Episode 197: Reaching Mt. Everest and Overcoming Adversity in Life with Eva Steinwald (Part 2)

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everybody and welcome back to the Alopecia Angel podcast. I am so excited to be with you here today. Because if you’ve been listening along, you heard from Eva last week and this week you’ll hear from Eva again. It’s me and Eva doing a Q&A and it’s so remarkable all the things that you don’t know going into something, all the things that you wouldn’t believe that she had to go through and endure. Throughout her journey of summiting Mount Everest and coming back. Because the thing is, it’s not just about training, it’s not just about getting the coaches, it’s not just about doing all the things, including the investment piece of it. It’s also the aftermath. The aftermath of all these things, the aftermath of coming back and how she chooses to live life, how she chooses to move forward, how she chooses to continue her journey, not just somebody in the mountains around the world, but then also all her other health life goals that she has.

And so this Q&A session that we have together is quite remarkable and astounding and gives you so much perspective, so much insider perspective that in reality no one talks about. And we actually had a quick conversation, she and I, about how the same thing would happen for hair loss or the same thing would happen for a cancer diagnosis or maybe even pregnancy or going through labor, is that, you know. Reading things from a book is one thing, living it is another, and then having to go through it is so so different.

And so this is one of the big things. That I like to say, you know, you can read as much as you want about alopecia or about learning how to swim, but until you’re in it, you don’t know until you’re actually living through it. You don’t know all these other sides ramifications and you know, next steps and the things that happen after you heal or during the healing process that you wouldn’t know until you’re actually in it.

And even then, sometimes that’s confusing and this is why working with somebody knowledgeable, with expertise, with results is so critical to your success. So here we go. Listen to this conversation between Eva and I. Feel free to like, subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast so that others can also find Alopecia Angel: Awaken to Hair Growth podcast, so that they can also too be inspired by women of all ages, races, and ethnicities, healing from alopecia, conquering mountains, and doing so many wonderful things in the world.

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Johanna: Just so the listeners know, Eva and I, we met in person before this podcast a couple weeks ago, and I could talk to her forever. We sat at a coffee shop for 3 hours

straight. And some of the things that I wanna pull from that conversation and bring into light, especially when it comes to adversity, especially when it comes to challenges, it’s what are some of those, like first steps? I know people are grieving every day, whether it’s for a loved one or a pet, or for a certain situation or what have you. What are those top 3 first steps that somebody should take in order to mitigate the grief?

Eva: That’s a beautiful question. For me, for example, my husband, I am who I am because of my husband. When you’re together, for 26, 28 years, you become a person and he supported me and I know I am who I am because of him. And I want to honor what he has done for me. And by honoring him, I want to live the life that he wants me to live. I know he would not want me to be sad, even though there are still days. I’m sad, and that will always be there and that is good and that’s okay. And you should feel sad because something was removed, something is missing. I do believe that if you give back, even if you volunteer, if you give back, whatever, let’s say you have something special that you can teach or you can give back. I believe by doing that, you feel a reward and to go past the mourning.

For me, I like to have a feeling of I’ve made a difference in someone else’s life and that makes me feel good. So for me, I do that through my karate school. I do that, through my climbing, helping people. I guide now off and on and it’s so cool to watch people reach a summit. It makes me feel good because I’m making a difference in their life. I take the focus away from me and I put the focus on someone else. And the focus can be a younger child, it can be an elderly person. It could be adopting a pet that is in a humane society, but your focus goes to something else and you’re making that person, that pet whatever, give them a better life. And I think that helps stepping outside the sadness, because the sadness will be there, your heart is going to be heavy and it’s gonna take time.

We all mourn for different times, some shorter, some longer, but I really, for me, it’s putting my focus on someone else. I have a client right now, a real estate client, and she lost her husband and I’ve known him and she’s so devastated and she came to my presentation and just to see a smile on her face, I know I touched her. And I know it made a little difference there just to have that smile and I’m hoping that she will pass that on and do that for someone else. ‘ cause it’s gonna help her with her mourning. Find something, find a hobby, do something new, step outside your comfort zone because that’s when you feel alive. And that’s, I think, will help with the mourning.

My husband was a Vietnam vet, so I have his flag, in my living room. And you know what, I talk to him every day. Every day, and I go up and I say: Hey Pat, good morning, this is what I’m gonna do today. And I share my day with him and I know he’s right there next to me, whatever I do. If I’m having a tough time on Everest, guess who I spoke with? I spoke with him and he gave me strength because that’s who he is. He always gave me strength. And even though he is not here in person, I feel his presence.

