Anxiety While Running at High Elevations | Mountain Summits as Triggers

by Chase Parnell — July 22, 2020 — 📸: Erin Bibeau (Never Summer 100k)

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I have dealt with anxiety for most of my adult life. I had a panic attack at the age of 21 and things have never quite been the same. It was most intense from ages 21-26 but has steadily declined in severity since. It goes without saying that I am tremendously thankful of this downward trend; my early 20s were hellish to say the least. If you’re curious about the aforementioned panic attack, I give the play by play in a prior article entitled Track Rubber and Blackberry. I share this highly personal information because I believe people need to be more open with the realities of the human experience. When I was really struggling, I vividly remember reading articles and watching YouTube videos of people describing their experiences with anxiety and it was incredibly healing and calming to know I wasn’t alone. 

As a married man in my mid-30s with two kids, I’ve mellowed out a lot. I don’t suffer like I once did, but there are still certain situations that trigger my anxiety to a greater degree than I’d like. Unfortunately, one of these triggers is the approach to a mountain summit. It doesn’t really matter so much what the altitude is; if I’m in an unfamiliar place and I’m within about 500-1000 feet of elevation gain from the summit, I almost inevitably experience symptoms. The tallest mountain I’ve ran up was during the Never Summer 100k at 12,800 feet. There, sucking air and pushing hard on my quads, I felt my anxiety quicken around 12,000 feet or so. Likewise, just a few days ago,  I tagged a summit outside of McCall, Idaho at just 7,600 feet and I started feeling symptoms around 7,000 feet. It’s almost as if my body has a pre-programmed setting that gets flipped when I see the summit up ahead but still have some work to do to get it done. 

What I’m Thinking and Feeling While Experiencing Anxiety

Once the switch is flipped, it might be best described as a sense of claustrophobia accompanied by a narrowing of vision and a fight or flight type adrenaline burst that adds fuel to the fire. I start thinking that maybe something is off. Am I low on calories? Crap, maybe I’m really dehydrated? Do I need electrolytes? I’ll eat and drink and that usually provides some temporary relief. 

I press on but a compressed chest and mild vertigo-like feelings remain and heighten as I get closer and closer to the summit. Note: if the weather is also bad or it’s really cold, things go sideways even quicker as the mind starts to embrace the irrational. The highlight reel of all possible devastating outcomes starts to play. And yet typically my desire to reach the summit is still strong and almost always enough for me to bear it and press on. 

Because of this anxiety, I tend to want to run in the mountains alone. If I’m with a running partner I feel like I have less control over the situation. There’s that social pressure to see it through to the summit; anxiety about communicating anxiety. 

Once I’m closer to the summit, within two to three minutes, there’s a noticeable pulse. Sometimes it feels like it even effects my motor control and I start to think about turning around even when I’m that close. I just want to start going down. It’s sad because I’m approaching the point of maximum beauty, the moment where I should be feeling most exhilarated. Instead, I can’t help but think about how alone I am, how I’m probably 10 miles from the trailhead, how I don’t want to die, how I wish I were at home playing with my kids, how there has to be something wrong with me. And yet the pull to the summit, and really, my desire to not buckle under these symptoms of my own creation, keep me going. 

You might be thinking, why don’t you just stay the hell away from running up mountains? Well, here’s the thing, almost immediately upon tagging the summit, when I change direction and start heading down, I feel better. Not just better, GREAT. I always love the long uninterrupted descents, a euphoric satisfaction emerges and I feel a sense of pride in overcoming my desire to quit. The next thing I know, I’m elated by the run; the hard stuff falls away into the background and I typically finish feeling stoked and ready to do it again the next day. 

That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I do avoid technical summits that require scrambling or climbing gear of any kind. I’ve just sort of viewed myself as not a good candidate for that type of thing. From my limited experience with mountaineering, I suffer more than I’d like and I don’t get the return to make it worth it. So yes, my anxiety does come with a cost and I think it’s important to acknowledge that.

