The Slowest Person on Everest… by Design
What Everest Taught Dawn Aiken About Preparation, Pressure Breathing, and the Thousand Little Decisions That Make a Difference
This blog post is based on the Live Q&A Session from August 25, 2026 between Recal Training founder Anthony Lorubbio and 2026 Everest Summiter Dawn Aiken: https://youtube.com/live/I4sXtQgjhVs
When Dawn Aiken stood on the summit of Mount Everest in May, she made it damn clear she wasn’t there just for the photo.
It was nighttime.
While hundreds of climbers were prepping to make their summit push during one of the busiest windows of this past Everest season, Dawn chose to leave Camp 4 early enough that she would climb largely alone and reach the summit in darkness. She knew it meant sacrificing the iconic ‘photo from the summit’ that many think of at Everest summit, but for her, that was never the point.
Dawn had been imagining herself being on top of the world for most of her life.
Born and raised in Boise, Idaho, Dawn is a nurse practitioner, mother, wife, endurance athlete, and someone who has spent much of her life doing things that, by conventional standards, should have been considerably more difficult than they were supposed to be. She was raised in and out of foster care and experienced homelessness at sixteen. As a child, she remembers telling her mother that she was going to become a doctor and climb Mount Everest.
Her mother’s response was, shall we say, somewhat less inspirational.
But Dawn never let go of that idea.
She calls Everest by its Nepali name, Sagarmatha, because, as she puts it, the name evokes something more beautiful. And over the years, Sagarmatha became more than a mountain in her imagination. When life became difficult, Dawn would picture herself standing on top of the world and ask herself a simple question: What would she do? Sometimes the answer was simply, “She wouldn’t quit.”
That mental image became a kind of north star. Everest was not something she wanted to accomplish to impress other people. She wanted to meet the version of herself that she had believed existed somewhere inside her for her entire life.
As she says: “Climbing Everest is not really one giant decision. It is thousands of small decisions made over months and years, often when nobody is watching and none of them feel particularly heroic.” Dawn describes her preparation as “a thousand little decisions,” but she is quick to clarify that those decisions did not need to be perfect.
They needed to be consistent.
And perhaps that is one of the most useful lessons from her entire experience.
The goal was never to become the perfect Everest athlete
Before Everest, Dawn was already an accomplished endurance athlete, including full-distance Ironman racing. It would have been very easy for her to assume that the fitness required for one extreme endurance pursuit would translate directly to another. After all, if you can swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a marathon in the same day, surely you are reasonably prepared to walk up a mountain, right?
Apparently, not quite.
One of the first things Dawn emphasizes is how important it was to surround herself with people who knew considerably more than she did. She worked with Mark Postle of Evoke Endurance for her physical preparation, studied high-altitude medicine and physiology, worked with physicians and other experts, and incorporated respiratory training with Recal (see below)
Want to join the next Live Workshop with Anthony from Recal? Click here: https://launch.recal.training/live-webinar-registration
Her reasoning was simple: she had no reliable internal “yardstick” for Everest.
She could measure her Ironman fitness against previous races. She could look at training numbers and understand what they meant. Everest was different. She had never spent days moving through the Death Zone. She had never had to make decisions at 25,000-plus feet. She had no idea what “Everest ready” actually felt like.
That made expert guidance particularly valuable.
Dawn told us that, had she simply found a training plan online and tried to figure it out herself, she would have gotten it wrong “in a bazillion ways.” The physiological demands were radically different from the endurance sports she already knew.
That is an important distinction for mountain athletes. Being extremely fit does not automatically mean being prepared for altitude. The mountain does not care how impressive your résumé looks at sea level.
The Lhotse Face was supposed to be miserable. Then it wasn’t.
One of Dawn’s favorite stories from Everest begins on the Lhotse Face.
Photo credit: Climbing the Seven Summits
If you have never seen it up close, the Lhotse Face is a roughly 4,000-foot wall of steep blue ice rising above Camp 2. From a distance it can look deceptively smooth and white, but up close the ice is a striking turquoise blue. Climbers ascend it using crampons, fixed lines, and front-pointing techniques, with very little margin for error.
