A mountaineer talks about his daily life

Nicolas Hojac, from Bern, spends a lot of time in the mountains, where he pursues his passion for mountaineering. In this interview, he talks about his daily training routine, how he prepares for his expeditions, and the role nutrition plays in all of this.

Who is Nicolas Hojac?

At the age of 15, Nicolas Hojac joined the Swiss Alpine Club. Since then, he has been pursuing his passion for mountaineering. A native of Bern, he has already climbed numerous peaks. He even once climbed his local mountains – the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau – all in a single day, within 11 hours and 43 minutes. Always on the lookout for new challenges, however, Nicolas Hojac is also drawn to more remote regions such as Patagonia, Pakistan and China. This autumn, Nicolas plans to explore uncharted areas of the Shivling in the northern Indian section of the Himalayas.

How much time do you currently spend mountaineering?

That’s difficult to say. I train for around 15–20 hours a week. My three pillars for preparing for mountain tours are strength training, endurance training and mental training. I do my strength training at the climbing or bouldering centre. I build up my endurance through running sessions and mountain runs, for example. I do actual mountaineering more for specific projects. I’m much less of a mountaineer than, say, a mountain guide. The reason for this is the risk factor. If I were out in the mountains much more often and training there, there would still be a residual risk, and that adds up over time. With this in mind, I try to always train in a safe environment and, above all, to only go into the mountains for specific projects.

I find it fascinating that the risk factor has such a strong influence on how often you’re in the mountains.

I never used to give it much thought. I tended to tell myself, ‘There’s also a residual risk in road traffic, for example.’ I’ve actually lost quite a few colleagues in the mountains now, and that really makes you think. You start to give the risk more thought. Now I see it like this: we have a residual risk. We don’t know how great that residual risk is, but you can influence the risk by being less exposed when you’re out and about. That doesn’t mean you can’t do any more cool projects, but rather that you manage the risk more consciously.

How do you prepare mentally for mountain tours?

During training, I try to find and push my mental limits. Most of the time, I only need 50 per cent of my abilities on the mountain. That way, I stay within a safe zone whilst climbing.

What projects do you have lined up? Presumably, you weren’t able to go ahead with some planned projects because of the pandemic?

Yes, 2020 was a bit of a nightmare. We’d actually planned to go to Peru, but had to cancel because things were pretty chaotic there at the time.

In July this year, I’ve got a film project with Alex Honnold. For that, we’ll be spending about a month in the Chamonix region and the Dolomites. Then in the autumn, we’re planning to head to India to climb Shivling, which is a bigger project. At the moment, it still looks difficult to get entry, so we’re hoping that will change by autumn. We’re assuming that it’ll be possible once we’ve had our jabs. Once you’re up on the mountain, you’re more off the beaten track; so Covid’s less of a problem there. The bigger question beforehand is whether we’ll get a visa to enter India.

Have you stayed in Switzerland since the start of the pandemic?

Exactly. Last summer, for example, we did the Spaghetti Tour in Zermatt. That involved 18 four-thousand-metre peaks. It was an alternative programme and great fun too.

How do you prepare for particularly challenging and/or longer mountain tours? Do you step up your training before such tours?

When it comes to mountaineering, there are, on the one hand, expeditions where you know exactly when you’re flying out. You can train with that in mind. During the journey there, you try to keep fit. In some cases, though, it doesn’t make sense to keep training. When you’re heading up to high altitudes, the best way to acclimatise is by doing nothing. During the year, for example, when I have a project in the Alps, it’s difficult to set an exact date due to the weather. Consequently, you can’t tailor your training to a specific day. A track and field athlete, for instance, knows when they have a competition and can tailor their training to that date. With mountaineering, things often turn out differently than you expect, because you have to reschedule, or the trip comes about quite spontaneously because conditions are favourable. In that case, you might take a rest day before the trip begins and work out a strategy for the climb. I’ve organised things so that I have a fixed training plan before expeditions, but I usually end up deviating from it. That’s just a bit of a special feature of mountaineering.

Do you change your diet before a mountain tour?

A few days beforehand, I usually do some carb-loading by taking extra maltodextrin to top up my carbohydrate stores. Hydration is very important to me, as I’m normally someone who doesn’t drink much; I always have to force myself a bit. I do make sure I’m well-nourished before a project.

