WHERE DID THE HILL GO?

How change actually happens — and why it isn't a leap

Back when I used to run, there was one route I did more than any other — out toward the edge of town, out and back, somewhere around seven or eight miles once I'd built up to it. About two-thirds of the way through, there was a hill. Not enormous. Maybe a quarter mile, but steep enough that it earned its reputation. Every single time I hit the bottom of it, I braced myself.

Most days, I huffed and puffed my way to the top of it. That was just what the hill cost.

And then one Saturday morning, I got to the top, and something felt different. I turned around to look back down at what I'd just run — and I genuinely wondered where the hill had gone. It wasn't that the hill was gone. It was that it had gotten easy, without me noticing it happening.

Here's the thing I want you to sit with before we go any further: nothing special happened that morning. I didn't do anything different on that specific run. I didn't train harder that week. The hill didn't get easy because of what I did that day. It got easy because of every single day before it — every run where I'd huffed and puffed my way up and thought nothing of it, every week of training that felt like it wasn't accomplishing much of anything while I was in the middle of it.

The Hill Wasn't Always Easy

I want to be honest about something else, too, because I think it's the part most stories like this skip: that hill did not stay easy forever. There were plenty of runs after that Saturday where I got to the same hill and it kicked my legs out from under me all over again — a bad night of sleep, poor fueling that day, just being a different version of myself under different circumstances than I'd been the week before.

You've probably seen the meme by now — the one where someone imagines the road to their goal as a straight, tidy line, and then the next image shows what the actual path looked like: winding, full of switchbacks, someone flat on the ground next to it, simply out of steam for a minute. That second image is the real one. It's not a sign anything went wrong.

The Grace Part

This might be the part that matters most, especially if you're the kind of woman who holds yourself to a high standard — and if you're here reading this, I'm guessing you might be. A setback isn't proof the compounding stopped working. It isn't evidence you failed. It's just a bad night of sleep, or an off week, or a season where life asked more of you than usual. High expectations are what turn an ordinary bump into a perceived failure. The bump itself was never the problem.

I think a lot of us — women who've built a life on getting things right — are the ones least likely to extend ourselves grace on the days it doesn't go well, which means we're also the most likely to mistake a completely normal part of the process for a reason to quit.

What This Actually Asks of You

Not a leap. Not a decision to become someone different overnight. Just the next small deposit.

So here's the one thing I'd actually ask of you this week: pick one promise to yourself that's almost embarrassingly small — not the resolution-sized one, the tiny one you'd normally let slide without a second thought. Getting up when the alarm goes off instead of hitting snooze twice. Drinking the water before the coffee. Sending the one email you've been avoiding. Keep it. Just that one, all week, on purpose.

That's the deposit. It won't feel like it's doing anything. That's exactly the point — the hill didn't get easier on the day that felt significant either.

You won't notice the hill getting easier while you're in the middle of climbing it. You'll just get to the top one day, turn around, and wonder where it went.