Dawn had heard the usual stories before the expedition. The Lhotse Face was going to be brutal. It was going to hurt. She was going to suffer. She was going to have to put her head down and endure four thousand vertical feet of misery.
So she prepared herself psychologically to suffer.
Then she stepped onto the face and discovered that somebody had already kicked steps into the ice.
The Sherpa teams who had gone before her had created beautifully formed footholds that allowed Dawn to simply step upward rather than repeatedly kicking her own steps into the hard blue ice. She didn’t have to fight for every foothold. She could follow the path that other people had painstakingly created.
For Dawn, that became much more than a convenient climbing feature.
She spent the ascent thinking about the people who had made her journey possible, from the Sherpa who had prepared the route to the people throughout her life who had helped her in small and large ways. She began practicing a deliberate gratitude exercise, using each step as an opportunity to think of something or someone she was grateful for.
Eventually, that gratitude expanded to include even the people who had made her life difficult.
Some of those experiences had given her something to push against. Some had created the fire that helped her continue moving forward when things became difficult. She realized that she didn’t necessarily need to decide that everything that had happened to her was “good.” She could simply recognize that all of it had become part of the person standing on that mountain.
The metaphor was almost too perfect: Dawn was physically climbing steps that other people had kicked into the ice, while simultaneously recognizing all the metaphorical steps that other people had created throughout her life.
And that idea came up repeatedly throughout our conversation.
The preparation nobody sees
Dawn’s preparation involved far more than simply becoming aerobically fit.
She incorporated a very specific strength program designed to develop the muscular strength and, critically, muscular endurance necessary to move repeatedly at altitude without allowing local muscular fatigue to become the limiting factor. She also used blood-flow-restriction training, which became one of the more unusual components of her preparation.
The basic concept is relatively straightforward. BFR uses cuffs or bands to partially restrict blood flow to the working muscles during exercise, creating a significant metabolic stress even when using relatively light loads. For Dawn, that meant doing exercises such as walking lunges and single-leg work while her legs were experiencing an increasingly unpleasant metabolic burn.
And she became remarkably good at tolerating it.
By the end of her preparation, Dawn says she could perform an eighth of a mile of weighted walking lunges with blood-flow restriction without stopping. The exercise that initially felt almost unbearable eventually became something she could approach almost meditatively.
That mattered because Dawn came to understand that the pain of the training wasn’t necessarily something to avoid. It was an opportunity to practice staying calm when her body was screaming at her to stop.
She connected that experience directly to her breathwork training. When the discomfort became intense, she would remind herself that she wasn’t actually in danger. She would calm her mind, continue breathing, and associate the discomfort with the dream she was pursuing.
There is a subtle but important distinction here. The goal wasn’t to become someone who couldn’t feel pain. The goal was to become someone who could experience intense physiological discomfort without immediately interpreting that discomfort as an emergency.
That became an important theme throughout her Everest experience.
Why being the slowest person on the mountain was part of the plan
One of Dawn’s favorite pieces of coaching from Mark Postle was also one of the hardest things for her ego to accept.
He didn’t tell her to expect to be the slowest person on the expedition.
He told her she was going to be the slowest person.
Dawn arrived in Nepal surrounded by extremely capable climbers and endurance athletes. Her natural instinct, like that of many highly driven people, was to keep up. She was fit. She had trained hard. She was there to climb Everest. Surely she should be somewhere toward the front of the group.
Instead, Mark wanted her in the back.
The reason was physiological, not psychological. During acclimatization, Dawn needed to keep her intensity low, generally around Zone 1 and the very bottom of Zone 2. Moving too hard and too quickly could compromise the acclimatization process and increase the physiological stress associated with altitude.
There was another reason, too: Dawn needed to practice her pressure breathing while moving.
Pressure breathing is not something you can simply switch on whenever you feel like it. Once exercise intensity and heart rate climb beyond a certain point, maintaining the technique becomes increasingly difficult. So the slow pace gave her the opportunity to repeatedly practice the breathing pattern she would eventually need higher on the mountain.
Dawn admits that being at the back of the group could be a little embarrassing. She was surrounded by what she jokingly described as “thoroughbred horses,” while she was intentionally moving along behind them.
But she knew why she was there.
