The last time I was in the Grand Canyon, I was trying to run it in a day.
Rim to Rim to Rim (R2R2R) – a challenging, roughly forty-eight-mile and nearly eleven thousand feet of elevation change hike/run typically completed by elite hikers and runners in one day – is the kind of undertaking that sounds either heroic or reckless, depending on who you tell. I was moving well in the predawn dark, headlamp cutting through the cool air at the top of the North Kaibab Trail, fully committed to the kind of goal-driven, head-down effort that has organized most of my athletic life.
Then the temperature climbed, and then kept climbing, and I began to really feel it.
There is an area past the main campground, as you move toward the North Rim, called the Box – a slot canyon where you can barely glimpse the sky between the walls of rock on either side. Those walls absorb heat and radiate it back.
I made it through and was halfway up my ascent of the North Rim when I got word that my wife, Marina – who had started her own Rim to River to Rim attempt, heading from the rim down to the river and back up, later in the day than planned – was running into trouble in the heat. Without hesitation, I turned around, back through the Box, and returned to the campground by the river, where the thermometer in the shade read 110 degrees.
We spent the night at the ranger station in the canyon while she hydrated and recovered, and we hiked out the next morning into a pale, exhausted sunrise. I filed the whole experience away under the category of things I would return to and do properly someday.
That “someday” came a few weeks ago, though it arrived in a form I never would have planned.
The Return to the Canyon
Ryan Krass – CEO of WOW Brands and co-author of The Rent-to-Own Revolution, a man I’ve come to know as someone who acts on good ideas quickly and without unnecessary ceremony – saw me at a meeting and said, essentially: Canyon. Backpacks. In two weeks. Weekend before Meeting of the Minds. You in?
The honest answer was that I had plenty of reasons to say no. TRIB Group’s Meeting of the Minds was in Las Vegas the following week, and I wasn’t sure I needed a side quest. I hadn’t been specifically training for anything like this. The preparation I would normally put into a trip like this – the gear checks, the conditioning, the research, the planning over multiple weeks – hadn’t happened and could not happen in the time available.
Every instinct I have, shaped by years of Ironman training and race calendars and the discipline of people who plan their physical lives in advance, suggested that the reasonable answer was no.
I said yes.
Fitness Beyond the Finish Line
What made that yes possible had nothing to do with the specific preparation I hadn’t done. It had everything to do with the preparation I do every day, without attaching it to any particular destination.
There’s a version of fitness that is entirely goal-oriented – you train for the race, you peak for the event, you taper, you recover, you do it again. That model has served me well, and I don’t want to argue against it.
But what the Canyon trip clarified for me is that underneath the goal-oriented work – and arguably more important than any of it – is something quieter: the daily maintenance, the baseline, the unglamorous accumulation of ordinary effort that doesn’t produce any finish-line medal but keeps you fundamentally ready. The morning runs that nobody knows about. The consistent nutrition that isn’t dramatic enough to describe. The sleep. The regular movement that has no race attached to it.
That baseline is what allowed me to say yes. Not specific training for a canyon descent, but years of sustained readiness that made a canyon descent at short notice something other than reckless. The spontaneity was only possible because the foundation was already there, which means it wasn’t really spontaneous at all, not in the way that word usually implies. It was earned availability. The freedom to say yes was built, slowly, over time, from nothing more than showing up consistently when there was nothing in particular to show up for.
A Different Kind of Experience
The trip itself was different in every way from my first attempt – which is to say, it was better in every way that matters.
I had a backpack instead of a hydration vest. A sleeping bag instead of a pace chart. I had Ryan and Anthony DeGregory for company, and the peculiar ease of moving through difficult terrain alongside people. The goal, if it could even be called that, was simply to get to the river, to camp, to hike out in the morning. Nothing to prove. No time to beat.
And because I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything specific, I could actually be there.
I looked up – something I rarely do when I’m moving fast and trying not to fall into the abyss. The canyon in the late afternoon light does something that is difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, a kind of enforced humility that comes not through any intellectual effort but from standing inside something that old and that large.
I touched the Colorado River, which sounds like a small thing, but a smell-the-roses type of experience easily missed when you are moving fast and focused on other things. I slept under a full moon so bright it was almost inconvenient, lying in the canyon with that ancient light coming straight down, and I thought about how many millions of years of darkness and erosion had produced the exact walls I was sleeping between, and felt something I can only describe as proportion – a useful recalibration of the scale at which I usually think about my problems.
We hiked out the next morning, drove to Vegas, and I walked into TRIB’s Meeting of the Minds still carrying some of the dust and the quiet of the canyon floor.
Fitness as Availability
Here’s what I want to leave you with, because these articles are supposed to be useful and not just personal narrative:
The fitness that made that trip possible was not exciting. It was not the kind of thing you post about or build a training plan around. It was just… maintenance. Showing up. Keeping the baseline. Moving most days, eating with some intention most of the time, sleeping enough, maintaining the kind of general readiness that doesn’t belong to any particular goal but belongs to life in general.
Most of us think of fitness as a response to objectives: I’m training for something. And that is a real and valuable way to organize physical effort. But there is another way to think about it, one the Canyon trip made newly vivid for me: fitness as availability. The daily work, not as preparation for the next race but as preparation for the next invitation – the one you can’t see coming, that will arrive in the form of a phone call from a friend, a chance encounter, a sudden opportunity to be somewhere remarkable and actually be capable of it.
You cannot plan for those moments. You can only be ready when they arrive.
Challenge for the Month:
Take an inventory – not of your goals, but of your baseline. Are you maintaining enough general fitness, separate from any specific objective, that you could say yes to something unexpected? A hike, a physical challenge, an adventure that calls to you on short notice?
If not, that’s not a training problem. It’s a maintenance problem. And the fix is simpler than a training plan – it’s just showing up, consistently, without needing a destination to justify it.