In general, I’m not a risk averse person in many settings. I will bomb down technical terrain that is probably objectively far more dangerous than many summits that I get all riled up about. I’ve ran a lot of ultras on varied terrain and am confident in my abilities to run a long way, but there’s something about summits, these fixed points on a landscape, that set me off. Maybe I’ve just watched one too many climbing documentaries that end in tragedy, or maybe I have pronounced survival instincts that more forcefully question what I’m doing. What’s the point? What’s happening here? Why are you doing this to yourself?

Hypoxia & Anxiety Symptom Similarities

In doing a little research, as is typically the case, I found others with similar experiences. What I found interesting, however, was the emphasis on how people struggle to define their symptoms. Is it anxiety or simply a hypoxic state from breathing thin air? Hypoxia is an insufficient concentration of oxygen reaching the tissues of your body and occurs at oxygen-deprived high elevations. In the abstract to a study entitled, High altitudes, anxiety, and panic attacks: is there a relationship?, the authors state, “People exposed to high altitudes often experience somatic symptoms triggered by hypoxia, such as breathlessness, palpitations, dizziness, headache, and insomnia. Most of the symptoms are identical to those reported in panic attacks or severe anxiety.”

This makes perfect sense to me and I agree 100% that the symptoms feel almost identical. But this seeming inability to bifurcate the symptoms almost makes them more maddening. Is this the elevation or is this me freaking out?! Perhaps at 12,800 feet in Colorado the feelings were actually related to the high elevation, but at 7,600 feet in Idaho? I don’t think so. What’s more likely happening for me personally, and I alluded to it above, is that I’ve subconsciously programmed my body to respond in this way based on a few experiences in my past that left a mark. 

Your Past Experiences May Forever Effect Your Present

I probably shouldn’t call it PTSD, but if there is a mild form of that, I think that’s what might be happening here. First of all, when I had my one and only panic attack in 2005, I didn’t even know what anxiety was. I had no idea that’s what was happening. But once you experience it, you and your mind is forever marked by it. You are forced to become a master of your psychology as it relates to anxiety and how to cope. For example, when my anxiety was bad, the first physiological symptom was a fuzziness in the pinky and ring finger of my left hand. What I came to learn was that it was a downstream repercussion of slightly elevated breathing. I was mildly hyperventilating and didn’t even know it. Once detected, however, I learned how to manage my situation and environment to make sure it didn’t escalate into anything more. To this day, I don’t rest my arm on the door of my car when driving with the window down because the pressure on my bicep restricts blood flow to my fingers and I start to feel that fuzzy feeling in my fingers. 

Similarly, in 2011 I spent the summer in Costa Rica. I met a local “Tico” named Julio who liked to run so he took me up the tallest mountain in the country, Cerro Chirripó, at 12,533 feet. The weather was bad, white-out conditions, I was fairly out of shape, and around 12,000 feet I started to feel physical symptoms from the altitude; mostly, slurred speech. I literally could not form words! So we sat down and had some warm broth and as my heart rate declined and the symptoms lessened, I ended up being fine — just a bit traumatized from losing control in that way.

I think most people have ongoing issues with some form of “trauma” if I could be so dramatic as to call it that. In my mind, it’s no different than the person that is mortified of public speaking because their childhood was marred by a bad experience. Or maybe you had a bad breakup or your partner cheated on you, and now you struggle with intimacy or are in a constant state of fear that you’ll get hurt again.

As much as we’d like to deny it, we are all a product of our collective experiences; the good, the bad, and the ugly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t push back. I believe we can create new experiences, empowering experiences, that will bend the curve and inch us closer to our whole selves. I think it’s extremely important to believe you are capable of real and lasting change. You are not stuck. We are constantly evolving and each day is a new chance to intentionally manufacture the person we want to be. 