Johanna: That’s beautiful. Going back to Everest, I was attracted to you, your story, your accomplishments, the sense of adventure, all of it because I love to travel and

because alopecia for me was my Mount Everest. Hearing your story multiple times now about climbing, probably not something I would venture to do.

Eva: You know what? I didn’t think of doing it 5 years ago, 6 years ago, you never know.

Johanna: Yeah. However, I wanted to give ballpark estimations of what this training look like time-wise, like the investment of time, ballpark wise with tickets, flights, the private helicopter recouping, let’s say any medical situations that came before, after, during the personal training, the performance coach, the this, the that. Like all these things, ballpark, like how much that financial aspect was. Just to give a little taste to our listeners, and then let’s move into the gut health, because I know that was like a big part that again, no one realizes like this is what’s gonna happen. And as I was telling you, even with labor, no one tells you the nitty gritty. So here I kinda wanna expose the nitty gritty ever so slightly and give the listeners like the rundown because I don’t think that they will be able to fathom everything that what you’ve and I have already discussed at the coffee shop.

Eva: No, absolutely. And those are great questions and nobody really talks about that at all. To give you an idea, when I decided to climb Everest, I did not have the money, but I had a rental and that rental was for my retirement. But I was so passionate and determined and a little crazy. I’m like: I’m gonna sell that rental. I’m gonna use that money and climb Everest. So that’s how I got my money to climb Everest. But to give a perspective of the cost, you can climb Everest for as low as and I’m just talking about the expedition, nothing else $65,000 up to $125,000. If you go with a $65,000 expedition company, it is gonna be a small company that doesn’t have a lot of logistics, probably not a lot of success rate. And I will say probably some of the bodies that I passed, the new ones, they probably went with one of the smaller companies.

I decided to go with a very reputable company. And there’s 4 really reputable companies that do Everest. I vetted them, I researched them, and my expedition initially was

$70,000, but then I decided I wanna ensure, or at least increase my chances of summiting. So I opted for a private Sherpa guide. And so that became more expensive. And so that was now like $85,000. And that’s just the expedition itself, nothing else. It’s not the flight. You have to give insurance and the insurance has to include evacuation and the cheapest insurance that you can get for everest is $15,000. That’s just the insurance. And then of course the flights going there, flights coming back.

When I got sick and I had to fly low, the helicopter ride going down to Lukla and coming back, and my 3 nights was $4,000. That was the 3 days, cost me $4,000. But I knew that was the investment that I was willing to make, because I had invested myself in to get well you have equipment. The summit suit that you see everybody wearing, you look like a little Michelin guy. Those run anywhere from $1,800 to $3,000. Your boots alone are $1,500, so it adds up and adds up. The other thing that I opted for is additional, you get so many oxygen tanks and I thought what if we’re stuck? And maybe there’s bad weather, I wanna make sure I have enough oxygen because I don’t wanna go make it almost halfway and then have to come back down because I don’t have enough oxygen.

So I opted to buy more oxygen tanks and that was like $6,000. It was all to ensure or increase my chances for success. So that right there, if you add everything up, came to

$110,000 just to summit a mountain.

But for me, it’s not just to summit a mountain, it’s investing in myself because I know as I summited and came back, I came back as a different person. My mindset is different, my life is going a different direction, and that’s where I wanna go. So I was willing to do that, invest in myself. The training you normally wanna start like a year, at least a year. If you have had some conditioning already, a year is good enough. But if you’re very new to this, you need at least 3 years of training. And that includes you have to climb high Mountains. So a reputable expedition company won’t take you unless you have done like Denali, Aconcagua or some other peaks in the Himalayas, where the $60,000 expedition companies, they don’t really look at that, they just want someone to be on the expedition. So to be able to climb High Mountains takes some time.

But once I decided I’m doing Everest, I had a strength coach and a high altitude coach. The high altitude coach, his specialty is getting climbers and runners prepared to be able to perform in a high altitude. What I pretty much did is I said: Martin, I’m handing you over my body, you tell me what to do with that body and I’m gonna do it every single day. I trained every single day from beginning of July through April 10th before I left, not missing one single day. That was interval running uphill, climbing with pack long distance, like 2 hour, 3 hour running, strength training with my other coach. It was nonstop. I looked at my work schedule and I rearranged my work schedule to fit my training schedule. My training schedule came first, and then my work schedule came second because I knew that was the only way.

