SPORT AND MOUNTAINS, A LIFE STYLE
By chance, I read a quote from Goethe: ‘the mountain is a mute teacher to silent pupils’. I loved it and it impressed me! Not because he said something exceptional or mysterious. I just thought of those people who look at the alpinism as a risky, tiring and nonsense activity, the conqueror of useless.
Intimate and personal motivation pushes people to go high in the mountains. Why do people climb mountains?
I started climbing after quitting ski racing. I spent twenty beautiful years of my life ski racing, eight of them in the National Alpine Ski Team and finished having had two years of great experience ski racing in the United States.
Skiing is part of my life story, but once it was over I looked up at the mountains and the slopes I used to ski down. Climbing mountains became a strong passion and turned into a job: mountain guide/ski instructor.
Climbing mountains means a lot to me. I can put all my energy in it; satisfying a sense of competition that is part of my character. A competition within myself that helps push me to my limits, testing hard situations, managing fear and instinct. Mountaineering is not just a sporting activity, it’s a lifestyle that leads you to experience challenges and sacrifices and rewards you with beautiful landscapes, physical and mental wellbeing. It teaches you to appreciate even the smallest things in the people and nature that surround us.
To be a woman then is something more: more sensibility and less difficulty understanding people’s limits or to appreciate the surrounding scenery. The motivations and how to deal with the mountain are the same as for a man, but we have to avoid emulating men for the qualities we do not have and take advantage of our own qualities…
“For some women it is wonderful to rely on the help of men as crutches, to go behind the rope of a man, but it is still better to admit that we have our own feet.” So wrote E. Kelly one of the first mountaineers .
Marica Favé