Its really great what you have done , challenging your self and all that.
The brain i believe is designed to protect us from going beyond our thresholds but the reality is ,its beyond this threshold that true joy lies..
I really love people who push themselves in life and please keep posting more.
Thanks, @kwakumax. As an engineer you might be able to relate to this than maybe others could - I realised my mental training came from preparing a huge proposal for an infrastructure project, with teammates, over months and months where we simply had to put one foot in front of the other and make sure we were farther ahead at the end of each day (in the right direction - a great proposal). What I'm trying to say is that the mental training was every bit as important, if not more, than the physical training. The discipline to listen to our guide when he would tell us to slow down was essential, even if we really wanted to get to camp early. He knew we had to manage our acclimatisation to the increasing altitude carefully over days.