summit day, Friday, May 13th. There were a LOT of summits this year, and overall it was an amazing (and bizarre) season on Everest. While our summit day was perfect (albeit, a bit dark and windy near day-break), I ran into some issues that forced me to turn around oh-so close from the summit. Here's how it went down...

So we got to the South Col (a.k.a. Camp 4) at around 2pm-ish, on the 11th of May. It was a LONG and tough day; probably the most challenging day I had faced so far. For the first time on the trip, I felt like the mountain was beating me. Getting over the Geneva Spur (which is the last slug upwards one faces before arriving at the South Col), was ridiculously tough. One of our sherpas passed by me at one point and saw that my oxygen tank was only flowing at 1.5 liters/min. He was like....um, you should have that at 2 liters/min. So he turned it up and I flew up the rest of the way. Nice. Either way, by the time we had gotten to the South Col, I was knackered; destroyed; beyond exhausted. Whatever you want to call it, I was that.

The tough thing about going to the South Col (elevation: 7900m - roughly 26,000 ft) is that you enter the Death Zone (a place where the body can't acclimatize anymore and your body is basically wasting away - in other words, you're body is "dying." So you need to get your summit out of the way and get the hell out of there as quickly as you can). So the plan was to get to C4, rest a bit, then go for the summit that very evening. Luckily (or unluckily, I'm not sure yet), the winds were way too high to try anything. Luckily (definitely luckily),  two people from our team had turned around and didn't make it to the South Col. That meant we had leftover oxygen tanks. So we all decided to sleep at C4 on oxygen and push the summit bid until the next evening.

Sleeping at Camp 4 is a BAD idea (unless you have lots of oxygen to spare, which we did) because it's in the Death Zone. Like I said before, you don't want to linger around there more than you should. Surprisingly though, with plenty of oxygen to spare, you can hold this process of deterioration off for a little bit. That night, I actually slept amazingly well. The one problem that I had was that I didn't really have that much food since we had only planned for an immediate summit, and not spending a whole night there. We all had to ration our food stashes a bit, and looking back now I wish I had packed more snacks and boil-in-a-bag meals. I was expecting my appetite to disappear at that altitude, but it didn't.

At some point in the day on the 12th, Angel (one of our guides) announced that we were leaving for the summit at 7pm. YES! I was so pumped. 7pm is really early to leave for the summit and it most likely means that you are going to summit in total darkness....bummer, but oh well. So I started gearing myself up, putting on my down suit, boots, crampons, harness, helmet, oxygen, backpack, etc. It takes a bloody LONG time to do anything at 8000m above sea level, so my sherpa (Phu Tashi) and I only started heading up at around 8pm.

We were the first people out of camp behind Kevin (my tentmate), his sherpa, and some chick and her guide from some other team. We quickly passed her as we headed up the first steep face of the Everest triangle. Beautiful moonlight and stars were over head. Everything was going great.

Before I continue, let me explain what summit day consists of. It can basically be broken down into 3 parts. Camp 4 to the Balcony (a small "flat" platform at about 8400m), the Balcony to the South Summit (at about 8700m), and the South Summit to the Summit (8848m). The times it takes to climb each section is roughly (and these are considered good times) 4 hours - 4 hours - 2 hours.

So I got to the Balcony in about 3.5 hours after what seemed like a never-ending slog up this very (more than I ever expected) steep slope. I still felt great though. I wasn't tired at all and my hands and feet were still warm. I was stoked. Once we got to the Balcony, Phu Tashi changed my oxygen bottle for a new one while I ate half a candy bar and drank 1/3 of a liter of water (which actually ended up being the only thing I drank or ate for the next 12 or so hours). We were good to go.

I put my oxygen mask back on again and we continued up the narrow ridge to the South Summit. Immediately though, I realized something was wrong with my mask. It had frozen up. Because you're constantly wearing it and breathing through it, a lot of snot and saliva (sexy, I know) tends to coat the inside. To drink or eat anything, you need to move the mask to the side away from your face, temporarily exposing it to the -40 degree air (which is what I did). Unfortunately I wasn't cautious enough to keep it all from freezing while I did that, so parts of the mask froze. There are ways to remove the ice if it builds up like that, but its not easy to do when it's pitch black and your fingers get so cold you can hardly move them.