She wasn’t racing them. She was acclimatizing.
And perhaps more importantly, she was practicing the exact skills she would need later when the margin for error became much smaller.
Pressure breathing became one of the most important skills she brought to Everest
Dawn repeatedly returned to pressure breathing during our conversation, and it is one of the clearest examples of how her preparation translated directly into what she did on the mountain.
See below for my take on Pressure Breathing:
At extreme altitude, the challenge isn’t simply that there is less oxygen in the atmosphere. Barometric pressure is dramatically reduced, which changes the pressure gradient driving oxygen into the lungs and ultimately into the bloodstream. The respiratory system is working in a fundamentally different environment.
Pressure breathing is one strategy climbers use to increase the effectiveness of each breath. Dawn described learning to breathe deeply through the nose, fill the lungs, and then create pressure through the trunk and controlled exhalation. Her Everest guides reinforced the same technique she had practiced during training.
The important part was not learning it at 25,000 feet.
It was having practiced it thousands of times before she got there.
Dawn spent the two-week trek toward Everest Base Camp using the lower elevations as an opportunity to rehearse the technique. She could feel when she was moving too quickly because her ability to maintain the breathing pattern began to deteriorate.
That feedback became another tool for regulating her effort.
Rather than allowing the mountain to dictate her pace through exhaustion, she could use her breathing as information. If she couldn’t maintain the breathing strategy, she knew she needed to slow down.
And according to Dawn, that preparation paid off dramatically. She says she never once experienced the kind of overwhelming breathlessness she had feared before the expedition, even at extremely high elevations.
That doesn’t mean Everest suddenly became easy. It means one of the sensations she had spent months preparing for never became the thing that stopped her.
Training her response to CO₂—and training her response to fear
Another major concern for Dawn before Everest was carbon dioxide tolerance.
This is where her medical background and her interest in respiratory physiology became particularly useful. She understood that the urge to breathe is heavily influenced by rising CO₂ levels, and that the sensation of air hunger can produce a powerful alarm response.
For someone heading into an environment where breathing becomes progressively more difficult, that raised an obvious question: What happens when the sensation of not getting enough air becomes intense?
Dawn didn’t want to discover the answer for the first time on Everest.
Through her respiratory training, she practiced CO₂ tolerance and controlled exposure to air hunger. Over time, she became capable of holding her breath for four minutes without the same panic response she had experienced earlier in her training.
The important adaptation wasn’t simply the ability to hold her breath for four minutes. It was learning that the sensation of air hunger could be uncomfortable without being an immediate emergency.
That distinction became incredibly valuable at altitude.
Dawn’s coach had warned her that there could be a point on Everest when the sensation of suffocation became so intense that people would turn around. She remembered that warning during her training and used it as motivation to become familiar with the feeling before the mountain ever presented it to her.
When the moment eventually came, she didn’t interpret the sensation as proof that something was going catastrophically wrong. She had practiced it. She knew what it felt like. She knew how to regulate herself through it.
And perhaps most importantly, she knew she wasn’t going to die simply because her body was screaming at her to breathe.
That is a very different relationship with discomfort than simply trying to “push through.”
Then she broke her foot
Because apparently preparing for Everest wasn’t complicated enough, Dawn managed to break her foot ten weeks before she was supposed to leave.
And not while climbing, trail running, or some heroic training accident.
She was walking around her house barefoot in the dark and hit her foot on a weight bench her husband had moved.
This was, as Dawn put it, her first broken bone and quite possibly the dumbest way she could have accomplished it.
The doctors told her the injury could take eight to ten weeks to heal. She had ten weeks until departure.
Understandably, her first reaction was something along the lines of, “What the actual fuck?”
But then she remembered something she had asked for in her prayers. She had asked to see the top of the world, even if it took ten attempts. She had also asked that, if Everest wasn’t meant for her, she would somehow be prevented from starting.
So she decided she had to detach from the outcome.
That doesn’t mean she sat around passively waiting to see what happened. Dawn is not exactly built that way. She worked aggressively on her recovery, and ultimately returned to full training much sooner than expected.
In fact, the injury ended up giving her an unexpected psychological advantage.
