Every year, thousands of people of all ages, backgrounds, and fitness levels climb what I refer to as a Meaningful Mountain.
A Meaningful Mountain is my term for a voluntary physical challenge that takes you out of your comfort zone and builds greater fitness, discipline, confidence, and mental toughness in the process.
Whether you are a person recovering after major surgery, someone who wants to adopt a more active lifestyle, or an elite athlete who wants to reach even higher, these experiences make you stronger and reinforce your motivation to take care of yourself.
Meaningful Mountains can alsohelp you create lifelong memories with people that you care about. Many people complete challenges with friends and family.
If your friends or family are unable or uninterested in climbing the mountain that you have in mind, they can still come and cheer you on during your event.
My family came and supported me when I competed in the Obstacle Course Racing (OCR) World Championships in Canada in 2016. The event was so much more meaningful to me because of the time that we spent together the day of the event and the day before and after.
Any adventure—especially a challenging one—is more meaningful when it is experienced with people who matter to you.
Identify a challengethat you are 50-75% confident that you can achieve with your best effort and focus.
Why 50-75%?
Feeling more than 75% confident is a sign that it’s probably not bold enough for you and that achieving it would probably not be very meaningful for you.
Feeling less than 50% confident is a sign that it’s probably too bold for you to pursue at this point.
There are many options for which mountains you could climb. There are challenges for all ages, for all fitness levels, and for every distance imaginable.
There are also powerlifting competitions, bodybuilding/physique contests, and obstacle races of various themes, distances, and difficulty.
Instead of participating in an organized event, you could also tackle your own physical challenge, or you could try to set a new “PR” (personal record) for a specific exercise or activity.
Meaningful Mountains will challenge you, and that is what makes them so rewarding.
As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
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