After a while, I eventually figured out a way to breathe with it - sort of (I later realized that I was breathing more of the "real" outside air, which I wasn't fully acclimatized to yet since I had been sucking bottled oxygen all the way from Camp 3). By the time I had reached the South Summit, I was utterly exhausted. For the first time on the whole expedition, I had hit a wall. After hours of breathing air that my body wasn't supposed to, my body just shut down. I had nothing left to give. It was definitely a foreign feeling to me. I usually can keep going during long hauls, and even when I'm tired, I can mentally push myself to carry on for a good while longer. This time was different. I could barely muster the energy to take one measly step.

So I just sat there as my sherpa changed my oxygen. I actually felt so woozy and tired at that moment that I nearly fell asleep. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was in and out of sleep for a few minutes there. I was totally out of it. My sherpa later told me that he saw me dozing off and turned my oxygen all the way up to 4L/min, which is like giving someone at sea level, speed (kinda). It did nothing. I told my sherpa that I needed to turn around and he urged me to continue on to the Hillary Step and then decide from there, so I agreed and sluggishly climbed over to it (If a sherpa takes you to the summit, they get their full $500 tip. They also rise in rank and stature among their peers. Summiting for them, is VERY important). Once I got to the base of the step, I looked up. This monstrous black shadow of an evil mountain stared back down at me. I saw headlamps moving in and out of it's twisted, rocky obstacle course.

No friggin' way.

I started realizing in my head that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it another few hours up and back to this point AND also make the rest of the decent without facing any serious problems. On top of all that, the night had just turned into absolute darkness - no moon, no glow of a setting sun (or rising sun), NOTHING. Not only that but it had become extremely windy, and also suddenly, very cold. I found myself sitting at the base of the Hillary Step, in and out of awareness, debating between going up or going down. I felt like I was sitting there 10 minutes, but I know (from what my climbing partners have told me) that I was there for at least 45 minutes. My sitting there, deciding whether I wanted to go up or down started to make my hands incredibly cold, and that's a really bad thing at almost 9000m above sea level - the altitude where most commercial airplanes fly. Now I had no choice but to turn around or else I was going to lose my fingers, and potentially even more.

So I gulped, took a deep breath, and turned around.

It hurt. So bad. But I knew it was the right decision. The mountain will always be there, I kept telling myself. But I still felt like crap. I started to cry a bit, but I kept my decision. Another thing that had played a large part in my decision to turn around was that we had seen the body of a Japanese climber who had died the night before along the same route we had just climbed up. So when I was facing those problems at the Hillary step, I was extremely aware of the possibility of death. Everything at that moment was so surreal, but the one thing that remained strong and real in my mind, were the memories of the ones I loved, and my memories of back home and how I wanted to see them all again. I didn't want to die. I wanted to go back home and do all the things I loved, and to see all the people I loved. That was more important than the summit. The summit is just a point. That's all. The summit by itself is absolutely meaningless. Memories and real life experiences with people you care about is what life is about.

So I chose to go down; to come back another day.

The climb down was a bit tricky at first, especially since my hands had become mostly numb. I tumbled a few times, very clumsily, but luckily the rope I was attached to stopped my fall. The climb down become a bit more pleasant once the sun started to rise. It gave me a second wind. I started to feel better. My body also started to warm up just a little bit. It was one of the most beautiful sunrises I had ever seen. We had been climbing all night in the dark and then slowly, it was as if Everest, along with the rest of the Himalayan mountains, had decided to reveal themselves by lifting up this dark blanket. Amazing. It's the kind of thing that makes grown men weep (or in my case, shed a few tears).

After a couple more hours of tiresome down-climbing, I finally made it back to Camp 4 safely and with all my fingers and toes intact. But it could have been a different story. I could have summited, but damaged my hands and feet, or more.....Not worth it, in my opinion. Looking on the positive side of it all - it now gave me an excuse to come back ;)

More of my thoughts on the expedition to come.....

Home

Man....so good to be home. A two day slog on airplanes and sleeping on floors in terminals, but I made it. I"m beat. That might have been harder than the actual expedition.

So I"m obviously still settling in....but I"m going to need some time to recover. From Everything. Healthwise my body is doing well, but craving so many things. I"m pretty thin, and have lost a lot of muscle in my body. My body also needs some time to be fed properly. Eating canned and freeze-dried food for a month just doesn"t give your body that "ah, yes.....fresh food!" feeling. Sleep, I also need a lot of sleep.

