Where to Look When Climbing a Mountain
I always start these events with very lofty goals, like I’m going to do something special. And after a point of body deterioration, the goals get evaluated down to basically where I am now—where the best I can hope for is to avoid throwing up on my shoes.
- Ephraim Romesberg, nuclear engineer and ultrarunner, 65 miles into the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race through Death Valley, as quoted in Born To Run.
On Friday, I summited Colorado’s Mount Huron, the smallest of what are known as the 14ers, the mountain peaks rising more than 14,000 feet. At 14,005 feet, Mount Huron is the shortest of the 14ers but offers an incredible panoramic view of the Rockies.
I made the trek with Evan and Josh, my fellow co-founders of The Wilds, and Billy, my best friend from college. The 3.5-mile trail up started with a relatively smooth forest trail, a series of wooded switchbacks crisscrossing their way up the hillside. We then reached the tree line and, after a brief interlude across an alpine meadow, began the real ascent.
The way became steeper, less forgiving. Each step got progressively more difficult. It was less like walking, more like climbing a poorly finished set of stairs.
I found myself reciting a sort of mantra:
Look at your feet.
Our impulse as humans is to keep our eyes on the prize. But that’s bad advice on the way up a mountain. To keep looking for the summit—and continually measure progress against the perceived distance—is to invite the mountain to mess with your head.
There’s a story about the notorious Hanoi Hilton, the POW camp where American soldiers were kept through the Vietnam War. It was a brutal place where prisoners were tortured and starved, and many didn’t make it out.
A pattern emerged over the course of the war as to which soldiers would survive, and which would succumb. The determining factor was hope.
Some prisoners were seemingly optimistic. They would pick a date, saying, “I’m going to be home by Christmas…or Valentine’s Day…or the 4th of July.”
That kind of hope doomed the optimists. Once the date came and went, that prisoner had to either choose a new date or give up hope. There’s only so many times a person could repeat that process before they ran out of dates—and hope.
The soldiers who persevered didn’t pick dates. They also had hope, but their hope was of a more general nature. They held onto a belief that they’d survive the ordeal—no matter how long it took. They focused on making it through the day. Then the next.
As pilot Jim Stockdale put it after the war: “I never lost faith in the end of the story.” That attitude—the stubborn insistence on believing one would prevail, no matter how long it took—became known as the Stockdale Paradox.
Obviously, I’m not comparing the difficulty of walking up a little mountain with the difficulty of surviving a Vietnam POW camp. I’m just thinking about the power perspective has to shape our experience.
When I began walking up the mountain, I wanted to look up, hoping to see the summit. I wanted to be optimistic, to estimate how much time was left to the summit, how many steps before we could rest and enjoy. As the going got tough, though, that became a bad habit. Because looking up didn’t show how close I was—only how far I still had to go.
That’s why I started reminding myself to look at my feet. If I intended to get to the top, then looking up did absolutely no good. It had no impact on how quickly I got up the mountain, and it made me feel worse about what I was doing right then.
The better course was to focus on taking the next step. If I could do that consistently, I could feel better about the process along the way to the summit.
A local couple had passed my friends and I on the way up. They reached the summit well before we did, and the man was beginning his descent as we were approaching what we thought would be the end of our climb (eventually).
“Is it worth it?” I asked, making a joke about whether we should keep going.
“Ya,” he said, “It’s another 10 feet.”
Sure enough, we’d already made it.