How I Trained to Climb Over 15,000 Feet!

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Maybe you’ve heard the expression “progress over perfection.”

The idea is that trying too hard to make something perfect can get in the way of making something better. Think of the person trying to - I don’t know - make and sell the perfect cake. They keep trying recipes. One is too sweet. The other isn’t sweet enough. The texture isn’t quite right, too dry… too spongey. After each attempt, they throw the cake away, never actually selling a cake. Before they know it, they are out of business.

The alternative would be bring your cake to market, keep iterating on the recipes. Each one is a little better than the former, but all of them sell. It becomes a process towards perfection rather than a binary situation: perfect or not-good-enough.

Anything we think of as a “practice” is like this, too. Yoga, let’s say. There is no “perfect” yoga, there is only getting better.

I would argue golf is like this, too. Even at my best, when I was playing for a living, I didn’t really hit “perfect” shots. It was all small degrees (or sometimes large degrees) of failure - never quite exactly the shot I pictured, even if the results were good.

So, I personally add a corollary to this expression: we should strive for perfection, but don’t let that get in the way of progress. Basically, it’s okay to strive for perfection if we accept that we won’t reach it (ever) and don’t let that stop us in the pursuit.

This video is, in some ways, a case study of this concept. The work I did, getting acclimated to higher altitudes before ever going on my trip to Asia for high (ish) altitude climbing was far from perfect. I did not follow a protocol that doctors would prescribe using a hypoxic tent or some such. Rather, leveraging the resources I had (peaks near where I live) and working around the constraints I faced (time and weather), I did something that was scientifically backed and likely to produce benefit without striving to bend my life around needing to get the optimum benefit.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to make a positive difference.

P.S. If it isn’t obvious by now, while this blog post is about acclimatization, it isn’t just about acclimatization…