• A classmate who has improved their grades
• Someone who is kind to others (a role-model)
• An adult who has gone back to school to get their high school diploma
• An inspiring coach or teacher
• Someone who has overcome a disability

• Who is your real-life hero?
• What challenges did he or she face while working towards his or her goal?
• How did he or she overcome the challenges?
• Has he or she achieved his or her "ultimate" goal?
• If not, is he or she still technically a hero?

• Are you particularly dedicated to a particular hobby?
• Have you helped a team win a game?
• Does your family rely on you?
• Have you delivered newspapers through a snowstorm?

• 1924 - George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, British climbers, were last spotted within 2,000 feet of the summit. Neither climber was seen alive again. Whether the two men reached the summit remains a mystery.
• 1953 - Sir Edmund Hillary, a renowned mountain climber and explorer from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa*, are officially recognized as the first to reach the summit. Both men use bottled oxygen.

  * Sherpas are the highest-living population in the world, located primarily in the Khumbu region of Nepal. Mountaineering Sherpas carry heavy loads, set guide ropes and prepare camps for climbers on Everest.

• 1956 - Swiss climbers Ernst Schmied, Jurg Marmet, Hans Rudolf and Adolf Reist summit.
• 1963 - James Whittaker becomes the first American to summit.
• 1973 - Shambu Tamang, 17, from Nepal, youngest person to reach summit.
• 1975 - Junko Tabei, from Japan, is the first woman to conquer Everest.
• 1978 - Austrians Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler are the first men to ascent without using oxygen.
• 1982 - Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, British men, vanish en route to the summit.
• 1986 - Sharon Wood becomes the first Canadian woman to summit.
• 1988 - Lydia Bradey from New Zealand is the first female to reach the top without oxygen.
• 1990 - Andrej and Marija Stremfelj from Slovenia are the first married couple to summit.
• 1996 - Beck Weathers nearly summits, but turns back. He is left for dead on the mountain but manages to make it back to Camp Four. Frostbitten so badly, he will need surgery for a new nose and a new hand.
• 1996 - American Scott Fischer and New Zealander Rob Hall, both mountaineering guides, reach the summit, but die in a rogue storm during their descent.
• 1998 - Tom Whittaker, an American, is the first disabled climber to summit.
• 2000 - Nazir Sabir, from Pakistan, and Ben Webster, a Canadian, are successful. No other members of Webster's team reach the summit.

Timeline Heroes

TALKING POINTS

Study the timeline. In groups of three or four, discuss the following questions:

Ben Webster summitted Mount Everest on 5/17/2000. Below is an excerpt from a 5/19/2000 chat with Ben that took place at STEPonline.com

Ben_Webster:"Hello everybody! Good morning from base camp."

Ben_Webster: "Just myself, unfortunately. In any expedition, there tends to be an attrition factor where people suffer from illnesses or have trouble acclimatizing, or with fatigue. The mountain takes care of a process of allowing just the lucky ones to have a shot. I just happened to stay healthy. One of our team members picked up a virus on the trail, and two months later he's still not well. The nature of living in a harsh and remote environment took its toll. I happened to be lucky in staying healthy and acclimatizing well."

Ben_Webster:"That's actually a huge part. The single greatest principle in climbing Everest - you need your Sherpa support, and oxygen and supplies, but you have to have it at the right time to make your assault. Every decision is made based on satellite weather reports. The hard part is that they're only about 50 percent accurate, so you're taking the satellite reports, making your strategic decisions, and then changing them on the fly as you see what's actually happening on the mountain. The weather there is very changeable, so to get 100 percent weather accuracy is very hard. We knew we only had a 16-hour window in which the winds would be low enough. At the end of that window, the winds were supposed to pick up and become treacherous. So we left very early - actually 9p.m., because the winds are lighter at night. We climbed all night, and only spent about ten minutes at the actual summit because we wanted to get back safely. We beat a hasty retreat for four hours to our camp. You have a complete sense of not loneliness, but you understand your mortality when you're that far away from any help. There's no rescue or anything, and if the weather turned bad on you, like in the disaster of '96, you could stay up there forever."

Ben_Webster: "Because I've done this stuff for the last 20 years, I'm always in pretty good shape. But I tailored my training schedule to mostly lower end and cardiovascular work. That means working endurance on the major muscle groups in the legs - hamstrings, gluts, calves especially, because you spend a lot of time on uneven ground and that takes a lot of strain on your calves."

