Beach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?
By now you know that I am a beach girl. Grew up on the beach. Love to vacation on a beach. Salt air is my bestie. Mountains? Well they’ve played a part in my life but truly not even a supporting role because the highest elevation on this island where I live is sometimes a mound of snow in a parking lot crafted by the snow plows after a six inch snowstorm.
Teen Kiki would travel to the mountains of Vermont to ski. There won’t be many blogs about those trips. Once I got going I wasn’t a bad skier. I was just terrified of it. Swooshing down a mountain at warp speed was not my thing. I hung up my skis in my 20s and never looked back.
That was of course until a new type of mountain exposure entered my life. Enter Spartan racing in 2016. When you start training for these races they never really tell you what to expect. They lure you in with the number of miles you’ll run and the amount of obstacles you’ll tackle in said run. What they leave out is the elevation in the mountain race series. Most mountain races are held at ski resorts. Some on the very same slopes I hurled my body down years prior. Now, I was hiking up the mountains and tossing myself over walls and swimming through mud pits. I won’t lie – the races were brutal but extremely gratifying. If you visit Killington Resort in Vermont and look very closely – you will find a piece of my soul carved into the side of the mountain. At mile 6 (out of 16) and starting the biggest climb up (called The Death March), my blood pressure spiked to 200/120. I collapsed. I woke up on an ATV wearing a helmet at base camp while paramedics started an IV on me. Finishing the race that day was not in my cards (I did return three years later to volunteer on course).
But that day in Killington changed something in me. Not in the big dramatic “and from that moment on I conquered every fear” sort of way. No. More in the “okay, mountains, I see you—and I respect the hell out of you” kind of way. Because mountains have a funny way of humbling you and expanding you at the exact same time. They’ll knock you flat on your back… and somehow still make you proud.
And yet, even after all that, I never converted into a mountain person. I didn’t suddenly start craving crisp alpine air or fleece-lined anything. Deep down, I’m still the girl who knows the exact shade the ocean turns at sunset, who can smell a tide change before she sees it, who feels most like herself when her toes are in warm sand. The beach is where my nervous system goes to exhale. The mountains? They’re where my blood pressure goes to audition for a horror film.
But here’s the thing: both have shaped me. The beach raised me. The mountains reminded me I’m tougher than I think. The beach is comfort. The mountains are challenge. One whispers. The other roars. And somewhere between the saltwater and the summit, I’ve learned that it’s okay to be a person who adores one and merely tolerates the other.
So yes, I’ll always pick a beach chair over a gondola ride. I will always choose sand over snow, flip-flops over trails, and a sunburn over frostbite. But I also carry a tiny sliver of Killington with me—the steep climb that nearly broke me and somehow built me all at once.
Mountains may never be my love story. But they are part of my plotline. And for that, I nod to them from sea level… preferably with a salty breeze in my hair and the waves reminding me I’m exactly where I belong.
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