This week, more than many in the past year, we’re all in need of more palate cleansers than usual. With that in mind, the interview with this woman should fill the bill. At the age of 73 she climbed Mt. Everest. For the second time.
Japanese mountaineer Tamae Watanabe, 73, is still climbing; she set a world record last month, becoming the oldest woman to scale Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. She broke her own record, set when she was 63.
Expect more like these, fitness experts say — exceptionally healthy adults who are transforming our image of aging.
“My guess is that as more people ‘age up’ who have been active their whole lives and are really committed, we will see more interesting things from people in the 60-to-80 age range,” says Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist and a specialist in exercise science in Rochester, Minn.
What really struck me in the video below was the humility of this woman. She seems genuinely surprised that anyone would want to interview her or that what she had done was in any way remarkable. She just… did it.
I was a big fan of the Discovery series, Everest: Beyond the Limit. I’ve done a few extreme sporting things in my day but nothing like that. I was always fascinated by the people who climbed into “the death zone” and came back to tell the tale. Particularly since they generally had to climb past the bodies of those who failed. (They don’t bring down the dead from Everest in most cases. It’s just not possible.)
Congrats to Ms. Watanabe. That takes a lot of nerve and she should be rightly proud of what she’s done.
UPDATE: (Jazz) Front page image fixed, sorry. Posting from the mountains on a sketchy connection. May have exceeded bandwidth on that one.
