What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done? What did you learn from it that you would pass on to others?

On Saturday my friend Colleen and I climbed South Sister, the third highest peak in Oregon at 10,358 feet. It was a 13 mile round trip and took us 10 1/2 hours. While I’ve always been

athletic and loved the outdoors, nobody who knows me would have said prior to Saturday, “Oh, Alison, she’s a mountain-climber”. And that’s the beauty of it. If I can climb tall mountains at age 52 then quite possibly you can, too. (Let’s remember this is the year in which children started asking me if I’m someone’s grandma.) Or your mountain might be a hard project, or a resolve toward personal growth, not a  literal mountain. My experience is that the same principles apply.

1. Choose the right mountain, or the right hard thing.  I didn’t choose Mount Hood (Oregon’s highest peak) to climb yesterday. I chose a mountain 2,000 feet higher than Mount St. Helens, the one we climbed last summer. If your hard thing is a work project, it might have been assigned to you without your having any choice. But often we can negotiate, for example, asking if we can add a certain component to our assignment to create more challenge. Or, if the challenge already seems too great, we might ask our boss if a skilled coworker could help. Which leads to the next tip.

2. Get help and give help. Climbing mountains and doing hard things are about interdependence, in my view, even though our culture thinks in terms of independence. Colleen planned the trip for the two of us – she is excellent at trip-planning, having planned and executed Habitat For Humanity trips for ten years. The young fellow at Columbia Sportswear helped me find the right hiking boots for my bizarrely narrow feet (he had narrow feet, himself, and knew which boots would lace in super-snug without buckling into  folds). My husband researched which hydration pack had good consumer ratings. You get the picture. Lots of help.

On the other side of the equation, giving help is one of my favorite things to do. Colleen wasn’t feeling too well on the final ascent in the unstable volcanic scree, so I carried her pack up for part of it. When we debriefed the hike at our Devil’s Lake campsite that night, I realized that helping her out had been my best part of the day.

3. Train and prepare steadily. Mountains and hard things are all about preparation and making ourselves stronger. I trained for about two months by hiking the steep south slope of Mount Tabor, near my house, up and down, over and over each night after work, packing 1.5 gallons of water on my back. It hurt on the ascents, but in a good way. Which leads to the next point.

4. Embrace the discomfort — if it’s the right kind of discomfort. My experience is that climbing a mountain physically hurts. It breaks the boundaries of what a body normally does, the same way that a hard project breaks the boundaries of what our minds normally do. But I had no emotional reaction to the pain I felt on South Sister, because I was already familiar with it from my training. It was the right kind of discomfort. The wrong kind of discomfort to endure would be a sprained ankle, or an abusive boss or work environment. I don’t believe in enduring that kind of pain. It needs a different strategy; it needs to be fixed.

5. Pace yourself. Take breaks. Do this both with your training/preparation, and during the climb itself. Don’t blaze out of the starting gate with your mountain/hard thing, because that will leave you crawling at the end, and maybe unable to finish. Breaks let us catch our breath and regather our strength. Parcel out your energy the way you’d parcel out the food in your refrigerator if you had to make it last all month. Climbing a mountain and doing a hard thing are matters of putting one foot in front of the other, again and again. Keep showing up for the work, whether or not you feel inspired.

6. Stay vigilant to the end, not just to the peak of the experience. It’s normal to feel upon summitting a mountain that  you’ve reached the goal, and now you can relax, because there’s only a little left to do. But reaching the summit means your hike is only halfway over. If you haven’t paced yourself, you’ll be so fatigued you could make a disastrous misstep on the descent. Plenty of people have died on descents. Remember that the summit, or the most exciting part of your project, is not the end of your effort. You’ve got to see the whole thing through.

7. Keep updating your mental map with new information.  I learned this crucial principle from the excellent book “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales. Like this post, he writes about outdoor challenges with an eye for the larger life-lessons that apply in any hard situation.

 8. Have humility concerning the mountain/hard thing. A mountain and its weather, for example, are infinitely more powerful than we are. (This is a prime reason that mountain-climbing is a spiritual activity, in my view.) Do not get ego-involved, at least not when making decisions. Thinking this mountain/hard thing is the ultimate proof of your character or abilities is an example of being ego-involved (our character and abilities are shaped by all of our choices and actions). Doing a great deal of talking ahead of time about what you are hoping to accomplish may not be the best idea (doing is better than talking). Being humble and not ego-driven leads into the next principle:

9. Be willing to change your plan. If Colleen or I had gotten injured on the mountain, we would have cancelled the plan to summit, and gotten down off the mountain together. The same would have been true if a snowstorm had suddenly materialized. I actually experienced this in August ’75 when I was backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas with a church group. I felt spooked – it can’t snow in summertime! this is dangerous! – but our leader stayed calm and led us safely back out the next morning. He had more experience with mountains than I yet have. If your mountain is a hard project, has the leadership climate in your workplace changed? Do you need a different project strategy in response to that?

10. Rest, reflect, and consider what mountain/hard thing you will embrace next. I feel wonderful today: light, strong, confident. I’m taking a few days off off from running, hiking or biking, to rest and center myself. I’ve been talking a little with Colleen and another friend about the next mountain. Mount McLoughlin, the tallest peak in Southern Oregon, which is my beloved work territory? Mount Adams, much higher than our past climbs?

Actually, what I want from these beautiful mountains is a small piece of their strength. There is no conquest of any kind going on here.  My climbs are pilgrimages to places where I feel close to God. My friend Cindy, a mountain-climber and world traveler, wrote about “practicing spirituality through the soles of one’s feet”  in the thesis that earned her an advanced degree from Stanford University. Cindy’s a wise woman.

What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done? What did you learn from it that you would pass on to others?