But the other thing I knew is if I miss one day, just one day, I’m reducing my chances of summiting. I was so determined not even to miss one day, because that was cheating myself If I miss one day. Or I’m supposed to run 2 hours, I’m just gonna run an hour today, you’re cheating yourself. You gotta do the whole thing no matter how painful it is, you gotta do the whole thing be cause when you cut corners, the more corners you cut, it becomes you cheat yourself. So I was not willing to do that.

Johanna: I love listening to you. I absolutely love listening to you. There’s so many takeaways in hearing you just speak. And there’s so many correlations to anything we want in life. Whether it’s Everest, whether it’s losing weight, whether it’s, getting our hair back, whether it’s anything else that we want to conquer it, it does take determination, it does take investing, it does take discipline, it does take mindset, it does take all these things and resilience. Yes, rearranging schedules. Yes, making ourselves a priority. Yes, making the yes goal the priority, and not cheaping, not just cutting corners, you get what you pay for.

We all know that. So you wanna go with a $60,000 or $65,000, Sherpa company. Then potentially, as you said, that was those dead bodies that were up there, the fresh ones. And that’s gotta be like a horrific site feeling and emotional what was going through your head when you saw that? I see dead animals like skunks on the road. I’m like: Oh, poor

thing. But at the same time, these are actual bodies, these are humans. It’s and you start thinking who’s contacting their family. It’s probably the Sherpa or the company or the agency or the waiver that they signed. Who’s gonna bring the bad news to these people? Because it’s not like they died in war, they died from a hobby, from a goal that they had.

Eva: When you walk past the body, and it was someone that had the same goal as I did. I’m assuming they trained hard, they made an investment and they didn’t make it. For me, I never, ever thought after I felt good, after I got sick and I felt strong and I was recovered. I never had any doubt that I’m gonna make it up and I’m gonna make it down. I just had no doubt. And they say 80% of success on Everest is the mindset. Because your mind starts wandering. You’re at base camp for days on and you have nothing to do. You’re in your tent and you’re maybe reading or you’re snoozing and then you start thinking. Wow, what am I doing here? Am I really able to do this?

I remember I was at camp one on rotation. I saw Everest for the first time because you can’t see Everest from base camp. I saw Everest and I was at 19,000 and Everest is 29, so another 10,000 feet. I looked up for nanosecond. I’m like: What are you doing here? What are you thinking? How are you gonna get up there? Yeah, but only for a nanosecond, because you can’t let that take over. When that takes over it’s over. You can just go home.

Johanna: So how do you fight off the doubt, the fear, the yeah, the what ifs and all these other negative thoughts. Like what are some of the tactics that you use to fight off all these things away?

Eva: I am someone that really lives in the moment. So in the martial arts, in karate, I asked my students, I asked, what time is it? And they all look: Oh, it’s three o’clock, it’s five o’clock. I said no. What time is it? It’s 3 o’clock. I said: No, the time is now. The time is now, it’s not a minute ago. It’s not what’s gonna be in 5 minutes, you only have now. So I’m someone that lives in the now. Even though I know I have things going on that’s gonna happen next day, but I focus on what is going on right now. Like our podcast right now. I have so many things going on before the podcast, after the podcast. No, my moment is with you, and that’s how I overcome like that fear of and that doubt. What are you doing here?

And then though I looked at it at Everest, I looked up, I’m like: W hat an opportunity I have to be here. How many people have that opportunity? Very few. It’s a small percentage of the population and I am here and I have the opportunity to summit Everest. What an honor is that? And really embrace that, and be humble about it. Be humble, because it’s, it is something special, but I don’t think it’s something that you should go around and brag about. You should be proud of it. And when people ask, then you can share, I’m more humble about it than: Hey, guess what I did? Yeah.

Johanna: Let’s put this into perspective. Do you have any numbers or statistics on male versus female age wise? because I know at the time in May, 2025, you were the oldest North American summiting Mount Everest ever in the world.

Eva: I broke a record of 18 years and the oldest American female, north American female was 61. And when I summited I was 63. And then 5 days later, this amazing lady from Dallas 66. Yes, she summited, she’s very humble. The average age is about 35. The average age is 35 up to 40. Now, there have been about, I would say about 7,500 summits, 7,500. And out of the 7,500, about 900 are female. So it’s really a very small percentage of females that have summited. And even when I think of my expedition company, there were 50 climbers. Out of the 50 there were maybe 5 females and not all 5 summited. There were 3 of us at summited out of the 5.

Johanna: And out of the statistics of like people who attempt how many don’t make it.

