My story

Thirteen years of one objective at a time

In June 2013 I walked out of Le Puy-en-Velay and kept going for two months, all the way to Santiago de Compostela. Six weeks later I was in Ho Chi Minh City buying a motorbike I had learned to ride three days earlier, then riding it to Hanoi and back — forty days, sleeping wherever people would have me.

Everything since has followed that shape. Pick something that looks slightly beyond me, train until it isn't, go. On Mont Blanc in 2015 the glacier day on the Mer de Glace was the first time I had ever worn crampons; five days later I was on the summit at dawn.

Great friends and reliable ropemates are different qualifications.

Aconcagua stopped me at 6,500 m in January 2025 and it still stands. The Matterhorn's Hörnli Ridge stopped me at roughly 3,800 m that August — I learned why, went away, climbed three Valais summits to prove the fix, and came back on 24 August 2026 as the first party on the mountain. That arc matters more to me than the summit photo.

The rest of the week I work in tech at Google. That is not a footnote. It is why the planning is thorough, why deadlines get met, why a brief comes back on time and why the debrief is written rather than promised. Every one of these trips was built around a full-time job, which is why the record is steady rather than spectacular — one objective at a time, for thirteen years.

From Annecy, in the French Alps. Living in Tokyo, which puts the Japanese mountains an early train away. Available worldwide.