Which of your many mountain tours has stuck in your memory the most?

One of the tours that has stuck in my memory the most was the one with Ueli Steck in 2015, when we set the speed record for a rope team on the Eiger North Face. That was certainly a tour that I remember particularly fondly. He was a good colleague of mine and, sadly, is no longer with us. That climb is an experience I associate very strongly with him. It was, of course, also very intense – climbing through that face so efficiently and quickly. We climbed through that face in 3 hours and 46 minutes. It really is quite an experience when you have a perfect day and the conditions and your own fitness are just right. That climb also came about on the spur of the moment; it wasn’t planned. That was really cool too.

How important is nutrition to you?

Nutrition is important to me, but I take a fairly relaxed approach to it. I make sure I eat enough. I always have a bit of a problem in that I tend to eat too little, or on long days I skip meals because I don’t have time for them. I was brought up to eat my five portions of fruit and veg a day and to eat a balanced diet. I still try to stick to that habit. But when you live on your own, it’s just harder to find the motivation to cook a proper meal than when you’re at home with your family and someone’s cooking for you.

What do you usually eat on a mountain tour? After all, you have to carry everything you eat with you. That probably makes quite a differenceto what sort of food you take with you, doesn’t it?

I always make sure that I enjoy eating what I take with me. Generally speaking, your appetite decreases at high altitudes. If you’ve taken something with you that you don’t really like, you usually just don’t eat it. At 6,000 metres or so, energy bars and gels no longer work for me. For one thing, the bars get very hard in the cold, so you can hardly bite into them. For another, your sense of taste is different at that altitude. That’s why I tend to eat things like cheese, bread, dates, nuts, biscuits, crackers, dried meat or salami.

Here in the Alps, though, I do sometimes carry gels or energy gummies with me. When you’re doing sport at this altitude, you realise you need to eat less because you feel hungry and more because you’re experiencing an energy slump.

Does the weight of the food make a difference to you?

Yes, especially on speed projects, it really does matter how much weight you’re carrying. Generally speaking, I always carry too much; I’ve hardly ever made it back home without any food left.

Water certainly makes up a large part of the weight too. You mentioned earlier that you tend to drink quite little. Do you have a drinking schedule to counteract that a bit?

Yes, well, I try to drink something every hour. Depending on the route, you have more or less time to drink regularly. So it can happen that you don’t drink anything for up to two hours. It’s always difficult to estimate how much fluid you need. On the Spaghetti Tour, for example, we drank about one and a half litres over roughly 13.5 hours. Compared to the amount a cyclist drinks, for instance, that’s very little. But in mountaineering, you can’t – and don’t want to – carry much more fluid with you.

How do you manage your diet after a strenuous mountain tour?

I make sure I eat something quickly after the exertion. Sometimes it’s also difficult to eat anything after very long and strenuous tours because you’ve got almost no appetite. It’s strange, because you know you should be really hungry after hours of exertion. I still try to drink and eat enough to replenish my energy stores.

Have you researched these things, or have you mainly learnt them through your own experience over time?

I figured all that out for myself quite quickly. I’ve carried various foods with me, planning to eat them during the tour. But during the tour, I didn’t end up eating them because I didn’t like the taste. Of course, I’ve also picked up a few tips from colleagues, but a lot of it is simply a matter of trial and error. That said, people’s experiences with nutrition in the mountains can vary quite a lot from person to person.

How do you manage your diet when you travel to faraway countries? Do you eat local food or cook your own meals?

We actually always eat local food. In Patagonia, for example, we had to buy and cook everything ourselves. In the Himalayas or in India, there are usually cooks at base camp who do the shopping and cooking. They generally cook a mix of European and local dishes. When it comes to food, it’s always tricky to avoid catching illnesses; the journey there is particularly tricky. Once you’re up at base camp, it’s usually no longer an issue, as the cooks are well versed in hygiene rules. During the journey there, you make sure to always wash your hands thoroughly and avoid risky foods. You spend a long time preparing for such trips, and it would be very frustrating to arrive at base camp with food poisoning. I’ve had food poisoning twice whilst travelling. Once, on the way to Pakistan, I ate some lentils that had gone off. The other time was in China, when we’d eaten something from a street stall. The whole team was affected, including the local team members there. So it wasn’t just down to our inexperienced stomachs.