Eva: So this year was a very low success rate. This year success rate was 45%. So of all the people that got permits only 45% summited this year. This year there were 271 climbers. This not does not include the Sherpas or the Porters, but 271 climbers, the usual success rate is about 65% So this year was somewhat lower and it’s probably because of less windows to actually summit. And the day that I summited on the 18th was the busiest day of the season, it was the busiest day. And there were lines of people, but not everybody made it up. But you also wanted me to talk around a little bit about gut, the gut health?

Johanna: Yes. Because I think this is also a side effect, of somebody where potentially no one really talked about and then there’s a aftermath.

Eva: Yes, everybody talks about the training that you do. The climb, the summit, nobody talks about what happens when you get home. You don’t really hear about that. And there’s 2 things that happen. First of all, the mental part. You just accomplished something that is so out of the ordinary, crazy, you worked so hard all year long and you come back into your regular world and you’re like: I don’t fit into this world anymore. It’s weird, you float around and you’re actually a little bit depressed. You start to get a little depression because you accomplish something and you’re still trying to process that, but now you have to go back to your regular life, work, this, that go grocery shopping and it’s weird. I walk around, I’m like: Is anybody gonna recognize that I actually did Everest? You know?

It’s just so weird. But I’m just like everybody else in the grocery store. When you come back, there’s definitely a mental part. It takes time to get back into your real world and then also find a new purpose. The physical aspect, there’s 3 things that actually happened to me. Number one, I came back with diarrhea. I mean like diarrhea. And it wasn’t like a day, I had a whole week of diarrhea and I’m like: Oh my gosh, did I like catch something on the way home? Did I get a parasite? Because you can catch parasites there. And so I went to the doctor, I got checked and he said: You’re fine. There’s nothing unusual. Your stool is fine. I’m like: Something’s going on.

So I spoke with my high altitude coach and he said Eva, when you enter the death zone, which is 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet, your body starts dying off. I thought, the only thing that I need up there is the oxygen. Once I have the oxygen, my body’s gonna be fine. That’s the only thing that’s lacking. But what’s actually happening is your body in general is dying off up there. That’s why it’s called the death zone. Even if you have oxygen, you can’t stay up there four or 5-6 days, your body’s not gonna survive. So my bacteria in my gut died off. I came home, had diarrhea. I had to rebuild my gut, the whole system, to make sure that it comes back to normal. It took me about 3 weeks to get back to normal my digestive system.

The other thing that happened was after about a month, I went for a run and my feet. The bottom of my feet were really tender and I thought, I’m using my same running shoes. I’m not, haven’t changed anything. What’s going on? And it was painful. So I spoke with my coach again and he says, those big boots that you wore, they are stiff. They don’t move. You were in those boots like 5 weeks. So the bottom of your foot states stiff and now you’re trying to run, it’s not flexible enough and that’s why it’s painful. So I did exercises with a ball rolling, massaging them just to get over that. After I knew what to do, it took me about 2 weeks where my feet were back to normal.

The last thing that’s interesting is lots of the training is running for Everest, running and heavy backpack hiking. When I came back about a week later, I thought: you know, I feel pretty good. I can go for a run. So I went for a 30 minute run. My legs didn’t know what to do. I felt like a moose, a moose that runs really fast with legs flop. My legs were like moving all over. I’m like: This is like so weird. I’m like, I don’t know. This is just not right. And my coach said: Your body, your muscles atrophy, your ligaments, everything changes up there and you slowly have to rebuild all that where you’re back to normal. And now it’s been a little bit over 4 months. I did a half marathon this Saturday and I finally feel normal.

I remember 2 years ago I was reading an article and the gentleman summited Everest and he said: Yeah, it took me like 3 months to recover. And in my mind I’m like: Why 3 months? I did Denali. It took me like 2 weeks to recover. How does that work? It’s the death zone and you’re above 18,000 for 6 weeks. And your body, our body is not made for that at all.

Johanna: It just shows you though how resilient the human body is. Sure, you have to support it. Sure, you have to rebuild it. But it’s all possible at any age. It’s so possible at any age. And the thing is, tying this into health, I have clients who have 3 autoimmune diseases, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re 65 or 25. Or even 6 I’ve seen throughout immune diseases in a 6 year old. And so the body can heal, the body can do so many incredible things. It’s just, potentially training, potentially supporting it, potentially doing things a different way, potentially recovery. It’s so possible and I think that’s a big key takeaway from this discussion with you.