Ben_Webster: "No, I don't, not at all. Every person has a different level of what's considered acceptable risk, and too often (because I've done this my entire life), I've had to defend my point of view, which is that risk is primary to the life experience. Without risk, there's no reward. I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but for me and other climbers, or people who do adventure sports, it's a reflection on their view that life should believed at the moment, and not tucked away in a secure place. Unless you're willing to risk something, you're not going to get anything out of life. For people who need a high level of security, they find that a crazy concept, but for those who don't mind a bit of risk, it's very liberating to the life experience because you're willing to try things that will make your life a little bit richer.

David-Step Guest:"What was the experience of actually being on the summit of Everest?"

Ben_Webster: "For myself, I know other people have said that it's life changing or very spiritual. It wasn't that profound for me. My first thought was the actual summit isn't as dramatic as you might assume - it's almost dome shaped, and not this rigid rocky outcrop that everyone imagines. It's quite rounded, like a dome. It wasn't quite as beautiful as I had expected, although the views were awe-inspiring. The second thought was that, having done the climb and done it with other climbers and Sherpa support, I thought back to 1953 and Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay and how they did it completely alone with no support, not knowing what was around the next bend. These guys were really pioneers, and what a fantastic feat it was for them to have done it."

Mountain gal:"What can you tell us about altitude sickness and the effects of oxygen deprivation?

Ben_Webster: "I can tell you, without going into great detail, a scary story relating to that question. This happened to me on the summit bid. On my summit push, I spent ten days at high altitude, about twice as long as is usually done. When it came time to summit, I still felt very strong, and was able to make the summit and return to Camp IV. But the next day, the aftereffects of being that high in the "death zone" hit me. I woke up, realizing I could no longer think straight. I was suffering from the beginning stages of extreme hypoxia, almost like getting Alzheimer's disease. It took me two hours to get dressed - I'd pick up a sock, not remember why I had it in the first place, and not be able to find it. I knew instinctively I was in trouble when my mind started to break down so severely. As soon as I got dressed, I left, and several thousand feet lower the effect decreased. By the time I made it to Camp II, I was fine. You read about climbers in the "death zone" who just sit down and die. And I felt this seductive experience first hand. Your mind is addled, but at the same time you don't feel pain. Instead, you feel tired and comfortable and lethargic. All you want to do is lie down and fall asleep. Part of your brain is screaming at you to get out, because you want to preserve your own life. But the rest of your brain just wants to lie down for five more minutes. If I hadn't gotten out when I did, I'd still be there. People in that circumstance either fall into a coma, or go into cardiac arrest and die.

Ben_Webster: "Yes, the section through the Khumbu Ice Fall started to disintegrate while I was up in the mountain. Lower down in the mountain, with the spring heat, the ice field started to break up, so when I came down through that section, it was in much worse condition than when I'd seen it a month earlier. It's in very bad shape right now, with the glacier shifting and crevasses opening daily. The support for the crevasses - the ladders, etc. - has all melted away, so it's a very scary process to go through it. It's like a river of ice, and it's moving very quickly right now in the spring. For a glacier that is - I think we could still outrun it! LOL.

Ben_Webster: "He was very kind, very congratulatory, and very quick witted."

Ben_Webster: "It took me two years to set up the project, and to find the financing and execute it. So it's a long process, and a very complex process as well, when you take into consideration the media and sponsor responsibilities, and ultimately your team responsibilities."

Jeff-StepGuest: "Now that you've made it to the top, looking back, is there a route or plan that you would of changed?"

Ben_Webster: "The success ratio on Everest is, again, extremely small. So it's hard to look back with success and say, "Gee, I should have done that differently." Ultimately, the decisions made were the right ones, because we succeeded where so many others don't. Having said that, your hindsight is always 20/20, so I don't like to look back and say I should have, because you're basing that on new information that you didn't have at the time. There's no one glaring mistake I would like to recover.

David-StepGuest: "Hi Ben, was there ever a time during your climb when you just thought you couldn't go on?"