After several weeks away from her hardest training, she returned stronger than before. Mark could see it in her performance metrics. The forced recovery period had demonstrated that she could absorb a significant amount of rest and come back without losing the strength she needed.
For Dawn, that provided something she had been struggling to find throughout the entire preparation process: evidence that she was actually ready.
Because that is the strange thing about preparing for something as consequential as Everest. You can train for years and still wonder whether you’re ready.
There is always another metric you could improve, another physiological adaptation you could chase, another scenario you could prepare for.
At some point, you have to trust the preparation.
The hardest decision on the mountain was deciding not to climb
Perhaps one of Dawn’s most important stories wasn’t about reaching the summit at all.
It was about staying put.
During an acclimatization period around Lobuche East Base Camp, at roughly 15,000 feet, Dawn woke up with a headache while the rest of her group was preparing to climb higher.
The temptation to go was obvious. She had traveled halfway around the world. She had invested enormous amounts of time and money. She was surrounded by strong athletes who were moving upward.
But she knew the rules.
If you’re experiencing symptoms that may be related to altitude, going higher is generally the opposite of what you want to do. Dawn had enough experience to understand that the headache might be nothing serious, but it was still information from her body that deserved attention.
So she raised her hand and said she wasn’t going.
That decision required considerably more courage than simply continuing with the group.
There is a powerful psychological trap in expedition climbing: once you have invested so much in the objective, turning around can feel like admitting defeat. Pride starts making decisions that physiology should be making.
Dawn had seen that happen around her. She watched strong climbers ignore symptoms because they didn’t want to be the person who slowed down or changed plans. Some ultimately failed to summit.
Her question was brutally simple: Do you want your ego, or do you want the top of the world?
She chose the latter. The expedition had contingency days. The schedule had flexibility. There was time to recover.
And that flexibility is one of the reasons professional expeditions build buffers into their schedules in the first place. Good expedition planning doesn’t assume that every day will go according to plan. It assumes that something eventually won’t.
Dawn was willing to use that margin rather than pretending she didn’t need it.
Everest doesn’t reward you for being in a hurry
This idea came up again and again throughout Dawn’s story.
- Go slowly.
- Protect acclimatization.
- Pay attention to symptoms.
- Practice the skills you will need before you need them.
- Accept that sometimes the smartest move is to stop.
These are not particularly sexy lessons. They don’t make for very dramatic Instagram captions. But at altitude, they can matter considerably more than how fast you can move.
Dawn’s experience also illustrates why preparation for high altitude has to be more nuanced than simply becoming “fit.”
She needed muscular endurance because the descent would eventually become brutally demanding. She needed respiratory training because breathing itself becomes part of the workload. She needed CO₂ tolerance because air hunger can provoke a powerful psychological response. She needed to practice pressure breathing because she would rely on it repeatedly during the ascent.
And she needed the judgment to recognize when all of those tools should give way to something even more basic: rest.
The descent nearly changed the story
Dawn describes the ascent as surprisingly manageable. She felt strong. Her physical preparation had done its job.
The descent was another story entirely.
She says it was the hardest physical experience of her life.
That is particularly interesting because climbers often focus almost exclusively on summit-day preparation. The summit is the goal, so it becomes the thing around which training and attention are organized.
But the mountain doesn’t end at the summit.
Every step you take upward eventually has to be taken downward, often after you’ve already spent days at extreme altitude, accumulated fatigue, depleted energy reserves, and endured a summit push that has demanded almost everything you have.
Dawn believes her strength and blood-flow-restriction training played a major role in allowing her muscles to continue functioning during that descent.
The ascent demonstrated that she could get herself to the summit.
The descent demonstrated whether her preparation had been comprehensive enough to get her home.
That distinction is worth remembering for anyone preparing for a major mountain objective. Success isn’t reaching the highest point. Success is returning safely with the experience you went there to have.
And then there was the night she reached the top of the world
Dawn ultimately summited Everest on May 20, 2026, during a notoriously busy summit window. But unlike most climbers, she intentionally chose to summit at night.
That decision was partly practical. The weather window was extremely narrow, and because of delays earlier in the season, hundreds of climbers were converging on the same opportunity. Her guide company, Climbing the Seven Summits, gave her a choice: leave earlier, climb ahead of the crowds, and reach the summit in darkness, or leave later and potentially have the more traditional summit experience.
