TOKYO (The Star, Malaysia), January 7, 2008:
YUICHIRO Miura has an unusual routine for a man who just turned 75. At dawn, the veteran adventurer wakes after a night in a private low-oxygen chamber. He straps weights onto his ankles, hoists a 20kg backpack onto his shoulders and hikes for hours around Tokyo. Sometimes he adds in a stroll on his treadmill.
Miura is one of Japan's old men of the mountain, a small cluster of greying Japanese climbers who since 2002 have been passing among themselves an august title: the oldest person to have conquered the world's tallest peak.
Yuichiro Miura: ‘It feels like the goddess of Everest is beckoning me to come back.’ . “It’s a tough but wonderful thing to get to the peak when you are past 70,” Miura said at his Tokyo home.
He is already famous for having skied down Everest in 1970, a feat captured in an Oscar-winning documentary. Now, for seniors like him, climbing the 8,850m Himalayan peak is as extreme an elderly activity as they come.
It’s no wonder that the Japanese have cornered the market in elderly Everest conquerors. Japan has the world's longest-living population and is going through a boom in activities for the elderly.
Toshio Yamamoto started the string of Japanese victories by scaling the peak in 2000 at 63 years old. In 2001, American Sherman Bull reached the summit at 64 years old. Tomiyasu Ishikawa, then 65, took the title in 2002.
Miura won the distinction in 2003, at 70, but was eclipsed by fellow Japanese climber Takao Arayama, who scaled the peak in 2006, just three days older than Miura was when he did it. Katsusuke Yanagisawa did it last year, at age 71.
Now Miura wants to reach the top again.
“It feels like the goddess of Everest is beckoning me to come back,” said Miura, who is planning an assault on the mountain this spring. (Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to climb Everest, in 1953).
The Japanese also hold the record for oldest woman on Everest: Tamae Watanabe in 2002, at age 63.
Some attribute the prevalence of Japanese adventurers among the ranks of older climbers to the same factors that make them live increasingly longer: a diet heavy in vegetables and fish, excellent health care and trim physiques.
“Overall, the elderly have more vitality than before and their performance in sports is also improving,” said Takuji Shirasawa, a specialist in ageing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology who consults Miura.
Another factor in play is increasing affluence.
The spread of commercial expeditions beginning in the early 1990s allowed inexperienced but rich climbers to reach the summit.
Arayama, who broke Miura’s record when he scaled the peak in 2006, said climbing Everest was a remote idea in his 20s, when the science was undeveloped and the experience was not widely open to the general public.
“The way we climb has changed. You use oxygen so you won't tire yourself and more was found out about the best pace of climbing and that's why I got to climb,” he said.
Money brings world-class equipment, expert assistance on the mountain, and state-of-the-art training.
Miura's climb is estimated to cost around 200 million yen (RM5.98mil) spanning three years, including overseas training trips.
All that cash rubs some climbers the wrong way.
Miura relies on “his financial strength to make up for what he lacks,” said Yutaka Nakagawa of the Japan Mountaineering Association. He said that sets Miura apart from world-class alpinists such as Italian Reinhold Messner.
“It bothers me that people equate Messner, who climbed without oxygen, with Miura, who spends money and uses just about everything,” Nakagawa said.
None of this bothers Miura much.
He’s in excellent shape. A test before his 2003 climb showed him to have the fitness of a 39-year-old man, according to Masayoshi Yamamoto, exercise physiology professor at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Kanoya in south-western Japan.
Staying active into old age is in his genes. His father made headlines three years ago when he skied down Mont Blanc at the age of 99. He died last year at 101.
His son might not be the only senior at the summit. American climber Dick Bass may also try at age 78. Yanagisawa said he knows of at least one other Japanese climber in his late 70s who wants to scale Everest this year.
Miura isn’t taking any chances. He has been treated twice in recent months for an irregular heartbeat.
His son Gota will accompany him to Everest as he did in 2003 and during the climb they will e-mail medical information such as his heart rates to doctors in Japan.
Miura says setting a record isn't all that important, since someone else will surely come along and break it. Instead, he said, “It's about discovering what I can do.” – AP
Copyright © 1995-2007 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
