The Mountain That Gave Me Back My Body
On submitting Ben Nevis the day after a negative pregnancy test
The day before James and I climbed to the snowy peak of Ben Nevis, I found out I wasn’t pregnant - after being certain I was.
I wanted to be pregnant. I really wanted it. And by the time October 2023 rolled around, I’d been testing before my period came for eleven months.
Over that year, gradually and painfully, I’d stopped letting myself believe that I would ever get a positive test. With every passing month I grew more detached from the result but at the same time grew more desperate.
That month felt different. I was five days late and walked into co-op in the Scottish Highlands to buy a pregnancy test and that flicker of hope reignited inside me. I remember swaying down the aisle, looking back at an anxious James and giving him a reassuring smile that “this was it”. I’d been feeling ill, shaky, mentally not myself. I thought I’d felt a shift.
The test was negative.
I was completely broken by it. I felt foolish for letting myself believe again.
I cried for hours on the floor of the shipping container turned Airbnb we were staying in, overlooking a moonlit Loch Eil.
After hours of tears and talking it through with James, he finally asked me if I was still planning on climbing Ben Nevis the day after. I didn’t know what to say.
We had previously submitted Scaffel Pike and Yr Wyddfa together. Summiting Ben Nevis was the point of the whole trip. We’d carved out this day and these conditions for it. On one hand I was not mentally well and wanted to lay in bed and cry. On the other, I knew I’d have major FOMO if James came back feeling proud, accomplished and tired, having completed the UK three peaks without me.
…
When I met James I was extremely unfit, poorly managing a chronic thyroid issue, felt directionless, had no understanding of the great outdoors and didn’t know the first thing about hiking. Exercise did not exist for me without shame, anxiety and fear. I didn’t understand how people enjoyed mud, trees, lacing up stinky old boots, getting rained on or fighting against the elements. I also had a punishing relationship with my body. I over ate then starved it, never thought nicely about it. I absorbed mean comments like a sponge. I had nothing nice to say about myself.
But James was a natural outdoorsman. He’d literally grown up in the woods and traced OS maps in his head when he was sleeping. He loved and breathed nature and felt happiest hiking, running, biking and walking. Meeting him and slowly being indoctrinated into his world was a process not without its hiccups, both of us struggling to meet in the middle to understand the other, but over time we melded and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Hiking opened new doors for me and allowed me to appreciate for the first time, my strength. Our first trip to the Lake District was humbling, I moved ridiculously slowly, but it was also a reset, a way to unplug and tap into a steady rhythm of one foot in front of the other. That was all I had to do. Breathe the Cumbrian air and keep moving onwards. I finished Scafell Pike with tearful pride and disbelief and enjoyed Yr Wydffa more than most days in my life, still not perfect but ultimately crying less, stopping less, appreciating the muscle memory I’d built up, the more time I’d been spending outside since that last mountain excursion contributing to my capabilities.
Bit by bit, I began to see my body in a new light, not as a temple as such, but as a capable, hardy thing - a frame that had carried me through bad breakups, long walks along seafronts, binge eating tendencies, a temporary period of COVID-lockdown abuse by red wine, nasty comments from peers in classrooms, dancing all night long, shopping trips in busy town centres and balanced my hormones as best it could while having survived through recurring assault from an ex. It was a weathered, bruised but beautiful thing my body, and as I began to move outside, mindful, painfully slow at first but with growing purpose, summiting both the other two of the three peaks, hiking became a surprising hobby, an outlet, a way to tune into that self-appreciation where the self-doubt wanted to be and had always been before. I’d never moved myself with such purpose, found such mediative practice in the outside world - it was so alien but so very special too.
And so, wanting to feel away from the devastation by choosing the mountains, I woke that next morning at 5:30am, drove to the North Face car park and started climbing.
We were quiet, reflective, ate our snacks side by side, neither of us quite able to find the words. But James supported me on up that path, across the CMD Arête and up towards the peak. It was a long day, cold and desolate, everything aching. I don’t remember seeing many people on the route and that made the landscape all that more intense, a world I could never have imagined I’d see with my own eyes just a year prior.
As the day wore on, I weakened, my pre-period symptoms and pains arriving as if to taunt me, my legs seizing under the constant grind. I’d never done anything as intense as Ben Nevis, the previous routes hard and shattering, but the dial had been turned that bit further now, 260m extra elevation, 6km extra distance of rough terrain and almost 10k extra steps compared to Yr Wyddfa.
At some point the snow was coming thick at us and I stopped, clinging to a sloping rock on a steep ridge, blinded, exhausted, body wracked with emotions. We were an hour or two from the summit and seriously behind in terms of daylight hours, so we talked through the idea of turning back, but I knew even as the tears kept coming and my hands kept shaking, that I needed to see this through.
I needed to prove that my body could do hard things. That I could fight until I had nothing left. That my strength was earned and used to its fullest.
There was a huge part of me, that within those eleven months of waiting, had truly come to believe that my body would never be strong enough to carry a child. I thought of my empty womb with such disdain, trying to come to terms with never being a mother. It was the bone deep self-hatred, the lifetime of being too big, too weak, too slow, that rubbed against me, making me feel smaller, making me cruel to my genuinely trying reproductive organs and hormonal system.
So I believed that maybe, just maybe, if I submitted to the highest point in the UK and completed the three peaks, I’d find the inner strength and self-belief to keep trying for motherhood, that I’d manifest my baby through my own self-fulfilment, pride and assurance. That I’d grow stronger just by finishing this day.
So we pushed on. Stiff. Slow. Tears freezing in tracks down my cheeks. Using hands where balance failed me.
Did everything seize up so badly that I had to physically lift my legs up the steps? Yes.
Did I whinge and moan that it would never end? Yes.
Did James have to stop a thousand times and learn the patience of a saint in one tiring day? Yes.
Did we reach the summit with mere seconds to appreciate it for lack of daylight? Yes.
Did we descend in the darkness, falling through marsh and bog, submerged in ice cold mud up to our knees, guided only by the dying torch light of our phones? Yes.
Did it take me almost 15 hours in total? Absolutely.
Climbing Ben Nevis was the hardest thing I’d done.
But was the cry at the top one of exhaustion or regret or frustration? No.
It was victory. A suggestion of self-belief, of kindness, of easing up on myself. I was so damn proud. So proud of my body - my legs, the soles of my feet, my ankles, my heart, my head, all my fingers and toes. So proud of my courage, my resilience. So proud that the body I’d spent years punishing, hating, harming, had carried me through 45,000 steps. So proud to finally understand the need and respect for nature, the thrill of a good view, of fresh air, of leaving civilisation behind and to have finally found a way to move my body that felt right in my soul while connecting and falling deeper in love with my partner.
Broken but lifted, I held my hands to my stomach that night in the dark, breathing deep into the womb, visualising the strength I’d gained and proved within myself going there. I connected to myself. Listened. I held myself and cried. The feeling was electric.
…
The next pregnancy test I took was positive. And it changed everything.
Now I’m not claiming that summiting your highest mountain ever will help with conception, nor am I saying it will fix the way you see yourself as a whole, but I am saying it’s a step in the right direction at least. Or 45k of them.
