There’s a Mount Everest in my Abu Dhabi apartment building. Or at least there is if you’re willing to resort to the combination of inventiveness and persistence required to stay fit through the brain-sizzling heat of an Arabian summer.
Nobody needs to be reminded that this time of year is hot. But it’s also the mountain climbing season in much of the northern hemisphere and anyone who plans to spend their summer holidays doing that without wasting the first week gasping their way back to fitness needs to find a way to stay fit in the enervating heat of the UAE.
This is, of course, rather easier said than done. At this time of year, I can only manage about half an hour of exercise outside before my head feels like it’s melting and I give in to the temptation to return to air-conditioned spaces.
But the two options are compatible, which is why Himalayan giants can be found inside my apartment building. It’s 26 storeys high, if you count the three basement parking levels. Climb the air-conditioned fire stairs and you’ve ascended a little over 80m – and all in a temperature in the pleasant low 20s instead of the mid-40s.
Do that once a day for 15 days and you’ve climbed the equivalent of Jebel Hafeet. Add one more week and it’s the equivalent of Jebel Jais, the UAE’s highest peak.
Do that once in the morning and once in the evening and after a month, you’ve climbed the equivalent of Mont Blanc. Complete 111 ascents of the stairs – the equivalent of three ascents one day and four the next for a month – and that’s the same as Mount Everest.
It is, admittedly, not the most interesting way to exercise but it’s still better than using a StairMaster at a gym and it’s a world away from dissolving in the sea of humidity outside.
I load my iPod with podcasts of interviews and emerge on the 23rd floor sweatier but better informed than I had been 15 minutes earlier on B3.
I’m not alone in this. Another summertime stairway aficionado is Dubai-based adventurer Adrian Hayes, who is preparing to attempt K2, the world’s second highest peak, in Pakistan this month. He also credits high-rise stairwells as an essential training option when it gets too hot to tackle the real mountains in the UAE or when business takes him to unfamiliar cities.
One reason why fitness is important is because it’s impossible to prepare for some of the challenges presented by the European mountains.
One is temperature, as Emirati mountaineer Saif Almehairi, 31, a manager with the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, discovered last August.
He was attempting Elbrus, a 5,642 metre volcano just on the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range that, thanks to the slightly spurious definition about where Europe ends and Asia begins, has the accolade of being Europe’s highest peak.
But at the time, there was a 70-degree temperature differential between the 45 degrees prevailing in the UAE in midsummer and the -25 degrees he encountered just before dawn on his summit day. Not even the most overpowered Abu Dhabi air-conditioning unit can prepare you for that.
“At 3am, it was really cold,” he explained later.
“I had multiple layers on – thermals and windbreaker jackets and then a down jacket and then a shell jacket.
“I was covering my whole face with a mask. It was not comfortable. I’m not used to it but you have to wear it.”
A second challenge was the thin air at altitude. Above 5,000m, the oxygen content is roughly half what it is at sea level. For all the deprivations of the UAE summer, the air here is always thick.
But despite having a few moments when he was ready to give in, he reached the 5,642m summit and unfurled a mammoth UAE flag, a gift from the Petroleum Institute that was bigger than he is.
Given the effort, the temperature and depleted oxygen, he could be forgiven for thinking his was the first UAE flag to fly from Europe’s highest mountain.
But then he ran into my group of summer refugees, who had drawn on the reserves of fitness from stairwell climbing to scale the mountain the day before.
Members of that group hailed from Britain, New Zealand, Eritrea and Palestine. But the common theme uniting us was living in the UAE so that’s the flag we carried.
And we found the view from the summit was a lot better than the one available from the Everest in my apartment building.
jhenzell@thenational.ae