My body is also starting to get back all its senses to the things it lacked at 17,500ft. Smells, sounds, feelings....all those things get stale at such high altitudes....but down here, they fill the air. The air is like a soup, and my body is on sensory overload. It"s pretty awesome actually. It"s kinda like being inserted into the Matrix (kinda).

So I walked away from the mountain unharmed. My frostnip injuries from Denali a few years back are acting up (my big toes are numb), but that was to be expected. The feeling comes back after a few weeks. Same with some of the tips of my fingers. No biggie though.

My mental attitude is good. I"m happy with the decision I made of turning around, casino pa natet but obviously there is a little bit (actually, a lot) of regret. I keep thinking if only I had pushed through a few more hours, I would have made the summit....but in reality, it would have been a HUGE risk. I usually go for risks, but not up there.

give me money today

So, am I going back? OF COURSE. When? As soon as possible. Most likely 2013. Climb For Memory lives on. Alzheimer"s is very important to me and I will continue to climb to raise awareness and donations for it. More details about my next climb(s) will be up in the next few weeks.

Also, give me some time to organize my photos and videos (I have thousands of pics and hours of footage), I will post them on the site and facebook as soon as I can. Also, more blog posts, especially one covering the details of my summit day.

Thanks everyone for following!

Namche Bazaar

So we"ve been in Namche Bazaar for the past day and a half. Namche is one of the larger villages in the Everest region and sits at about 11,000 ft. We spent most of the day yesterday just resting from our long trek in. Took a nice hot shower and slept to help let my body recover.

Today we did an acclimatization hike up to a small village called Kunde where Edmund Hillary built one of the famous hospitals in the region. We ate lunch at Ang Nima Sherpa"s home - had some wicked garlic soup, egg fried rice, and then a few glasses of Chang (the local rice beer which is known to make you dizzy, which it subsequently did, hehe).

We then trekked to the neighboring village, Kungjung, where Hillary"s famous Sherpa school resides (he built it 50 years ago).

We really got the Sherpa lifestyle experience today. The villages we visited today were the original villages where Sherpa"s were from. We saw them planting potatoes, Sherpa kids throwing yak poop at each other, met some of our climbing Sherpas, got necklaces blessed by a Lama (not the Dalai Lama, but some Lama)....oh and we got our first (well, second really) view of Everest. So amazing! It had a huge snow plume coming off if it due to the 100mph winds that are currently hitting the summit.

Tomorrow we have a big trekking day to Tengboche Monastery to get blessed, and then on to Pangboche for the night.

3...2....1.......Everest

Hey guys! Checking in from the absolutely crazy and chaotic city of Kathmandu. Arrived Monday and have been exploring and wrapping up last minute things before we officially start the trek into base camp tomorrow.

As soon as I arrived Monday I was lured into a cab and driven through the heavily-polluted, cow-ridden, traffic-rule-lacking, funky-smelling, bodies-burning-in-the-distance, streets of Kathmandu. I'd say it was more overwhelming than being thrown into a cab in manhattan, NY, for the first time. I got to my hotel and was in a delirious headspace, having travelled over 35 hours to get there. I went on to sleep a solid 12 hours and was good to go by Tuesday.

Oh yeah, I lost one of my gear bags, but luckily it came the next day. One by one, team members started showing up and I've been getting to know them slowly but surely. Everyone is totally awesome and has a super cool background story. There's a former space shuttle pilot candidate, a nuclear pharmacist, a woman climbing for violence against women in Congo, a couple everest second-attempters, a wine-maker from california....all sorts of people. All really fascinating people and all stoked to climb this thing!

Did a bit of sightseeing Tuesday and Wednesday, but slowly the allure of this foreign land began to wane. It's polluted, hectic, and extremely poor...it definitely has it's charm though, and the locals are some of the friendliest people I've ever met, but honestly, I just wanna get the *beep* out of here! I'm SO ready for some mountains.

I bought myself a 3G sim card yesterday so I can use my iPhone on the mountain. The card cost 99 rupees ($1.30) and minutes are 6 rupees a minute (international to the US) - um, yeah, that's less than 1 cent per minute!! Absolutely crazy! Especially considering that my satellite phone is $1.10 a minute. If it works as well as it's supposed to up there, this could end up being amazing times infinity.

Today I'm just going to take it easy, get some cash for the trek in (35,000 rupees should do it - I'm so rich here! Lol), and then get some rest. We fly out to Lukla tomorrow morning, which is a small village at the start of the Khumbu valley sitting on the edge of a mountain.

