Who’s Ready to Do Hard Things?

This should be easy, right? Pick a rating system and it’ll tell you what’s hard: double black diamond ski runs, 5.14 climbing routes, Class V whitewater. Except, not really. I’ve skied plenty of double-expert-only runs that were for me, in those conditions, easy. In my not-very-illustrious climbing career, I never got near 5.12, making 5.14 functionally impossible. And as for big whitewater, I’ll happily jump in a boat with an oarsman who knows what they’re doing, but me, by myself? Yeah no.

Degree of difficulty is highly subjective. It’s ever-changing. In outdoor adventure, relative hardness is determined by a sweeping set of conditions, from the weather to the state of the snow, ice, water, air, dirt, or rock. There’s also the preparedness, experience, fitness, and mental fortitude of you and your party. And not just that—you also have to weigh the interpersonal dynamics of your team. On a trip to Greenland, I spent two weeks in close quarters in a very small boat, where someone kept stealing communal chocolate and hoarding it for themselves. You wanna see a trip get hard, fast? Add a mystery candy bar thief and watch what happens to morale. Expedition history is filled with efforts that collapsed under small transgressions blown into team-wide wars.

The closer you squint at hard, the squirrelier it gets. If it’s physically strenuous but you’re enjoying it, is that still hard? If there’s no risk to life or limb, does it legitimately rise to the level of hard? Completing my to-do list feels a lot tougher than going for a two-hour trail run—does that make it hard, or me lazy? What if it’s physically easy but cognitively hard? Or physically easy and emotionally fraught? Pretty quickly, you realize difficulty is bound up in the mental, physical, emotional, social, and situational, all interacting with one another, each element jostling for importance.

And yet, as I look back over a lifetime of sufferfests, challenges, successes, and failures, it’s almost always the mental factor that takes center stage. In 1924, Nobel Prize winner Archibald Hill proposed the human heart is protected from injury by the brain, an idea that eighty years later was developed into the central governor theory. It argues our bodies are more capable of extremely arduous efforts than we think, but our brains make us feel fatigued, slowing us down, so we don’t cause permanent harm to ourselves. Further studies have shown it’s not quite that black and white, but still, I suspect we’ve all experienced situations where we’re convinced we can’t go one more step, but somehow we do.

This suggests we can dig deeper if we just dig deeper. It’s certainly been my experience. The physically toughest days of my life have come when I wanted to quit but felt I had no choice but to continue, when I ignored the self-talk and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Many times, I have laughed at myself and quipped the AJ mantra, the deeper you get, the deeper you get, ya big knucklehead, and kept moving until I was out of the hole I’d dug for myself. Likewise, when I’ve needed to bail, the decisions have been self-evident and free of second-guessing.

As I think about what we do in the field, overcoming hard things doesn’t seem to be a problem at all. We do or we don’t do; either way is fine. The bigger issue, if you’re the sort of person who wants to take a big swing, is overcoming the inertia and comfort of daily life in the first place. As Mark Twain wrote in 1897, long before algorithmic addiction, “It’s easier to stay out than to get out.”

I believe this. I have a very long list of trails I want to ride, peaks I want to scramble, canyons I want to explore, and as each year slides by with goals unaccomplished, I kick myself for succumbing to the easier path of day trips and the somnolent drone of modern living. If day trips make you happy, awesome. But I still want those moments where I doubt, then surpass, where I suffer, then break through, where I feel—and am—my best.

So. The next twelve months will be different. The plan is taking shape. The calendar is penciled in. You with me? You ready to do hard things?