It was close to midnight when I could stand it no longer. Determined to stave off altitude sickness, I had downed six liters of water on the first leg of a climb of Mt. Rainier, drinking even when I wasn't thirsty. Now nature was calling.
I fumbled in the darkness for my headlamp, switched it on, then pulled on the down jacket I was using for a pillow. Descending from my plywood sheet of a mattress, I slipped into my cold, damp climbing boots and, as quietly as possible, creaked over to the shelter door, doing my best not to wake the 15 others bunked in our hovel of a home. Lifting the beefy latch, I braced for a blast of wind, never noticing I was illuminating the ceiling.
"Dude," whispered a more experienced adventurer, "your headlamp's on upside down."
I had to laugh. But I could afford to. The toughest part of my journey was over.
Not so for another first-time climber.
A football field away, across a boulder-strewn ridge and in a similarly spartan hut, rested one of the most powerful people in sports, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He was lying in the dark but wide awake, dreading the final push to the 14,411-foot summit -- what he later would call the biggest "physical, emotional and probably mental" challenge of his life.
"Tod Leiweke made a good analogy," Goodell said of the Seattle Seahawks' chief executive who organized the climb. "He said it's like Christmas Eve. I said, 'Yeah, but one difference is you're not getting presents.'
"You had nothing but bad thoughts. Things like avalanches, crevasses. . . . I'm thinking, 'Hey, I'm not out here to kill myself.' "
Actually, Goodell, Leiweke, Seahawks Coach Jim Mora and a group of Pacific Northwest business leaders were making the trip for charity. They raised about $400,000 for the United Way of King County (Wash.) and put a spotlight on the NFL's Play 60 program, designed to encourage children to get at least an hour of physical exercise a day.
I was allowed on part of the journey -- participating in training school, and meeting the group at base camp on the way up and accompanying them on the way down. The biggest challenge in that: the 4 1/2 -mile slog I made apart from the group from the trailhead in Paradise to the base camp at Camp Muir. The distance wasn't the tough part; it was the grind of the nearly relentless incline -- a gain of about 1,000 feet in elevation for every mile.