Just an update on my health: the cold I caught last week is pretty much gone and I'm fully rested. I feel great. I've been very careful with keeping my hands clean and keeping them out of my mouth, as well as eating really carefully. So I haven't gotten sick....yet. Gotta keep that vigilance all the way up the mountain. Getting sick at altitude can end one's expedition in a heart beat, since it's extremely difficult to get rid of an illness when your body is also working to adjust to the altitude. There's always a but of luck when climbing these mountains!

I'll probably get to write again somewhere along the trek. If not, I have someone ghost writing for me in the event that I can't!

Namaste!

Getting sick....great

Apparently there is a cold bug going around all of Miami, so inevitably I caught the damn thing. I'm taken a bazillion vitamins and meds to fight this thing because I CANNOT leave with this in my system. Recovering from a bug at altitude is a climber's worst nightmare. The body is already struggling to acclimate - add a bug on top of that and it makes life pretty difficult. Hopefully this thing is gone pretty soon. Luckily I'll also have a few days in Kathmandu to recover a bit before we start trekking. Packing is pretty much done, just finishing the final tweaks and making sure my bags don't weigh a million pounds. Another hard thing is to figure what books and entertainment to bring. I might just get a kindle or something, that way I don't have to schlepp some huge bag of books. We'll see. Some exciting news though: I am participating in a study about cognition and high altitude climbing, something that's always interested me. I finally got the interest of some scientists who are as interested as I am about how my memory training scores will be affected as I go higher up the mountain. Cool!

I can't believe it's finally here. Can't wait to get out there and meet the mountain. My training has been pretty heavy up until about 2 weeks ago. I've slowed down since then to try and pack on some last minute pounds, which has always been an issue, but I am definitely ready for this beast of a mountain. Coming off of my memory championship win I am definitely in the zone mentally; which is 80% of the battle when climbing the mountain. So that's a positive :)

Until my next note....

Books & Books & Books & Books

Just came back from Joshua Foer's Books & Books book reading (that's a mouthful of 'books"). The turnout was awesome! Never thought you could fit that many people in that book store. Ha! Anyways, I thought it went well. Josh got a ton of questions thrown at him and he handled them all very smoothly. I didn't get to do the cards demonstration I wanted to (would have taken too much time), so I stuck with the numbers. Made a small flub, but that happens from time to time, especially with all sorts of distractions. For those who were there and were not impressed with my memory skills, please personally email me at climbformemory@gmail.com and tell me so. I will personally come find you and show you how to memorize a deck of cards.

Aside from that, it was great to have my family and friends there. Now, on to the next endeavor. MT. EVEREST. Holy cow. I leave in 3 days. I just finished packing today and I have two really huge and heavy duffel bags. It's so tough to pack for 2 months (in the wilderness). The million dollar question: HOW MUCH TOILET PAPER TO BRING????

Oh PS: I'm totally writing a book after this climb. I just gotta come up with a cooler title than "Moonwalking With Einstein" (maybe "Climbing With Einstein" or "Climb For Moonwalking With Einstein's Memory" or "Moonwalking Up Mt. Everest For Einstein" or....)

The Week After

It"s been a week since I won, and it"s been super crazy and busy. A ton of interview requests, articles, twitter adds, facebook messages, speaking engagements, and I"m spent. Ha. I leave for Mt. Everest in 6 days and it has seriously just crept up on me. Having been so focused on winning the memory competition, it"s a bit challenging to switch gears to Everest mode. I got back home to Miami where all my gear is yesterday and started sorting my gear. I"m definitely starting to feel that mountaineering excitement I get before a climb. Gonna try and get my packing done today or tomorrow so I can enjoy the rest of the week (and try to pack on some LBS).

For those of you from Miami, I will be at Books and Books on Tuesday at 8pm for Joshua Foer"s reading/book signing of "Moonwalking With Einstein". I"ll be doing some type of memory demonstration - there"s been one I"ve been dying to do which I think is pretty sexy.

Anyways, this week I"ll be only focusing on my climb, so expect some more blog posts relating to Everest.

Cheers! (And thanks for all the congrats from everybody, I seriously appreciate it!)

Nelson Dellis - 2011 USA Memory Champ!

