No Longer Alone

For the man doing hard things alone.

I’ve spent my whole life doing hard things. I built my family a house with my own hands. I had no previous experience and no money, and I did most of it alone. I had to change a clutch in my truck and get it back on the road, having never replaced a clutch. Alone. I’ve done hard things because they needed doing. Alone.

I was always left with the question of “how much,” and always the answer is “more.” So, I give more. I ask the question again, and the answer is still, “more.” Always more. The real answer? It’s never enough, until you’re dead.

I know I’m not the only man who feels that way.

Then I found a man who looks like me. He had a different life than me, but he was a man who carried the same weight and it hadn’t destroyed him. He was going somewhere with it. But he wasn’t doing it alone.

That man’s name is Zach Homol.

He’s a husband, a father, a man with a full life and a career. He’s also a man who does hard things with his body — and he does them with other men. When I found him I recognized something I didn’t have a word for yet.

At the Prairie on Fire Backyard Ultra last September, hanging out before the race, he said something I’ve been carrying ever since:

“I’m in a season of life where if I’m going to have friends, they’re going to have to be doing the same things I’m doing. Runs, hikes, lifts. That’s all the time I have outside of my family and career.”

I knew it was true for me too. But I didn’t fully understand what it meant until this June, when he hosted a training camp at his home. I wasn’t there. I read his recap from the sidelines — meals at his table, hard things where he lives, men in his actual life. Not a program. A man who opened his life and said come.

Reading that recap, I recognized something. Not something new, but something I’d already lived and hadn’t understood. The same thing had been happening to me; I just hadn’t seen what it looked like.

Here’s what I realized. I don’t have to do it alone. I don’t have to wait to get to where the community is. I can bring it to where I am. Show up publicly. Do the hard things I’m already doing. Do them consistently and out loud. Let the men find me.

Because they’re out there. Drowning in the same silence. Carrying the same weight. Looking for the same thing I was looking for — proof that it doesn’t have to cost everything. Proof that the weight can mean something. Proof that a man can carry it and not be destroyed by it.

What changes when the hard things stop being solitary isn’t the hard things.

It’s you.