Kacia Fitzgerald

You're Not Supposed To Be Able To Do It Yet

By 29029 Everesting

May 27^th, 2022

When my fiance, Seena, and I signed up for 29029 Utah, we were in a season of looking for personal growth. We thought it would be a fun way to see what were made of!

We wanted to pick a challenging something to do. I’d done some half-marathons and things like that, but I wanted to pick something that was so challenging that we wouildn’t be able to do it yet. We wanted something that we’d need to train and prepare for - something that would stretch us.

We wanted to become the kind of people that could do something as crazy as 29029.

We’ll get to a whole new level of what we believe we are capable of.

We knew with certainty that who we were when we signed up would not be able to do it. We knew we’d have to become different people - improved people - in order to summit that mountain.

We were up for that challenge.

We didn’t know it at the time, but 29029 would be the closing the chapter of one of the most challenging years of our life.

6 weeks prior to the event, Seena’s Dad passed away.

We lived in Austin at the time, but spent 10 weeks prior to his passing at a hospice with him in Seattle.

Every week, the training plans would come out, but we were just in survival mode - we had more important things to deal with. We weren’t doing any of the training.

But we still had it in our head that we’d tackle 29029 no matter what. We decided that if we got a month out from event day, we’d find a way to train for that last month at least. We were still going to climb that mountain!

It was a season of challenges and grief for us. We tackled it together, and while still working through the grief, found ourselves on the slopes of Snowbasin, feeling majorly under-prepared while tackling a whole new challenge.

When we arrived in Snowbasin, we were terrified. The nerves were the real deal!

Everybody you meet at 29029 is so insanely passionate about it. They are hungry about life, and all about self-improvement.

The first person we met when we arrived in Snowbasin was as passionate as the rest, and the first thing they asked us was, “How did you guys feel about the crazy treadmill challenge?”

Seena and I looked at each other (we had not done the treadmill challenge) with a glint of insecurity in our eyes.

We cannot let where we are right now, and how we compare to others with their training, mess with our mindset.

That first conversation opened the door for some self-doubt. Maybe we didn’t train enough. Are we qualified to do this?

We had to work quickly to remove those doubts before the took hold. We made it about our identity. We are the people who follow through with the thing we said we’d do.

It didn’t matter how other people trained. It didn’t matter how we had been able to train. We were here to climb a mountain, and that’s what we were going to do.

We took the decision to quit off the table, right from the very beginning.

The morning of the event, I woke up an hour before our alarm was set. It was like Christmas morning!

The hype-talk at the beginning had us fired up, and we went out the gate really, really, REALLY fast.

We did our first 4 ascents without stopping before taking a break for lunch. The initial adrenalin had worn off now, and it was starting to feel hard.

Of course we kept going, but we began to realize the magnitude of the effort the next 9 ascents would demand from us. I had to be really cautious about the thoughts I was allowing into my mind. It would have been easy to tell myself I’m not trained, because it was true - I wasn’t!

I had to find a thought to substitute in - a thought to force out any doubt.

We might not be trained, but we are mentally strong.

To keep the mental vibes in check, we set the ground rule that we weren’t allowed to complain about how hard it was. Of course it was hard - that was obvious - but we weren’t allowed to talk about it.

Instead, we’d say something like “Whoa! This burns! Look at me going for it! I’m such a badass!”

It might sound silly, but it was really helpful in keeping our mind in the right place.

The repetition of the mountain added another element to the challenge. After a half-dozen ascents of the exact same route, we knew exactly where every single hard part of the mountain came.

We were constantly reframing our thoughts around that repetition. Instead of worrying about the steep climb coming, we’d reset. It wasn’t there’s a hard climb coming, but instead, it was there’s two more bends, one small climb, and then an aid station where we get to have a snack!

As we continued to climb, we looked for evidence that proved we were capable of doing hard things. It was how we kept ourselves moving forward.

We had just gone through a hard season that we weren’t sure we’d get through, but we did. And now we were in Snowbasin, struggling with something else hard. It was lining up to be a perfect conclusion to that chapter of our life - the difficult season of life coming to an end.

We made it to ascent #13. Seeing that finish line while being so exhausted - so run down and so beat - and knowing we pushed through it all to get there was such a proud moment. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been that proud of doing something.

As soon as Seena and I crossed, we instantly burst into tears. It was a tidal wave of emotions after such a hard season in our lives.

The finish line, and that Red Hat, were reminders of how mentally capable we were. We’d dealt with grief. We’d managed that challenge, and now we’d managed a totally different challenge. We conquered the mountain!

Coming out of a grief season, the accomplishment felt that much larger.

A lot of people get caught up in the question of what is 29029. They get caught up in the numbers: thinking it’s about climbing 29,029 vertical feet, thinking it’s about climbing up the mountain x-amount of times until you’ve reached the summit.

All of that’s awesome, but that’s not what 29029 is. 29029 is all about the growth as a person that you feel when you’re doing something that you’re not sure you can physically do.

Completing 29029 made me question the stories that I’ve told myself about what I’m capable of. It gave me confidence. It helped me recognize the beliefs I had that might have been holding me back. It made me rethink so many pieces of my life. It made me better!

If people who are reading this are questioning whether they should do it or not, I hope this story reminds you that you’re not supposed to be able to do it yet. That’s the whole point when you’re signing up for it.

29029 will push you to grow into the kind of person who can do something like this!

The distance between where you are now, and where you’ll be when you get to the point you can climb the mountain is the point of 29029. The process of getting there is the point of doing it. It’s an experience you’ll never regret.