George Herbert Leigh Mallory was a romantic.
He was also a teacher, a WWI veteran, and graduate of Magdalene College. And if you know him at all, you likely don’t know him for any of those things, besides what his romanticism drove him to do. You might know him for something famous he said, “Because it’s there.” You definitely know where he died, even if you don’t know that he died there — Mount Everest.
Mallory made his famous quip — because it’s there — in 1923 after already twice attempting Everest’s summit. He’d try for the summit one more time in 1924. No one knows if he made it. When famous mountaineer Conrad Anker found his body in 1999, Mallory had a broken leg and evidence of head trauma. He had laid at 26,740 feet for 75 years, 2,292 feet below the summit. The broken parts of his body suggest that he fell during the descent. Maybe after reaching his goal.
George Mallory was a romantic and an explorer who aimed his heart and his body at the roof of the world, a place that many believed was earth’s final frontier. His efforts created the momentum that led Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay to summit Everest for the first time in 1953. When they did, a frontier closed, pulled from uncertainty’s shroud, added to the annals of human striving and accomplishment.
But I don’t believe it was the final frontier, nor do I believe it was the frontier that any of them were truly set on exploring.
The Final, Never-Ending Human Frontier
Because it’s there is a powerful quip — a three-word sentence that says more than most paragraphs. It says far more about the man than it does about the mountain. It says more about Man, the collective male and female halves that comprise the whole, than it does about any individual. At the same time, it tells you everything about a person.
We can’t help but want to explore, we’re wired for it — some more than others. But the truth is universal, humans want to fuck around and find out. In the past, it was a biological imperative. We had to push ourselves, we had to see what was beyond the next mountain pass or at the far end of the river — finding resources for survival dictated it. But the days of exploration for survival are long gone.
Calories are cheap and so are the thrills. You can have any delicacy you desire delivered to your doorstep in less than an hour for no more effort than making a decision and pressing a few buttons. You can sit on your happy ass while living vicariously through the imagined lives of people on your TV screen; you can drown your brain in the well-curated lives of the people you follow on social media. And you can do all of that by maintaining a good-enough job that extracts time from your life and replaces it with currency. It ain’t all bad, don’t confuse my few sentences of acknowledging reality with complaining. But it all does leave a hole inside a person. Fortunately, that hole invites us to explore the final, never-ending human frontier — the human spirit.
It seems like a contradiction, but the human spirit has grown in value since it’s lost its practical need. There is little left on earth for us to explore. We’ve climbed the tallest mountain; we’ve gone nearly the full depth of the ocean. We do not have to work hard to have everything we need. That makes exploring the depths of who we are and what we’re capable of a rarity. Rare things are beautiful and they are valuable.
Things beautiful and rare draw criticism from cynics. They say things like, “Why would you want to push yourself that hard, what’s the point?” And that is where we return to the romantic notions of our friend, Mr. Mallory.
A Personal Everest
Your own Everest towers inside you. There’s no need to climb to the top of the world to show yourself who you are, to surprise yourself by finding out what’s hidden beneath your skin, rising from your guts and peaking at your heart. But you must acknowledge that it’s there. You can’t allow the cynics, whether they live in your head or are voices from the outside, to deny the spirit in you that takes the shape of a mountain. Then, you must decide to climb it. Then after you decide, you must start climbing.
And you start the climb by opening yourself to finding out the size and the shape of the mountain. Without opening yourself to all the possibilities, all of the potential outcomes, you will not truly climb. You’ll take tentative steps that look like climbing, but take you only as far as the first ridge. There is no climb without letting go and giving yourself over to the effort it takes to climb, no matter what happens. You must be willing to take the risk, to learn things you might not like, to endure, to overcome discomfort, and to trust that you’ll be someone better and different when you finish the climb. You have to let go of fear. Only then can you explore the final frontier.
Once you’re open, then you need something that pulls the mountain out of you and lays it at your feet. You need a challenge — something that asks you to endure as you explore. Then, you go. You disregard the outcome in favor of the effort, and you push yourself past the line of your comfort, then keep going. As you get well beyond the comfort line, you enter the frontier. You’re pulled back into yourself to ascend the steep ridge running from your guts to your heart.
Then you climb your personal Everest.
A Challenge
You don’t need a mountain, you just need an event that asks you to open up and lay it all out. That’s why we created the Run Carry Ruck. We wanted a simple challenge that gives people the chance to climb their own Everest. The chance to ask themselves,
How fast can I run?
How strong can I carry?
How enduringly can I ruck?
They prod a person to ask themselves one more question,
Am I willing to find out?
Answering with an honest yes is the only way to explore the final frontier. And if the cynics raise their voice again to question why, you can answer:
Because when I go home and I stand in the shower feeling the quiet ache in my body, when I feel the tension still in my grip as I grab the shampoo bottle, when my back reminds me of each step planted on the path between the start and the finish, there will be no ache in my chest, there will be no knot in my guts. Because I climbed from my guts to my heart with everything I had.
It doesn’t matter if you finish the Run Carry Ruck in forty-five minutes or two hours. When you give all you have to something, you’re left standing at the peak looking back on your internal climb, and a quiet satisfaction settles into you. You’ve explored the final frontier well, and you’re different and better for it. And you know you’ll explore further the next time, not just because it’s there…
But because you’re here.
URGENT NOTICE!
Before you head out, I’ll remind you that Algonkian is limiting us to 100 participants in the race. The best thing you can do to ensure that you get one of those spots when we open registration is to get your name and email on the pre-sale list. Do that by clicking the link below.
RCR 313 Pre-Sale
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