Monday, May 23, 2022 • 17min

Nims Purja: The Nepalese mountaineer who breaks boundaries for a living

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Nepal-born Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja is the first Gurkha to serve in the United Kingdom Special Forces. After 10 years of service he decided to give everything up to climb all the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000m in seven months – the last person who achieved the feat took seven years. Hear his story, in his own words, about his humble beginnings and his big dreams. This long read from RedBull.com is written and read by Josh Sampiero. Make sure you hit follow to be the first to hear the latest episodes. Discover more about Beyond the Ordinary at redbull.com/beyondtheordinary.

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Josh Sampiero

Nirmal Purja

Transcript

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Josh Sampiero

00:05

The

Nims Purja

paradox. A conversation about humble beginnings, dreaming big and always believing that anything's possible with

Nims Purja

, the Nepalese

mountaineer

who breaks boundaries for a living.

00:21

This long read is taken from

RedBull.com

and is written and read by Josh Sampiero. To make sure you don't miss the next episode, subscribe to Red Bull's Beyond the Ordinary podcast wherever you get your podcasts from.

Nirmal Purja

00:39

I'm

Nimsdai

, born in

Nepal

. I joined the

Gurkhas

when I was very young. I was the first-ever

Gurkha

to pass the selection for

United Kingdom Special Forces

selection. I served with UKSF for 10 years and in 2019, you know, I decided to give everything away and, you know, sort of climbing all these big 8,000m peaks within seven months.

01:07

So, yeah well, that's the sort of brief I can give I guess. I'm there to break boundaries: that is my job, in human performance and endeavour. That is my job.

Josh Sampiero

01:23

This is

Nirmal Purja

, usually known as

Nims

, and some of the things he’s done really defy belief. Like climbing two of the world’s tallest peaks – back-to-back, with no sleep. Or tackling

Everest

while on "vacation" from his former job in the

Special Forces

. In his own words, he’s here to break boundaries, and those boundaries are really high up.

01:51

The mission he began in 2019 was grandiose in every respect: climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000m mountains, a feat first achieved by the legendary

Reinhold Messner

in 1986. The last climber to do it took more than seven years.

Nims

wanted to do it in six months. To do that, he’d need to skip the weeks-long period of acclimatisation and recovery that normally lets people climb only one or two such mountains a year.

02:24

The name he gave to this ambitious undertaking raised eyebrows from the start. What he called "Project Possible" seemed anything but. Yet he achieved his goal of climbing all those mountains in just 189 days. You can watch his documentary "

14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible

" on

Netflix

, out now.

02:48

To get a better understanding of the kind of person who even attempts such a thing – keep listening.

Nirmal Purja

02:55

Okay, so for those people who don't know, I climb in the big mountains of about 1000 m peak. So the peaks of over 1000m are called the death zone peaks because over there the oxygen is so less and is so thin that human body is literally dying and that's my playground, and that's where I operate, so this is what I do.

03:20

It's about being yourself, being honest, be happy. You know, we have so much stress on this kind of, you know, extremely risks taking sports that when you come down with us, like, we just want to have fun.

Josh Sampiero

03:36

"Fun" probably isn’t the first word you would associate with what

Nims

does for a living. "Extremely difficult and dangerous" is more what comes to mind. However, if you were to spend any time with him, one thing would become immediately clear: this guy is happy with where he’s at – but he’s even happier when he’s in the middle of a multiple-day mountain-climbing sufferfest.

04:02

The young

Nims

was never afraid of a rumble in the schoolyard.

Nirmal Purja

04:05

I didn't take shit from anybody and even at a young age, I was fighting, I was scrapping.

Josh Sampiero

04:11

The presence of two older brothers, both of whom made it to the elite military force known as the

Gurkhas

, may have helped that tendency – but there was not much of a question. The fight was in him from the start, even if climbing mountains wasn’t.

04:27

When someone achieves their life’s dreams at a young age – and for

Nims

, it was to honour his family by serving in the military – you shouldn’t be surprised when that person suddenly needs a new dream and a new goal. Leave the obvious mountain climbing metaphor by the wayside here – it’s important to understand what kind of soldier

Nims

was, and actually, still is.

04:51

Competition for

Special Forces

is fierce and selective – and most of the time, the tryouts and subsequent training takes care of the selection on its own. Over 90 percent of applicants don’t make the cut. The

Special Boat Service

, where

Nims

served, is for the elite. There’s no question this is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

Nirmal Purja

05:14

I broke that barrier of being the first

Gurkha

to be in the

Special Forces

. You know, it's crazy because it's like the real James Bond, you know. One minute you're flying out of the plane, second you're diving, third, you are in the war. It's always action. So, that was my dream job, but I left my one dream job for another dream job to change the world in a different way.

Josh Sampiero

05:37

It’s hard to say where and when the seed to become a mountain climber got planted in his mind. But whatever the inspiration was, when

Nims

got his first taste of the high alpine, he was addicted – and it was clear that the world’s tallest mountains were in his future.

05:55

On his first venture into the high alpine on

Dhaulagiri

, he wanted to remain undercover. He and his climbing partner kept a low profile, ditching climbing gear for casual clothes like shorts and sandals. It got to the point where people were asking who they were just because they looked more than a little clueless.

06:16

For his first

Everest

summit, some years later, the modus operandi hadn’t changed. With only a couple weeks of military leave, he went to the bank and fibbed about needing a car loan so he could pay the fees to climb. He arrived at base camp late in the season, with little time to acclimatise, and told everyone there he was a medic back in London.

06:39

After his summit, he didn’t post pictures or share the news – in fact, he kept it well under wraps. Never mind the fact that he was now the only currently serving

Gurkha

to summit

Everest

– he’d done it without official approval. Not that following the rules has ever really slowed him down.

06:59

Word got around about what he’d done, and the reaction was more impressed than annoyed. But that was only going to be the case as long as he kept having success. So in case you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, it’s worth sharing a story that

Nims

himself is in no way reluctant about telling – when he overestimated himself on that first climb up

Everest

07:22

Upon arriving at Everest’s Camp II,

Nims

decided to push himself 150m higher just to test his reaction to the altitude. The reaction was not good, and he found himself with High Altitude Pulmonary Edema.

07:38

It’s worth talking about what can go wrong at high altitude. Forget falling off a rock or sliding down ice or snow (although that can happen too), simply being there is dangerous. Humans like oxygen in their air, and the higher you go, the less there is of it. At Base Camp, you’re breathing 50 percent of the oxygen than you are at sea level. At the summit, your body (and brain) is getting 33 percent of the oxygen that you’re used to.

08:11

For mountaineers, the thing about bringing people to 8,000m is that you’ve got to have immense self-belief to attempt something like this, yet be incredibly humble to survive. Despite the simplistic name, decisions made at that altitude are rarely straightforward. There’s no "safe" or "unsafe", merely'less risk "and" degrees of significantly more risk ".

08:37

As a

mountaineer

Nims

has to occupy both ends of the mental spectrum: full trust and belief in himself and his decision-making abilities, and the capacity to know when the mountain is, in his own words "simply bigger than you are".