I Can

This photo is from 10 September 2023. That was the first time in my life I stood in the high mountains.

I was 36 and weighed 111 kilos. That is a number that looks frightening today, but in that moment it meant I had 44 kilos behind me, gone. And above all it meant I finally could.

Three hours uphill

One sentence kept repeating in my head the whole way. It was nothing made up, I did not come up with it on the way home. It was there while I was walking, and the higher we got, the louder it was.

I can.

I can climb uphill in the Tatras for three hours straight and still have it in me. I am not tired at all.

A man who weighed over a hundred and forty kilos and spent his evenings in front of the telly does not say a sentence like that just like that. That sentence is not about performance. It is about the body suddenly doing what you tell it to, and not what it allows you.

I remember that thought more precisely than the route.

For the First Time with People I Did Not Know

It was my first trip with KST Nižná, the hiking club. For the first time in my life I went somewhere with people I did not know at all.

For somebody that is an ordinary thing. For me it was the biggest barrier of the whole day — bigger than the climb.

All my life I said about myself that I was a hopeless introvert. That I do not belong among people, that it drains me, that it is simply not my thing. I took it for a trait. For something that is given and that nothing can be done about.

That day I found out it is not true.

I am not an introvert. I had just never met people I had something to share with.

And how could I have. Until recently what interested me was the telly, the computer and the state of a washed-out brain. Who am I supposed to talk about that with? What is a man like that supposed to talk about? For years I explained that silence by my nature, when it was the silence of a man who has nothing to say because he does nothing.

When you suddenly walk uphill with somebody for five hours, you have a shared topic automatically. You are on the same path, in the same weather, with the same tiredness. The talking comes on its own.

What Changed

The mountains changed the way I see the world. It does not sound like a great discovery, but for me it was one.

Until September 2023 my world was made of four walls, two cats and work. After September 2023 there were also people in it who wrote to me about where we were going next, and scenery that got me at every step.

It was an immensely happy time and I know exactly when it started.

Back then I still had no idea that in under two years I would be standing on Elbrus. At that moment it would not even have crossed my mind. It was enough for me that I got to the top and that I was not tired.

I am writing about this in the book — chapter The Mosaic of Life, subchapter The Mountain That Took Me In.