How To Overcome Anxiety Around High Elevation and Mountain Summits?

First off, I obviously don’t have anxiety licked. And I probably never will completely. But I can confidently say that by necessity I’ve become adept at managing it in the mountains, 100 mile races, and other similarly intense environments. By adept, I don’t mean I’m always without mental anguish, more that I can at least still get myself to do the thing. Here’s what works for me. 

Exposure therapy. I’m a big believer in doing what scares you. How else is growth going to happen? Listen, you don’t have to summit an 8,000 meter peak in the Himalaya, you don’t have to go ice climbing in Alaska, but you have to keep pushing yourself to get out there. The longer you go without trying, the greater the stigma around it will grow. Baby steps are better than no steps. One thing I like to do is force myself to sit on the summit for a few minutes. Don’t just tag it and descend. Take a minute to breath and realize that you’re fine. The more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll become. 

Know that some anxiety around mountain travel is totally normal. In an observational study conducted on 43 recreational trekkers of all levels and abilities, “Forty‐two of 43 individuals (98%) had anxiety symptoms at some point during the expedition.” It’s good to remember that you are in fact doing something that is anxiety inducing. In this day and age, when you scroll your Instagram feed you’d think it’s just totally normal to be scrambling ridgelines, summiting technical 14ers, and having the time of your life while doing it. All smiles and fist bumps. But really, your average mortal experiences some level of fear and anxiety. Moving in the mountains alone, away from support, exposed, is worthy of these emotions. There isn’t something wrong with you because you feel this way. 

Stack the Deck in Your Favor. I’m guilty of entering the mountains with a terrible hand on many occasions. What I mean by this is that I don’t always take care of the little things and set myself up for success. The goal before you go into the mountains is to rid yourself of as many anxiety inducing factors as you can so that you can focus solely on the physical work of summiting. Know your route well, bring extra food and water, bring gear for any weather, bring a Spot tracker device, get Gaia GPS on your phone, don’t go for the summit if daylight is limited or if you are nursing an injury. Set yourself up for success by being fully prepared so you can minimize the irrational fears and focus on the task at hand.  

Remember that Running in Mountain Environments is Healing. In an article published by the High Altitude Medicine & Biology journal, “…physical activity in general is known to improve symptoms of depression, anxiety, and panic disorder and enhance measures of mental well-being like quality of life and resilience. There is a positive effect of physical activity in an alpine environment on mental health beyond that of physical activity itself. By building a personal bond to individual mountain sides the positive impact of the outdoor environment on mental well-being is enhanced. A mountain hiking program in the Alps has been shown to improve hopelessness, depression, and suicide ideation in patients suffering from high-level suicide risk.”

If you need it, there’s your WHY. There is a point beyond pure esthetics and exercise. There is indeed something that happens when a human places itself in the mountains and is open to being moved by the experience. People have spent lifetimes exploring this phenomenon. In fact, this is what many of us are doing now. 

Remind Yourself Where You’ve Been and What You’ve Accomplished Before. You better believe I am constantly reminding myself that I went up to 12,800 feet during a high-intensity race when I’m struggling to summit a peak at a lower elevation. If you have an instance in your memory that was 10 out of 10 scary, and yet you overcame it and walked away safely, then bring that to mind to stoke your confidence. I don’t know this for certain, but don’t you think women draw a lot of confidence from birthing their first child when birthing their second? B!tch, I got this!

The Only Thing Worse Than Anxiety is Quitting What You Love

Alright, I hope this discourse has served you in some way. Anxiety is far too stigmatized and is far more common than we all admit. My struggle through it has been one of the most formative journeys of my life. We each have our own personal struggles and maybe anxiety isn’t yours, but I believe we can apply these concepts regardless of affliction. So let’s continue to foster our confidence, keep hope alive, get out into the places we love, and collectively grow as human beings in community. 

Thank you for reading and feel free to comment or share an experience below. See you at the summit. 

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