I stood on the summit of Denali. Was this even real?
Denali, a cold mountain rising high into the sky where ravens don’t go. It was an impossible faraway dream for me, hidden away in the top left corner of a world’s map. The road there was long: building winter camping experience, learning mountaineering, finding a team, setting a goal and going into preparations, planning and training.
They say you do not start with Denali; you graduate there. They also say you need to arrive at more than 100% of your abilities. All this being true, I would add: you need to have the right people with you all along the way, and this is what Uphill Athlete gave me.
My path to Uphill Athlete was anything but straight. When I first came across Steve’s name through a webinar on how to prepare for Denali I dismissed the idea almost immediately. Who cares about the heart rate? I thought. I’ll just do what I think I can, and we’ll see how far that takes me. That was the first attempt. It ended without a summit, with my pulmonary edema during an acclimatization trip in the Andes and us going home without having even set foot on Denali. Having recovered from the sickness and shock, I took an entire summer off—no goals, no training, no plans, no conclusions. Then Steve’s book found me through a Facebook recommendation, as these things do. I started reading with no obligations. I tried a few things from it. I bought a Garmin watch, learned many new words, and one day clicked on an ad for a training plan—not because I had researched it or knew it was the right one, but simply because it was there and it didn’t seem expensive. Only when I went to the website did I discover there was a longer plan: The Comprehensive All-Mountain Expeditions Plan, recommended for people who had enough time. We had enough time. Bit by bit, entirely unstructured and a little in the dark, I had arrived at exactly the right place.
When I first came across the one-on-one coaching option, I nearly signed up. Structure and accountability are what get me out of bed. The simple fact of having agreed with someone, of not being able to cancel at the last minute, is enough to move me at five-thirty in the morning when nothing else would have. I believe in that completely.
But my job is unpredictable in ways that are out of my control — business trips on short notice, meetings dropped into the calendar without warning. The thought of another communication channel, of checking in with a coach every few days to renegotiate the week’s schedule, felt like it would add pressure rather than remove it. And I knew something about myself: I am disciplined enough to follow a plan if I have one. I do not need someone to chase me. I need to know what I am supposed to do and get support if I get stuck.
Training groups was the answer. The plan was mine to follow; the advice was there when I needed it, without the weight of constant check-ins. When I found my plan and joined the group, something fell into place. The pieces that had been arriving one at a time finally made a whole.
Life became simple: every day I had a workout to complete in between solving problems at work and managing two teenagers. I would have never thought this to be possible: getting up at 5 a.m. on a business trip to hit a hotel’s gym, walking out the door on a grey Saturday morning in November to hike in the mud with bits of snow, running in the darkness after work with a teenager as occasional company. Months of being continuously tired and hungry, messaging Alexa to ask whether I was doing too much, whether I was still sustainable. She would answer, and I would keep going. And many, many more hours adding into days, weeks and months that I stopped counting. Tired became my excuse for anything; fatigue was my best friend until, at some point, I started feeling that my legs had become strong, my breathing had become calmer, and my heartbeat had gone lower. What used to be an annual challenge became a weekly routine. Uphill became a normal state of affairs rather than an extraordinary effort. I could feel I was changing—or was I simply becoming my true self?
Training Groups also brought me to Alexa. A couple of months before departure,I was reminded of a time I had gotten stuck on a wall, unable to move, unable to speak. Physically, I was fine. But in extreme physical exhaustion, facing difficulty and danger, I had a tendency to lock myself completely inside—silent, unreachable, gone. I had known this about myself since childhood. On this mountain, I could not afford it. I had already watched all of Alexa’s mental training content on the Uphill Athlete website, so I reached out—thinking it would be one session.
“We always talk about fight or flight,” Alexa explained. “But there is a third response: freeze. When you’re physically exhausted, mentally depleted, in an environment that registers as dangerous, the system simply shuts down. It’s not a flaw. It’s biology. And once you understand there’s a mechanism, you understand there’s a way out.”
Until then, I had spent years believing I was simply strange—that this was something broken in me I would have to manage forever. Understanding the mechanism changed that. Alexa also identified what she called the window: the narrow gap between still functioning and going completely silent. It is short, but it is there. The work was to see it coming and act before it closed. She gave me several things to reach for in that gap; she was honest that not all of them would work every time, but one would. This was enough to shift what I had always had to endure into something I could work with.
After countless weeks of training, months of preparation, a few practice climbs and lots of gear testing, suddenly the departure date became awfully close. Instead of panicking, I realized: I am ready. I am as ready as I can be, and the mountain will decide on the rest.
From our arrival in Talkeetna, I knew the mountain would treat us well. I had my dialogue with it, and I knew we had to be patient: the weather has not been great early in the season. I knew we would go when it was the right time. It finally came when, after a quick flight with Talkeetna Air Taxi and a rushed gear offloading, we were standing on the Kahiltna Glacier in full awe. Truly a place among giants, as Lisa Roderick said.
The days of hard work started; the way up felt very long. Still, the mountain was giving us breaks in between the hardships, sending warning signs and checking if we had learned the lesson. The loads were heavy as we started with over 200 kg of gear for three people, food and fuel being the heaviest. The storm came, and for two nights we were busy shoveling our two tents every couple of hours, and still they were getting buried faster than we could help it. The way up steepened, the sleds were painfully pinning us down, the altitude increased and the movements slowed dramatically. Breathing rhythm became the most important thing. Planning reduced to the current day, with the next day a question mark. Days went by, sleep was scarce, efforts were big, legs were still strong, patience was enormous.
A window came—a blessing of six days without storms, with low winds and clear skies. The word “summit” was mentioned carefully for the first time, while there was still enough work to do. Bringing our cache up to High Camp and putting up a thin bamboo wand with the expedition name on it felt like a victory parade, making us one step closer. If only the weather could hold! A rest day at 14k Camp, strong winds at night undermining hope, and then a still, quiet start to the day: yes, we were going up.
A quiet night at High Camp, the endless cold Autobahn in the morning, winds above Denali Pass and countless mind-boggling steep snow hills above it all the way to Football Field. My hypoxic brain refused to accept the Pig Hill towering up vertically at 6,000 m elevation above the Football Field: this must be somebody’s poor joke, I thought. No breath left, only stubbornness and attempts to warm up the fingers in the fierce wind. The summit ridge was painfully slow, up and down several times until suddenly there was no more way up, nowhere to go further uphill, and this is how I knew that we were there.
Far, far away lay distant lands, the sky was so dark above us that it felt like we were flying into space, the wind was chilling to the bone, the air was thin, the sun was shining. Truly appreciated once back down in warmth and safety long after that, this moment has carved out a permanent place in my mind and will stay with me.
We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard, I thought, finally understanding these famous words in full. Impossible at first, scary at the second thought, broken down into steps and objectives through the training plan and made real by all those who believed in me. Alexa, who coached me at the end and put my mind in the right place; Chantelle, who helped me review my progress halfway through when doubts were highest; Steve, who created it all and sent me his words of guidance and encouragement. Uphill Athlete coaches have guided me to this small, flat snowy ridge far above anything I’ve ever been to, and the great cold mountain rising up to the skies where the ravens don’t fly has become my dear friend.
Now from the comfort of my home, I can still feel the summit winds and see the endless void below me, and I know I am not the same person who came to the mountain. I am becoming someone new, someone whom I don’t yet fully know and who looks ahead to becoming even more together with Uphill Athlete.
Maria Horalikova Summited Denali on June 5, 2026, as part of a small independent team.