THE HARDEST MILE

I love getting caught up in a good story. The romance, the wonder, the risk and the reward.

But I don’t want to just read or write about adventure; I want to go on one too.

It’s why yesterday I found myself 7,500 feet in the air climbing a volcano for the 3rd year in a row. Okay full disclosure, it’s a dormant volcano, but that bad boy went boom once and left a giant crater in it’s wake!

It’s the last part of the journey that is both the most difficult and scary to me. You see the trail runs along the ridge of the crater and at least once gets within a few feet of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of feet deep crater.

As I walked that portion of the trail I felt fear grip my heart and not for the first time I wondered If I’d ever put myself through this again…

But let me take a step back.

The way up the mountain is approximately 5.5 miles long. The first 4 miles are hard, at that point you are about 7,500 feet in elevation. But things get much more difficult that last mile and a half as you ascend another 2,000 feet in elevation; face the crater edge, and scramble up the boulder and scree covered mountain trail.

You’re already tired, you’ve already been hiking for a few hours, and yet you haven’t reached your destination yet, you can’t even see your destination yet.

On this particular day, the smoke from forest fires somewhere, are clouding the skies and obscuring the peak somewhere up above.

The hardest mile.

Isn’t this so much like life?

We’ve all learned that on the journey of life, not all miles are created equal.

Some miles are harder than others… Some days, weeks, years are harder too.

We can’t always predict when it will happen and it’s not always the last mile either.

Sometimes it’s the first steps on the journey as we pray for courage to begin.

Sometimes it’s the middle when we feel so lost and alone, too far from the shore to turn around, but unsure if we can make it to the other side.

Sometimes it is the last mile, the darkest moment before the proverbial dawn bursts forth.

That hardest mile on the mountain felt so much harder than others.

• Time slowed.

• Progress slowed.

• Self doubt and fatigue grew.

It’s worth it.

But as you’d guess, once I reached the mountain top, the pain, the fear, that hardest mile and all the other ones, they were all worth it!

But honestly I don’t really make the hardest mile of the climb for the mountain top.

I do it for all the other ordinary days of the year, the moments I’m sitting safe at my desk writing just like this, and then I smile as I remember that I climbed through the hardest mile.

But even that’s not really what it’s about. It’s not just about what I did, what I accomplished. It’s about what climbing through the hardest mile makes me…

An adventurer, an overcomer, a warrior, someone who is brave enough to try and strong enough to win.

The question.

What will you do during your hardest mile AND who will choose to become?

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See you next Thursday!

Geno Schmelzer,