Home

10%

Wei-Li Shao

The Edge

By 29029 Everesting

February 27^th, 2026

On mile 10 of the final day at TRAIL Park City, I caught a rock and went down hard.

My arm swelled up almost immediately. It was so bad that at the next aid station, the medics thought it might be broken. It didn’t hurt like a break, though, and after a quick assessment, they cleared me to keep going.

Then I fell again.

Again.

And again.

Every time I tried to run, I face-planted.

I couldn’t trust my footing. My confidence was gone. The rest of my group had already finished.

I was alone, watching the cutoff clock close in.

Oh s***, if I don’t pick this up, I’m not going to make it.

This wasn’t the first time I had to relearn how to move.

Sunset over mountain range. Golden light illuminates layers of distant peaks. Foreground shows a dirt path with tire tracks and grassy edges.

In 2016, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

I was getting ready for work, squeezing in a quick workout, when I felt a strange rippling sensation down my right side. After a trip to the hospital and a few scans, a brain tumor that required surgery was discovered.

Post-operation, my surgeon came in.

“It was dicier than I expected,” he said. “I had to remove more of your brain than planned.”

His job had been to save as much of my function in my right hand and foot as possible.

My job would be everything in between.

That was my first real edge: a place where I didn't know what I would get back.

I had to relearn how to walk.

How to brush my teeth.

Even how to pick up a cup.

Anything involving my right side became a conscious act. Even now, I don’t have full sensation or proprioception on that side. I don’t always know where my right side is in space unless I actively look at it.

Even though I needed to recover, that was never the goal for me.

Recovery meant returning to who I was before.

But I wasn’t trying to get back to some previous version of myself.

I wanted to become someone better than before.

Without the surgery and without the struggle, I might have stayed the same…

It may sound strange, but I believe suffering is a gift.

When you lose something as basic as movement and have to fight to get it back, gratitude stops being a concept. It became a reflex for me.

Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

So the question shifted.

Not 'can I get back to where I was,' but instead:

What else can I do?

I’d never run a marathon. Never even a 10k. I’d always been active, but I had never deliberately tested my limits.

That’s when I found 29029.

Close-up of stacked wooden signs with printed text,

Runners gather at night outside a building lit with string lights. People stand and walk on the lawn near wooden picnic tables. The sky is a deep blue.

I’ve always secretly coveted failure.

I am drawn to that edge where success and failure are both plausible outcomes.

In 2023, I signed up for 29029 Snowbasin, looking for that edge.

I found it.

When night fell, I got scared. With limited sensation on my right side, I rely heavily on sight to keep my footing.

In the dark, every step felt uncertain.

I went to a coach and explained my situation, perhaps leaning too heavily on the safety angle.

“If it's a safety issue, I can’t tell you to keep climbing.”

There it was.

The perfect exit.

I stepped away from the edge and pulled myself off the mountain.

But quitting didn’t sit well.

I realized it was never actually a safety issue.

It was a mental one.

So I signed up again.

It wasn't about chasing the Red Hat.

It was about returning to the edge.

A group of hikers treks uphill at night using headlamps and walking sticks. Mountains are visible in the background. The hikers wear numbered bibs. String lights glow in the distance.

Night scene shows scattered figures with lights in the dark. A bright headlight shines in the upper right, and a purple glow appears in the lower left.

The following year, I gave a talk at work about what I’d learned from failure on the mountain. When I said I was going back to Snowbasin, ten of my colleagues signed up with me.

Now, the edge wouldn’t be private.

It would be shared.

We trained together. Checked in. Held each other accountable.

Life was already busy, and adding long training days forced us to get intentional. There was no room for drift.

When you prepare for something big, your life gets dialed in.

Close-up of a Snowbasin ski run sign with

At my return to Snowbasin in 2024, all eleven of us finished.

The Red Hats were great, but what mattered more was this:

We had chosen to search for the edge together.

And no one had backed away.

After Snowbasin, I wanted to find that edge again.

I pitched TRAIL Park City to the group from Snowbasin, and six of us signed up.

Another year of intentional training. Early mornings. Long weekends. Fitting miles into lives that were already full.

We weren’t just preparing to finish.

We were preparing to stand at the edge.

Day 1 was restrained. We respected the edge we were chasing.

We felt good, and adrenaline was high.

But we held back.

Managed heart rates. Ate on a schedule. Let people pass us without picking up our own pace.

We were being conservative because none of us had done a marathon before, let alone three in a row at high-altitude.

Finishing strong, the pacing had paid off. We felt good.

Ready for more.

Day 2 was temptation.

This time, we flirted with the edge.

Pushing right up to it.

Newfound confidence inspired us. We opened it up. Pushed harder. Moved quicker. Found flow at altitude.

And by the end of the day, we felt it.

TRAIL doesn’t forget what you did the day before.

The miles were stacking up.

Blurred figures pass by colorful banners labeled

Day 3 was accountability.

And somewhere around mile ten, accountability turned into something else for me.

Pain.

That's what the edge felt like.

That was where the first fall happened.

And then another. Each impact stacked up.

With so many miles to go.

Hikers walk along a dirt trail on a steep, green hillside. Mountains rise in the background under a clear, blue sky. Trees line the left side of the trail.

The old loop started…

I’m hurting. I’m in pain. I’m struggling.

So I flipped it.

When you talk to yourself in the first person, you spiral.

When you switch to third person, you create distance.

Hey Wei-Li, you’re in pain. What are you going to do about it?

The focus shifted from suffering to response.

Not this is hard, but how am I going to handle this ‘hard?’

Now I wasn’t thinking like the guy who had hit the ground countless times. I was thinking like someone capable of more.

And when that wasn’t working, I went back to 2016.

To staring at my right foot and telling it to move.

To relearning how to walk.

Compared to that, this was a choice.

Instead of obsessing over pain, I pivoted to gratitude.

I get to be here.

I get to be on this horizon.

I get to push my limits.

The pain didn’t disappear.

But it moved to the background.

I picked up the pace for those final miles. Not because it stopped hurting, but because I decided what would matter more.

I had finished TRAIL.

Later that year, I texted the group.

“If you were to describe your personal and professional life this year, is it better or worse than previous years?”

Every single one said better.

“Was TRAIL the reason?”

They all said yes.

Pre-surgery to now, I’m better.

Not recovered.

Better.

TRAIL didn’t prove that I survived brain surgery.

It proved that I'm willing to stand where I don't know how it ends.

Where failing is possible.

Where quitting is tempting.

Where failure is real.

That's the edge.

And I choose it.

Wei-Li Shao celebrates finishing a trail race, holding a yellow

Footnotes

Voice: Wei-Li Shao. Writing: Cirque Studio. Photos: Megan Dunn, Brendan Ladd, Cirque Studio

Button Label

FootNotes

Voice: Wei-Li Shao. Writing: Cirque Studio. Photos: Megan Dunn, Brendan Ladd, Cirque Studio

Lance Friedman

Wei-Li Shao

The Edge

FootNotes

Do One More

No Emotion, Just Motion

Brian Goldstein

The Foundation for the Summit

Tom Turcich

Higher Together