Ben_Webster: Actually, yes. Claude and I discussed this at Camp III. We were both tired, and were feeling the effects of low oxygen, and had less energy than we normally did. The different elements that were happening around us with different expeditions made us discuss our chances of actually making it to the top. We weren't thinking it was looking grim, but by the same token, we weren't really optimistic either. You have to dig deep, and sort of bypass some of that emotional negativity and just figure that you're here, so you have to go do it. Once I started to climb from Camp III to Camp IV, I started to feel strong and fine again. From there, you just put aside a lot of stuff, and focus on what you have to do, being strong emotionally and mentally. If you get deflected at all from the task at hand, you have absolutely no chance at all. The big telling part was how cleanly and quickly I climbed to Camp IV, which gave me confidence that my body hadn't worn down, and I still had the ability to make it. Once I knew my body could do it, I just had to get my head and my emotions in the right place. You can control your thoughts and emotions, but you can't control your body if it's breaking down from altitude. If you break your leg, there's nothing you can do about it, but if you're being negative, you have it in your power to change that.

Nathan-StepGuest: "What goes into an expedition leader's decision to turn away from the summit before reaching it?"

Ben_Webster: "Nathan, that's a very good question, because sometimes as an expedition leader you may have to decide that for another climber and take away their life long dream. You base it on what's best for the expedition first, and the expedition's success. Everyone has to come home. That's more important than summitting. I suspect that when people make those decisions, they've weighed the pros and cons of acceptable risk. The mountain is littered with corpses of people who obviously, when given that decision, decided to press on, or if they decided to turn around, it was too late. This shows bad luck, or bad judgment. You know that going up Everest, that these decisions are life and death. So when people turn back, I never discredit that. It's always seen as a failure, but it's NEVER a failure when people come home. It's only a failure when people don't come down. People shouldn't get so consumed by the actual summit - any piece of rock or ice isn't worth a life. If you turn around, there's always a chance to come back and do it again. But if you decide to press on, and make a bad decision, it may be your last expedition.

Ben_Webster: "Actually, it's very easy to correlate the two. In a lot of cases, you have to face (and it's a good word, challenge). Kids are just trying to get through their adolescence, which is so complicated that there are a lot of obstacles, like drugs, alcohol, etc. Those are the obstacles they have to get through. The key word is "challenge" because you have to get your headspace into a positive area, so you think they are just challenges to overcome. Keep a positive outlook, realizing there are things you have to go through and get around as part of the process of getting to the "peak" that you want. So I see a definite correlation. I know for myself that during adolescence, everything was very intense emotionally. That was the case here too, but as you get older, you realize that it's just one experience in your life. Most teenagers just don't have the life experience to put it into perspective yet. They don't realize that the intensity of the emotions will diminish with perspective."

STEP: "We are just about out of time for today Ben, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your journey. Do you have any last words for our audience?"

Ben_Webster: "I've done several online interviews now, and one thing that comes out is people's seeming arms' length admiration for this experience. But I'd like to bring it down a notch - understand that I'm happy that people enjoyed what we did here, but remember that this is just one Everest. Everyone has his or her own personal Everest. If anything, take what we did, and reflect it back on your own life. I'm not extraordinary. If you met me, you'd think I was just the guy next door, so that should tell you a lot about the capacity of people to succeed. Find out what your personal Everest is, and go do it!"

Response to Ben’s chat

1. Why didn’t the other members of Ben’s team reach the summit? How did he feel about it?



2. What factors might have prevented Ben from reaching the summit?



3. How did Ben train for the expedition?



4. Do you agree with Ben that "every person has a different level of what’s considered acceptable risk?" Where would you draw your line of acceptable risk? Do you think this level increases or decreases as you get older?
   
   
5. What did Ben first think of when he reached the summit? Which climbers did he later think of?



6. Was Ben affected by altitude sickness? Explain.



7. Do you think Ben is a hero because the Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, phoned him?



8. How long did it take Ben to prepare for the expedition? What were some of his responsibilities?



9. Ben believes you can’t control your physical state, but you can control what other state? And why is it crucial to attaining goals?



10. According to Ben, what is more important than summitting? Why?

Setting Goals

• I am in control of my own thinking, my own focus and my own life.
• I control my own thoughts and emotions, and direct the whole pattern of performance, health and life. I make my own choices.
• I am fully capable of achieving the goals I set for myself. They are within my control.
• I learn from problems or setbacks and through them I see room for improvement and opportunities for personal growth.
• Everyday in some way I feel better, wiser, more adaptable, more focused, more confident and more in control.