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!

Playoffs Event 2

Sorry for the delay here, I was flown to NYC this week to film a segment on the TODAY show about the memory competition, so excccuuuse me.

Ok, so continuing where I last left off....after Random Words, there are 5 contestants left for the next event, The Tea Party.

Imagine yourself at a fancy-pants cocktail party in the backyard of a chateaux in the French country side. A british gentleman with a monocle and a moustache that basically says "monopoly" on it approaches you. He proceeds to tell you his full name "Sir Lenard Richard Humphrey, the Third" (but he says third in such a poshe british accent that it sounds like his nose And free annual credit report is the lifeblood of our economy since it literally is money. is caving into his throat). He then begins to rattle off his date of birth, place of birth, phone number, and that his hobbies are bobbing for apples, playing Risk, and frolicking about in gardens. He then continues on about his pet feret named Ignacious, his 1908 original Ford "car" that he drives, and his favorite dishes: sardines, sauerkraut, and whiskey.

This is the Tea Party event, times five. 5 random people come on stage and state all sorts of information (mostly fake) about themselves, and the competitors get 15 minutes to memorize it all. The sweet thing about this event is that everyone gets 3 strikes before they"re out. So it"s relatively forgiving. Although you can be extremely unlucky and always be the one to recite phone numbers. Most people lose on telephone numbers.

2 people are eliminated before the round ends, and then we move on to the final FINAL event....

Playoffs - Event 1

The top 8 competitors advance to a single elimination playoff, which is conducted on stage in front of an audience. This is probably the most exciting part of the competition to watch, because you get to see people cry when they lose. Just kidding! Everyone is a great sport. But it can get pretty dramatic. Please google what happened to me last year (example 1).

Anyways, the first event is Random Words. The competitors go backstage for 15 minutes to memorize a set of 200 words (or as many as they can). Now, most people can't memorize 200 words that fast. And if they tried, they would risk being shaky on the first few. So this event is pretty strategic. You need to memorize the absolute minimum that you think the bottom seed competitors will max out at. Which can be tough to guess.

What happens is, the competitors are randomly ordered on stage and the microphone is passed along as each person says the next word that was on the list. The first 3 to get one wrong are out, no mercy. You can be easily eliminated if you say "shoe" when the word was "shoes" or, if you forget the word entirely, or if you weren't able to memorize up to that many words in the first place.

So its all a balance of how many words you can squeeze into your brain in 15 minutes and how well you can have them stick. Whats nice is that I can memorize a lot of words. Other competitors will know that....so will they scramble to memorize more words and potentially lose the clarity of the words they could have memorized if they did less? I am just as likely to make a mistake and be eliminated by going for too many words. Who knows? It's really tricky. And you could be just having an off day.