For Dawn, there wasn’t really much of a decision.
She wasn’t climbing for the photograph.
She was climbing for the experience.
And that night, standing alone near the top of the world beneath a sky full of stars, she experienced something she describes as one of the most beautiful moments of her life.
There was something almost poetic about it.
Years earlier, as a young woman going through an extraordinarily difficult period of her life, Dawn had looked into the night sky and asked God whether there was anything left for her in this world. She says she saw an image of herself standing on top of the world.
Decades later, she was there.
At night, under the stars.
It was not the summit photograph she could have imagined as a child. It was, in some ways, something much more personal.
She had come all the way around the world to meet the person she had been imagining for most of her life.
And she finally did.
The summit wasn’t really the accomplishment
One of the most striking things about Dawn is that she doesn’t seem particularly interested in being congratulated for “accomplishing” Everest.
She sees the experience differently.
To her, reaching the summit was a humbling privilege. She feels that she was granted safe passage by Sagarmatha and that countless people helped create the circumstances that allowed her to stand there.
That includes her coaches, her guides, the Sherpa teams, her family, the people who helped her throughout her life, and even the people who kicked those literal steps into the Lhotse Face before she arrived.
She also speaks passionately about the importance of choosing the right expedition company.
Dawn climbed with Climbing the Seven Summits, or CTSS, and repeatedly returned to their emphasis on “safety first, summit second.” She also joked about their famous “no dickheads policy,” which requires prospective climbers to be interviewed and, according to Dawn, results in a significant number of applicants being turned away.
That might sound like a funny little cultural quirk until you consider what spending weeks at altitude with a group of strangers actually entails.
At 25,000 feet, personality matters.
Judgment matters.
Teamwork matters.
The person next to you may have to help you. You may have to help someone else. Your summit may need to be sacrificed because another person on the team needs assistance.
Everest is an individual dream that requires an extraordinary amount of collective effort.
Dawn understood that better than most.
Kicking in the steps for whoever comes next
Toward the end of our conversation, we returned to the metaphor that had appeared earlier on the Lhotse Face.
Dawn had spent her climb thinking about all the people who had kicked steps into the mountain before her. The Sherpa teams had physically made the route easier for her to follow. Her coaches had given her a training path. Her family had supported her. Other climbers had shared their knowledge.
Now, having stood on the summit, she sees herself in a similar position.
She wants to kick in some steps for the people coming behind her.
That is perhaps the most compelling reason to tell her story.
Not because everyone needs to climb Everest. Most people absolutely do not.
Not because everyone needs to hold their breath for four minutes, perform blood-flow-restricted walking lunges, or spend months obsessing over respiratory physiology.
The value of Dawn’s story is that it demonstrates what happens when a person takes a huge, seemingly impossible objective and breaks it down into thousands of small decisions. It shows the value of preparation, expert guidance, adaptability, humility, and the willingness to listen when your body tells you something you don’t particularly want to hear.
Most importantly, it demonstrates that you don’t need to know exactly how you’re going to get there before you begin.
Dawn remembers the people in her own life who told her she could do things that other people told her were impossible. Now she wants to become one of those people for someone else.
Her message is remarkably simple: if a sixteen-year-old foster kid from Boise, Idaho can eventually stand on the summit of Mount Everest, then perhaps your own version of “impossible” deserves another look.
You don’t have to know every step yet.
You just need to start kicking them in.
And, occasionally, you need to be humble enough to realize that somebody else has already kicked a few in for you.
That may be the real lesson Dawn brought home from Sagarmatha: the biggest mountains in our lives are rarely climbed alone. We prepare ourselves to take the steps, we accept help from the people who know the route, we learn to recognize when we need to slow down, and eventually, if we’re lucky, we find ourselves standing somewhere we once only imagined.
If you’d like to join my upcoming workshop — where I’ll be talking mostly about how breathwork training is the missing piece of most peoples’ altitude prep, here’s a link to register:
There will be time for Q&A, and I’ll be more than happy to address the above challenges — and other questions you have — during that time.
See you there,
Anthony
Founder & Head Coach
Recal Training