Fuelled with Luchos to summit Everest!
Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay submitted Mount Everest on 29th May 1953, there have been over 4000 successful summits of the mountain. The mountain has clearly witnessed many triumphs and also a large number of tragedies that have all too often partnered those successes. People have used it to push the boundaries of what the human body and mind can endure.
So this year, a friend of ours, Mr Ed Hill, took it upon himself to embark on an expedition to summit Everest with Elite Exped (headed up by the superb Nimsdai Purja and his supremely capable team).
On speaking to Ed prior to his departure, it became clear that nutrition is a key component of any detailed plan when attempting a high peak summit (not just Everest). With this in mind, we asked Ed if he wanted to test our energy boost blocks and see how they would perform in extreme conditions. Not just in the approach and training phase of the expedition, but more importantly, in the Death Zone.
It is with some notoriety, that we humans find it hard to do a number of things in the Death Zone. Digestion and the ability to take on calories to sustain yourself is really hard to do, let alone simply breath.
Not only would our guava nutrition blocks have to provide the calories needed, but clearly they would need to work under conditions they had never been tested in.
Ed’s account of reaching the summit on 31st May is truly remarkable. The achievement is one of those things that should never be underestimated. Mountaineering in the Death Zone will always be an extremely dangerous undertaking and things can go very badly wrong in a very short space of time. That level of pressure while struggling to think or breath is something that few could comprehend.
However, we are pleased to report that our guava nutrition energy blocks dealt well with the tough conditions. Ed is very clear that when he (and other members of the expedition) tried other sports nutrition bites that people had brought with them, they did not find them nearly as easy to digest as our vegan energy bar. In fact he and his climbing partner Dan Dowding used them all the way to the summit.
At Lucho Dillitos we like to be involved with challenges that are not always perhaps the first thing that might spring to mind.
The unconventional test of our guava-based blocks and the energy boost they provide is what we will always seek out.