06/15/2026
I went to Utah to climb a mountain.
More specifically, I showed up for the 29029 challenge at Snowbasin with spreadsheets, pacing plans, nutrition bags, hydration strategies, backup strategies for my backup strategies, and a healthy amount of confidence.
Then the mountain punched me directly in the face.
Not metaphorically. The vertical gain at Snowbasin is the kind of thing that makes you question your life choices before breakfast.
I thought the challenge would be fitness.
It wasn’t.
The challenge was presence.
For years I’ve told myself I was comfortable with ambiguity. I’ve navigated acquisitions, layoffs, and startups. I thought I knew what it meant to live without having all the answers.
Somewhere on the side of that mountain I realized something.
Being comfortable with ambiguity is not the same thing as being present.
The lesson didn’t fully land until the middle of the night.
Headlamp on. Exhausted. The mountain disappearing into darkness.
For the first time all day, I couldn’t see the summit. I couldn’t see how far I had left to go. I couldn’t see the switchbacks above me.
I could only see the five feet of trail illuminated in front of me.
And for the first time all day, that felt like enough.
I climbed the equivalent of Denali. Not Everest.
That’s not what I’ll remember.
I’ll remember the volunteers who somehow found the right words at exactly the right moment. The coaches who gave so much of themselves to complete strangers. The conversations on the trail. The silence. The suffering. The beauty of watching ordinary people keep moving long after they wanted to stop.
I came home with blisters, sunburn, a chest full of mountain dust, and a lesson I wasn’t expecting.
Sometimes the next step is enough.
Sometimes that’s the only thing there is.
