“You won’t find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.”

I read that line this morning and something in me finally gave way.

I cried. Properly. The inevitable release of feeling that had been stored rather than felt. The kind that comes when you realise you have been holding yourself together for longer than is sustainable.

At home in the UK, my Dad is very ill. With me, the quiet accumulation of responsibility, worry, and anticipatory grief does not announce itself. It simply settles into the body and asks to be carried while everything else carries on.

And alongside the personal mess, I have been circling doubt for days. A different kind of doubt. One I kept telling myself was separate from the sadness at home. I labelled it selfish, indulgent, unrelated. The GOAT. A pending 55K ultra, now only days away.While life has been loud, the route has been quietly breaking itself open to me in weekend trial sections. Long climbs. Exposed endless rock. I had a completion time in my head. Ten hours. Clean. Controlled. Something that made sense. But this route does not care about my plans.

The numbers have been drifting. Twelve hours. Thirteen. Fourteen if things unravel. And with them came the sensible voice. The reasonable voice. The one that speaks in outcomes and reputations and sensible withdrawals. This is too hard. This is misjudged. Better to pull out now than carry a DNF. Better to step away with dignity intact.

This weekend brought a run-through of a brain-breaking 8K descent that left us all levelled. Legs gone. Focus stripped bare. I walked off the mountain having quietly accepted that this race, this year, was not meant to be mine.

As I woke this morning my mind drifted, as it often does, towards movement. Other runs. Other challenges. Safer ideas that still looked hard enough to feel respectable. I reached for my phone without much thought and opened Instagram. And there it was, as if delivered without asking. A post from Cameron Hanes, headlined by a line from Hunter S. Thompson.

“You won’t find reasonable men on the tops of mountains.”

You do not go to the mountains to be reasonable.

You go because the mountain asks a question ordinary life avoids. What happens when effort is the only thing left. Who are you when the plan collapses and the story stops flattering you. How quickly do you abandon yourself when the numbers turn against you.

That is what brought everything to a head. Not fear. Not fatigue. Recognition.

These things are not meant to be easy. There is no perfect time, no flawless preparation, no version where the day opens cleanly and rewards you for good behaviour. The difficulty is deliberate. The doubt is designed. The conditions exist to make quitting feel sensible.

DNF is always there. That is what gives the choice its gravity.

But the point is not to engineer comfort. The point is to stay when staying stops being attractive. To keep moving when the outcome refuses to behave. To release the fantasy performance and commit to the honest one.

I realised this morning that the tears were not really about the race. They were about grief I have been trying to manage by staying composed. About learning, again, that there is no clean way through love or loss. My lifelong habit of waiting for certainty before committing suddenly felt exposed. Wanting things neat. Wanting guarantees. As if any of the things that truly matter ever arrive that way.

Like life, the mountain does not offer certainty. It offers a path and a question.

Am I willing to walk it anyway.

This is not about ten hours or fourteen. It is about refusing to let reason be the gatekeeper of meaning. About choosing to struggle. About continuing when the only thing left to protect is your own word to yourself.

I am still scared. Still unsure.

But I am not withdrawing.

Because you do not climb mountains to prove you are reasonable.

You climb them to remember who you are when you are not.