I won! I am officially the 2011 USA Memory Champion! And man, does it feel good. It's something I have worked so hard for over the past two years. The win is such an achievement for me on so many levels. On a personal level, the feeling of working towards a goal and then accomplishing that very goal is such an incredibly satisfying feeling. On top of that, my goal was always to "make some noise" and gather attention about the memory techniques that I have trained and taught myself, and that should be learned by all. They are tools people can use to study, learn new things, become confident, and most importantly to potential thwart off the onset of Alzheimer's disease. To go a bit more into detail about the competition....I went into it pretty confident, but my nerves where a bit high in the morning. I feel like the hardest part of the competition for me was handling my nerves and making sure not to psych myself out. They had me sit next to 2-time defending champ, Ronnie White (the guy who beat me in the finals last year), as if that wasn't supposed to add to the already existing pressure....

The first event with names and faces, I started off slow, but ended with a decent score (134 names, I believe), which was enough for second place. Next, for the speed numbers event I went on to score 236 digits on the first trial, then 248 digits on the second trial (these beat the USA record from last year, which was 178 digits (set by me as well :D)). The closest score to me on that event was Ronnie White's 140 digits.

At that point, I was starting to get in my groove and felt really good and relaxed. The poetry event was so not stressful at all and I managed one of my personal best scores, memorizing 189 points worth of words, punctuation, capitalization, etc. That was enough for second place for the event, as Hershey High-school student, Michael Glantz utterly destroyed the poem and scored 235 points (and he apparently doesn't really have much of a system, he just reads it over and over and re-writes it == insanely awesome). That was a new US record, by the way.

Then finally we had speed cards. Cameras were swarming all around Ronnie and I and I totally blew the first attempt. My time was 58 seconds (quite slow in comparison to my training...), and I made numerous mistakes. So it came down to one deck. Play it safe or go for it? I figured I was already in a pretty good spot in the current rankings, so why not go for it? I knew my training had to pay off somewhere along the way. So I did. I mean, I went slower than usual, but still fast enough to beat the standing record for memorizing a deck of cards by nearly 25 seconds. I scored 1m03s. I wish I had gotten the US record under the 1 minute mark, but oh well....next time.

Getting the deck of cards all correct felt awesome and at that point I was number 1 in the standings. I felt super confident. A bit mentally exhausted, but excited to continue. I got a bit nervous when I found out that a handful of Hershey students were joining me, Ronnie White, and Brad Zupp into the final rounds (they can memorize words like its their job). So we went into the random words event. I went for 120 words, as I knew Sophia Hu would (she holds the US record for most random words memorized in 15 min at 120 words). Unfortunately Brad lost on the first word. He knew up to 72 or so, but jumbled the first word with the second. Ah! So frustrating. So he was out. The next person who was eliminated wasn't gone until, I don't even remember what number word. We ended up going all the way up to about 100 - which is crazy.

Five competitors remained. Next, was the Tea Party event. I had practiced this event so much over the course of the year, so I knew how to go about it. Surprisingly, so did most everyone else. Everyone basically completed recalling all 5 of the contestants information with only having one person eliminated (usually 2 people get eliminated from this event). So then there were 4 left. Me, Ronnie, Michael Glantz, and Sophia Hu.

I knew I could do the next event pretty solidly. Again, it had been something I practiced every other day. 2 decks of cards in 5 minutes. I went for both because I had no clue where Ronnie would be able to memorize up to. Last year he did 70 or so cards and won. I figured he might go for both decks. So I did as well, to be safe. Sophia and Michael were eliminated after a few cards and it ended up just being me and Ronnie. We fired back and forth for 72 cards and then on the 73rd card Ronnie said into the mic "I'd like to be the first to congratulate the 2011 USA Memory Champ" - I couldn't believe it, I had won! I was getting so nervous, thinking to myself, when is this guy gonna run out of cards. I thought we were going until the end....but I was solid and persistant, and that was enough to win it all.

So I won. For a year I get to claim the title of having the best memory in the USA. One goal down, another to go. Mt. Everest is next, which I leave for in two weeks. I am so excited for it and even more so for when I come back to push my charity even further and try to get more involved with schools, businesses, elderly homes, and hopefully even sports. So many exciting things to come! I feel like this year was great for the USA Memory Championships. The crowd was crazy and there was a lot of press from all over the world: France, England, and Russia. I hope this trends continue and I will do my best to make next year's competition even bigger.

Thank you everyone for your support over the last year!