Eva: Oh, I agree. And age really has nothing to do with it. You need to listen to your body. If you think about I didn’t sleep for 40 hours and I felt strong. Oh my gosh, I felt strong the whole way and I never once though thought about my God, when was the last time I slept? I never thought of it once. It came to me, when I did my organized my presentation for my Everest climb, because I put it together and I’m like: Oh, I need to look at the timeline. And I was looking at the timeline and then I was adding up the numbers from one camp to the next and where I slept, where I didn’t sleep.

And then I added up the numbers and it came to 40. I’m like: That can’t be right. So I had to do it again. I did it three times because I’m like, it’s impossible that I did not sleep for 40 hours. And it’s not like I just laid around for 40 hours. I pushed my body to the max. It’s amazing how resilient your body is to recover and to heal itself because it wants to survive. That’s the ultimate goal of the body, is to survive. It doesn’t wanna die.

Johanna: Absolutely. So today, coincidentally, I don’t know if you saw on the news, but there was this Polish guy.

Eva: Polish guy, yep.

Johanna: Summited Everest with no oxygen, had his skis, thought he was in the Alps and just skied down all the way the base camp or something.

Eva: It’s pretty amazing ‘ cause my coach my coach is Czech and he actually knows him, he knows him. He’s a very humble guy and he does everything very clean. So his brother, the climber’s brother was following him with a drone. So that’s how the footage happened with the drone. And then as he was skiing down, because I was trying to figure out how did he make it down? And so he did not go down the normal route. He went down a different route, but his brother with the drone told him okay, you need to stay more to the left, stay more to the left. Okay, now you can go straight down. Now you can go to the right because otherwise it would be impossible. And it would be deadly.

And the Khumbu ice fall is all just like boulders and everything. So he skied off to the side but very slow. So he told him exactly where to go. But the blessing, as you can watch him, there is powder snow. And very rarely does Everest have snow like that. So he hid it in the right window to have good snow, be cause usually it’s very windblown and very hard and icy, and he had powder of all things. Just the accomplishment of making it to the summit without oxygen is huge. This last season when I was there, there were only two climbers that did it. Others turned around. So only 2 made it this last spring and then to ski down.

Johanna: So he skied down all the way down to base camp?

Eva: All the way to base camp.

Johanna: How long did it take him to ski down?

Eva: I don’t know. I need to see, I need to check. I’m pretty sure he stopped in between to get some food and to I would imagine to maybe rest a little bit. I don’t know how long it took. So for me from the summit, so from 29,000 to 21,000, it took us, let’s see, 12 hours, something like that. But then we slept an hour a night, and then we walked all the way down, and all the way down was another maybe 5 hours. So he probably made it, I would think, like in 6 hours.

Johanna: That’s incredible.

Eva: I told my coach like two weeks ago, I said: Martin, I wanna find a summit where I can take my skis up and I can ski down. It’s not gonna be Everest, I can tell you that right now. But, so we’re brainstorming that what kind of a high summit would be a good one? A skiable one to ski back down, because I’m a good skier, it’s just another challenge that would be cool to do. But it’s not gonna be Everest, that’s for sure.

First of all, what you do I think is so beautiful and so special and so important, and I thank you for what you’re doing because you are bringing light to life and that is so important nowadays. So thank you.

Johanna: I appreciate that. That’s so huge to not settle. I mean for me, that’s probably the biggest thing, like to not live life with no regrets, and if you really want something, go for it. If it’s hair, if it’s health, if it’s Everest, if it’s scuba diving or anything else, let’s just go for it. It’s there for us.

Eva: It is there for us and it was given to us.

Johanna: And it’s such a choice as you say, it’s a choice to be bald. It’s a choice to have your hair, to have your health. It’s a choice to have the performance coaches and to do all the things that’s necessary or to be the couch potato at the house. Like it’s really our choice.

Eva: I let them, my audience know, whatever you choose, it’s okay. It’s your choice. But then don’t expect your life to be different and to change, because it’s not going to change. It’s a choice. And if that’s okay with you, absolutely enjoy it. But to make a change, to have a different life, you have to make different decisions. Yeah.

Johanna: Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for your time, for your story. I appreciate you so much. And whenever you want, I’d love to grab coffee again.

Eva: Yes, when you’re back. I mean from your travels, absolutely let’s do it. I wanna stay in touch.

Johanna: Thank you so much again.

Eva: Wonderful. Thank you.

Johanna: Thank you so much. Take care.

Eva: Yep. Bye.

Johanna: Bye.