Every weekend, we pick the best stories published in Goodmorning Runlovers, the newsletter edited by Andrea Corradin that you can read in less than a minute. It arrives in your inbox every day Monday through Friday, by 8:30 a.m.
If you are not a member just click on this link or the banner above.
Look at this photo: it depicts Simone Moro at altitude. He is smiling, as he often does. But there is one detail that makes it surreal: in his hand is a mocha. When he is on expeditions he carries it with him because, he says, “Drinking coffee gives you incredible mental strength.” Extraordinary men like him are also extraordinary because of the simplicity with which they do extraordinary things, and perhaps therein lies their secret. Although not him, we bet, he would never dream of calling himself “extraordinary.”
One day, when interviewed by Linus on Deejay Chiama Italia, when asked why he did such crazy things he replied unsettlingly, “For me, it’s crazy to have been in the tangenziale queue to get here, not to climb one of the highest peaks on Earth.” Points of view, and listening to different ones sometimes makes you realize how relative your own are.
Simone Moro is one of Italy’s greatest mountaineers. The only one in the world to have climbed four peaks above 8,000 meters in the winter period. The highest in the world. Growing up in Bergamo, not exactly a city of climbers, he discovered the mountains as a game thanks to his dad Franco, who used to take him with him on his outings. As a child Simone cut out pictures of Reinhold Messner from magazines and hung them on the wall of the small bedroom he shared with his siblings, saying he would be a mountaineer when he grew up. Mountaineering is definitely not the easiest path to stability and success. They would not consider it a “permanent position.” On the contrary, a path full of risks and uncertainties. Expeditions gone wrong. Failures. His parents have always supported him in this particular passion, giving him one piece of advice:
“Follow your dream, but also prepare a plan B.”
So Simone studied, getting his diploma, and in 2003 he graduated with a degree in exercise science. But Plan A fortunately worked out. He has been an athlete with The North Face for 15 years, and has accomplished many projects in the process. Like becoming a helicopter pilot, specializing in high-altitude rescue in Nepal. Being a mountaineer he tells, doesn’t make you rich or famous, plus the climbing is literally uphill. Lots of fatigue. Long times. In the mountains, all and now doesn’t work.
To become good you have to listen to the advice that comes from those who are wiser. Riccardo Cassin once told me that the goal to achieve was to become a “good” and above all “old” mountaineer, and to do that you have to learn to value the things you do. The top of the mountain is not the finish line, because then you have to come down.