ΤΕΝ TOUGHEST INDIANS

The select club of Indian mountaineers, triathletes, swimmers, runners, and cyclists who are pushing the limits of human endurance to set new benchmarks in their sport

- Shail Desai

The ability to push the limits of physical and mental endurance beyond what is considered humanly possible is not for everyone. A few are blessed with the physical capacity and the mental stamina to breach the boundaries imposed by conventional ideas about human physiology. For nearly 150 years since mountaineering began as a sport in Europe, no one considered it humanly possible to climb an 8,000-metre high Himalayan peak without the use of supplemental oxygen. Then came the legendary Italian alpinist, Reinhold Messner, who in 1975 became the first man alongside Peter Habeler to ascend Gasherbrum I in the Karakoram mountain range without oxygen. They did it in just three days.

In 1978, the duo repeated their feat on Mount Everest, becoming the first mountaineers to climb the world's highest peak without oxygen. Two years later, Messner became the first to solo ascend Everest without oxygen support. Over the next eight years, he climbed all the remaining 8000-metre peaks in the Himalayas in a similar manner. When he reached the top of Lhotse in 1986, he became the first human to climb all the fourteen 8000-metre mountains in the world without supplemental oxygen.

It had taken Messner 16 years to achieve this legendary feat. In 2013, the great South Korean climber, Kim Changho, beat his record by ascending all the 8,000ers without supplemental oxygen in less than eight years. Then in 2019, another legend emerged. Nirmal Purja, a 35-year-old Nepalese climber, stretched the possibilities of what humans can achieve even further: he climbed all the 8,000ers in just six months and six days. "It is impossible; I was told so many times? So, I named the expedition Project Possible," Purja said in a magazine interview recently.