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“How many mountains you climb?” Cosme asked. “Oh, mucho.” He looked at me dubiously. “Glaciers?” “Zero,” I confessed. What I didn’t confess was that the mucho mountains I’d climbed were the lil ol’ peaks of the Bay Area of northern California, where I reside, and that these peaks top out at about 4,000 feet, nowhere near the caliber of the 19,300-foot glacier-capped Cotopaxi we were en route to. “Why you want to do this?” Well, I really didn’t, was the truth. But I escaped the Christmas holidays to be there, in Ecuador, to run, and a week of running at high altitude had led to this. “You have experience with crampons and ice axe?” “No.” He shook his head. “This is not good.” Many things about the expedition turned out to be “not good”: such as my putting-on-crampons skills and my ice-axe-wielding skills and my mountain-descending skills, which Cosme, my mountain-climbing guide, insisted we practice before the midnight summit attempt began. There was a lot of head shaking and Spanish mumbling from him which, gratefully, I couldn’t understand. He tethered us together once we reached the glacier, about an hour into the climb. He was in the lead. At points it was very difficult for me to breathe. Almost as difficult as I imagine it would be trying to breathe while underwater. When I had enough oxygen and lung strength to do so, I would shout out, “Mas lento, por favor.” When I didn’t have the energy to speak, I would just stop, and then feel the tug at my waist of the rope, signaling his insistence that we continue, always for good reason. I once made the mistake to stop and, at 3:00-ish a.m., shine my headlight around to see where we were, what was around. What was around was a crevasse. A very deep one. And my cramponed right foot was 1 inch from its drop. We had to keep moving, he demanded. There was no way to go but forward. So I breathed as deeply as I could, at 17,000 feet, and reminded myself that all pain, physical or emotional, is temporary: I had summitted a bad divorce. I had persevered through many challenging hours (nearly 25) to finish a 100-mile ultramarathon . I mustered all the optimism I could, but I was frustrated and cold and demoralized. I wanted to cry. Memory came to assist then, and called up a cartoon from my childhood: Chilly Willy, a penguin whose tears became ice cubes after leaving his eyes. And hidden under my red fleece balaclava, while recalling cute little Willy as I was being assaulted by a brutally frigid 30-mile-per-hour headwind, the corners of my mouth turned up, and I didn’t let a single ice cube drop from my eyes. Almost nine hours after we had left the refuge at Cotopaxi’s base to head up that sulfur-seeping icy beast, we were back, I with a pounding head and a dizzying nausea. A group of Swiss climbers were still lingering, laughing and drinking, when we entered the lodge. A man in the group, seeing my state, offered me a swig from his flask of liquor made of the “finest Swiss herbs” to help with the nausea . . . and to celebrate my first (and perhaps last) volcano/glacier summit. I accepted the flask with gratitude and, after taking a hearty swig, gestured to my Swiss savior, asking permission to pass the flask on to Cosme. Permission was enthusiastically granted. And the tense displeasure that had punctuated Cosme’s expression ever since my lack-of-mountaineering-skills disclosure softened into a smile as he too took a hearty swig.