Find Your Hiking Buddy
My 12th climb up Snowbasin this month should have been the hardest of the whole event. By that point, I'd been awake and hiking 26.5 of the last 29 hours.
I'd slowed to a two-hour pace, my legs were shot, and I still had two ascents left on a mountain that had spent the better part of the last day trying to break me.
Yet it was the easiest climb I did.
Not because the mountain got gentler. Because I climbed it next to my friend Gabby. We talked the whole way up about her work, the stuff she's building, and life.
She was moving a little faster than was comfortable for me, so I pushed to keep up. When I needed to breathe, we slowed. I barely noticed the near-vertical pitch that had wrecked me eleven times before. Same mountain, same tired legs, completely different climb. The only thing that changed was that I wasn't doing it alone.
That should be impossible.
The mountain didn't change. My legs didn't change. So why did the hardest climb turn into the easiest one?
In 2008, a research team led by Simone Schnall took people to the base of a steep hill and asked them to estimate its steepness.
Some stood alone. Others stood next to a friend. The ones with a friend beside them judged the hill as less steep, and the longer they'd known that friend, the gentler the slope looked. Same hill. The presence of one person literally changed how hard the climb appeared to the brain.
That's why isolation is where drift wins.
Alone, every hard thing looks steeper than it is, and the voice that says "this isn't worth it" has the whole room to itself.
It's the reason you'll skip the workout you do solo but show up for the class. Why the project dies on your own laptop but ships when someone's waiting on it. Good people don't climb the mountain for you. They shrink how steep it looks, so you'll actually take the next step.
So this week, take the hard thing you've been grinding alone and put a person next to it. Not to do it for you. To be in it with you.
Pick the one you keep avoiding - the workout, the habit, the project, the call you keep pushing. Then choose your version of climbing next to Gabby.
Text one friend and ask them to do the 6am workout class with you. Book the class instead of the solo session. Send the project to someone today and tell them you'll have your part by Friday.
One move that turns a solo climb into a shared one.
You'll feel the slope change. That's not in your head. It's how the brain is built.
You weren't built to climb in isolation. The size of what you'll attempt is set by who you'll attempt it with. Go find your Gabby.