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Hello, Friends. This one belongs to a man who waited for me on a mountain — and to the one sentence, years later, that changed what all that waiting meant. We start here.
In the summer of 2021, I spent most of my Saturdays on the side of a mountain, apologizing.
I had signed up for something called the Xtreme Hike — 30.1 miles in a single day, walked to raise money for the fight against Cystic Fibrosis. The cause had gotten into me the year before, and I felt a genuine conviction about it: I wanted to give something of myself to it. The problem was the self I had to give. I was in the worst physical condition of my life. I had no business attempting a hike of that distance, and somewhere underneath the conviction, I knew it.
The training hikes were supposed to be the manageable part — eight miles, ten, twelve. The rest of the team would finish them and go home to their afternoons. I would still be on the trail, hours later, in the middle of the summer heat, moving the only way I could: two or three steps up the incline, then stopping, hands on my knees, waiting for my breath to come back. Two or three more. Stop again.
And every time I lifted my head, Will was there — sometimes at my side, more often a few paces ahead, turned halfway back toward me, waiting.
Will was one of the coaches — the one who walks at the very rear so that no hiker is ever the last person on the trail alone. Which meant that my pace was his pace. My hours were his hours. While everyone else was showered and home, Will was standing on a switchback in the heat, watching a man fight for ten feet of mountain.
So I apologized. Constantly. I'm sorry I'm so slow. I'm sorry you're stuck back here. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. What I was really saying was harder to admit than any of that, and I couldn't have said it out loud at the time. He'd answer the same way, more or less every time: "You're doing great. One step at a time." Then he'd stand there while I took the next two or three, and stop with me when I stopped.
He never once asked me to consider whether I should be there. He probably should have.
I finished 17 miles of that year's final hike, in 14 hours. Not the 30.1 I'd signed up for — but at the time, it felt like more mountain than I had any right to claim.
So the next year, I signed up again. This is the part of the story where I'm supposed to tell you I came back stronger. I didn't. I came back heavier, slower, and further from ready than I'd been the first time. The training hikes that had been brutal in 2021 were something worse in 2022, and my body was saying so in ways I couldn't keep ignoring. I stepped back.
I told Will and the others that I needed to stop for my health — and that I would work my way back. I don't know if anyone believed the second part. I'm not sure I did. It's the kind of sentence people say on their way out the door, and everyone nods, and the door closes.
It took me four years to make it true. Those years are a story of their own, and not the one I'm telling. What matters here is that this spring, I came back to the mountain. And Will was still there — still the sweep, still the last man on the trail so that no one else has to be.
This time, I could walk and talk at the same time. That sounds like a small thing. It's the whole thing. In 2021, every breath I had went to the climb; there was nothing left over for a conversation. Now there was. We still finished at the back of the pack, Will and I — but minutes behind the others, not hours. And for the first time in the years I'd known him, I got to actually know him.
Here is what I learned about Will this spring, now that I had the breath to ask.
Will has a reputation as a man of few words — and then you read the reflections he writes about what he sees out there, and they can put a lump in your throat. The trail, it turns out, is also where he talks. He told stories as we walked: emergencies and how he'd navigated them, the funny ones, the frightening ones, the hikers he'd shepherded through moments a lot worse than mine. He's been doing this for something like fifteen years — two hikes a year, one as a volunteer coach, one as a fundraiser himself. Hundreds of miles of other people's hard days.
Somewhere in the middle of one of those hikes — an eight-miler, I think, though I couldn't swear to it — the conversation turned to how far I'd come. I thanked him, again, for those two summers. I brought up the exact moments I've told you about: the two and three steps, the stopping, the hours. I'd thanked him before, plenty of times, but always from the middle of the struggle. This was the first time I could thank him from the other side of it.
I don't remember the words that surrounded what he said next. I remember the sentence itself exactly.
"You taught me a lot about patience that hike."
I laughed. Really? And then he gave me the rest of it: he'd been frustrated back then. He had every reason to be — those were long, hot, exhausting days, and I wouldn't have blamed him one bit. He just wanted to help me succeed, he said, so that's what he did with it.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part I could get wrong. My first instinct, hearing it, wasn't hurt. It was something closer to awe. I had spent those two summers apologizing precisely because I assumed the frustration was there — I just never found a trace of it. I searched his face for it, certain it had to be there. Nothing. For two summers, standing in the heat, watching me fight for ten feet of mountain, Will felt what anyone would feel — and decided, twelve Saturdays a summer, hour after hour, that I would never receive it.
That is not the absence of frustration. That's something much harder. It's a man holding two things at once — what he felt, and what I needed — and choosing, every time, which one got through.
And learning it didn't diminish those summers — it made them human. What I'd taken for a man who didn't run hot was someone managing it for my sake. The kindness hadn't been effortless. It had a price, and he never once passed it along.
Here's what his choosing decided. I came to those trails already ashamed — sorry for my pace, sorry for his lost afternoons, sorry, underneath all of it, that I'd chosen something I couldn't do. If his frustration had reached me even once — one sigh, one glance at his watch, one flat "let's just get through this" — it wouldn't have told me anything new. It would have confirmed what I already believed. And I would have gone home that day agreeing with the verdict.
Instead, I went home with seventeen miles.
The frustration was real the whole time. What those summers meant was still his to decide — and he decided it in my favor, three steps at a time, without ever telling me there had been a choice.
I've thought a lot since that spring hike about what Will actually did, and the more I turn it over, the less it looks like patience. Patience is the word he used, and it's the word we reach for — but patience sounds passive, like something you have or you don't. What Will did was active. Two summers of Saturdays. He felt something real and decided, each time, that it was his to manage and not mine to absorb.
Most of us are on the other side of that arrangement more often than we know. Someone near you is struggling right now — slower than you'd like, behind where they said they'd be, taking three steps and stopping. And here's the part I knew from my side of it: they are almost certainly already ashamed. They've been running the case against themselves for longer than you've been frustrated. Which means your frustration, if it reaches them, won't tell them anything new. It won't inform them. It will convict them. It will arrive as the verdict they've been waiting for, delivered by the one person with the standing to hand it down.
You don't have to feel nothing — that isn't realistic, and pretending it is would be its own dishonesty. The question is only what you do with it: whether what you feel is yours to manage or theirs to absorb. That's the whole distance between what Will felt on that mountain and what I found, every Saturday, when I searched his face.
Somewhere on your trail there's a person taking three steps and stopping, watching your face to learn what their struggle means. They'll take whatever they find there home with them tonight.
Will never told me there had been a choice. I'm telling you: there is one, and someone is living inside yours.
"What those summers meant was still his to decide — and he decided it in my favor." — MB
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