What’s Your Everest?

Contributed by author and Terry Ambassador, Haven Lindsey.

Mount Everest. The world’s highest mountain. The Himalayas’ ultimate jewel that stands at more than 29,000 feet. There are technically more difficult climbs than Everest, but she attracts people from all over the globe with her lure of giving hikers the opportunity to stand on top of the world.

Having the financial resources to make the attempt to summit Everest is just one part of the challenge. People prepare for months and years, they sacrifice family time, and they leave jobs in order to train for the privilege of literally putting their lives on the line for what they have deemed to be their ultimate challenge. For these folks, Mt. Everest is indeed their “Everest.”

The majority of us will never see Mt. Everest, nor attempt to summit the world’s highest mountain. And yet, we all have an Everest in our lives. You do not have to scale Mt. Everest to, in fact, summit your own version.  

We know growth happens outside our comfort zone. We understand that unless we push ourselves, we won’t really know how tall we are. What can we handle? Where do we break? When do we tap into a power reserve we didn’t realize we had?

As cyclists and athletes, we can relate to putting our bodies and minds on the line—regardless of what that line is. For some, it’s buying a bike as an adult and joining a weekly group ride. For others, it’s competing in races. As we get closer to our line we grow more comfortable venturing further and farther from the ease of our comfort zones. We’re still allowed to feel nervous or afraid and sometimes may question ourselves, but as we begin to test our limits, we begin to feed on the growth that happens—the type of growth that can’t be shrunk. For example, when you ride your bike 50 miles for the first time you will forever know that you can ride 50 miles—you can’t undo that knowledge. Get caught (like I once did) 20 miles from home in a downpour and watch how you change your mindset, how you pivot your focus, and how you make it home soaked to the bone, having successfully navigated slippery pavement and traffic situations. Those experiences introduce us to a type of growth that stays with us, permanently.

Learning where that growth will stem from isn’t always clean, clear, and easy. It’s one thing to find the thing you like to do and thrive within a certain level of challenges, but it’s an altogether different thing to identify your Everest. It can be difficult to set aside the ego and identify the thing that scares us, the thing that intimidates us, the thing that we tell ourselves we can’t do (or can we?). We all have our Everest residing within us—I believe we have many of them. Some of us climb our Everest, some of us won’t consider it, and some will get stuck along the way and turn back— but she’s always there on the horizon. Your Everest isn’t going away without being summited.

I recently climbed my Everest. My version wasn’t a mountain, it didn’t even take place on my bike, but it did challenge me in a way I’ve never experienced. It required me to push myself so far that I couldn’t spot my comfort zone in my rearview mirror. I felt afraid, emotional, and exhausted yet I knew I had named my Everest and I was going to claim her. I allowed myself to feel every feeling and then I did it anyway. Months later, I’m still learning from that proverbial summit. And just like the mountain climbers who experience a range of ripple effects after summitting Everest, I am continuing to grow after the experience.

Embracing and overcoming a challenge off the bike can have a positive impact on the bike and vice versa. My Everest was not the Everest but it was every bit as steep. And, just like many mountain climbers who can’t quite articulate why they want to climb the world’s highest mountain, I wasn’t sure why I was driven to climb my version. Just because we identify our Everest, doesn’t necessarily mean we can answer the inevitable, why’s and that is okay. I trusted that I needed to do something without knowing why and like many mountaineers, I experienced the confusion and judgment of people who couldn’t relate. My Everest showed me the strength I hold, that otherwise, I would have never known.

We all have an Everest and climbing yours isn’t guaranteed to be easy, in fact, it may be one of the hardest things you ever do. You may not understand why your particular Everest is what it is but the lessons will come in time. They come from embracing the challenges, they come from the growth, they come from the knowledge that you heard your mountain calling you and you answered.

No one can climb your Everest for you, but it is standing there waiting for you. What’s your Everest?

About Haven:

Haven Lindsey is a freelance writer and avid cyclist in Taos, New Mexico, where she lives with her dog, Gracie, and cats Pine Cone and Banjo. Haven is both a road cyclist and mountain biker but notes that road cycling is her first love. When she first saw cyclists riding up a mountain in Switzerland, she knew at that moment that she needed to take part in the action and from that day forth became a cyclist. In fact, she once broke her foot playing tennis and specifically had her surgeon fit her cycling shoe to her boot so she could continue doing what she loved while she recovered.

Haven began contributing to the Sidesaddle Blog after sharing her powerful poem ‘A Mourning Ride‘  with the Terry Team. Her writing beautifully expresses the tremendous impact cycling can have on one’s life and she has since become one of Terry’s most prominent ambassadors. Haven has said that even if she wasn’t a writer by trade, she would still write for fun because she enjoys the process of taking a blank slate and bringing it to life with words that help to inform, educate, and perhaps make you feel something along the way.

Haven’s second children’s book is due to be published in early 2024 by Brandylane Publishing and a book/memoir titled ‘What’s Your Everest? ‘ is in the writing stages. To keep up with Haven Lindsey and read more of her work, please visit her website: 4havensake.com