I grew up here [DETROIT].

This was my family’s getaway [LAKE HURON].

Not two years ago, I lived just above sea level [BOSTON].

Now this is my home [PRAIRIE].

So you’ll forgive me for thrilling at my smart watch stats during my first run in Tahoe City, California earlier this month. Not for a fast time (it wasn’t) or for running at all a day after arriving in the mountains but for the elevation. 6,255 feet! (My usual elevation is between 720 and 780.)

At that moment, I started to get what motivates my husband to climb mountains. He’s summited many in his life and with each story, he rattles off the elevation – numbers that had accumulated and rattled around in my flatlander brain until this trip to Lake Tahoe, when I started to realize: elevation means something to you because it’s important. It’s how many vertical feet you’ve ascended. Away from the ocean life crawled out of and toward outer space. A measure of how hard you’ve worked to navigate and climb there. A promise of the view you might get along the way.

The elevation thing snapped into place for me early in the week and 3D’d the rest of the time. Bill grew up hiking here every year, like Mount Rose and Mount Tallac. I know these are the highest and second highest peaks around Lake Tahoe. He has the elevation of each memorized. I started to see why.

The week at moderate elevation with hikes and trail runs thrown in made me pay more attention to where I was in space. I started to respect the change in up and down as much as the point to point.

Incidentally, we watched the Disney animated film THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE the week we were at Lake Tahoe. It took being in the mountains for me to appreciate how much of the zany humor of this movie, set in ancient Peru, depends on steepness: stairs, mountains, cliffs (so many cliffs), complicated vertically oriented palace architecture. Objects, people and evil kittens are constantly falling, climbing, bracing, swinging, bouncing back.

All the elevation gave me a new orientation and even a new courage. At the end of the week, I did something my beginning-of-the-week self did not dream was possible: I ran a trail race – one with 3,768 feet of elevation gain over about 11 miles.

On Wednesday, we went to the Palisades ski area hoping to ride the tram to the “high camp” area at the top of the mountain, play miniature golf up there, enjoy the view. Sadly, the tram was not running that day. But some activity was going on down in the village – looked like a race set up? A big one. Looking up The Broken Arrow Sky Race, we realized I could technically run the 18K on Friday before we had to leave on Saturday. The race was totally sold out, but there was something about day-of registration.

I woke up Friday morning thinking, “I’ll show up, find out they don’t have a spot, and do a flat run along the river while the rest of the family does the tram thing.” So when I did find out there was a spot for me, the resulting fear wasn’t so much race nervousness as wondering if I’d fall off the mountain.

There were some very steep climbs, for sure. I’d never done anything like this. There were places along the first ascent where it really did look like one misstep would send you and a few neighbors on the crowded trail down in an EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE-style tumble. But I gained confidence with every step. When I crested the highest point, an aid station at a place called Siberia the cool wind in my face felt good. I threw my hands out to catch all I could and ran across a football field sized plateau. I finished the race a true believer in the power of the vertical foot.

I learned today from social media that a colleague just summited Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, 19,000 feet, in memory of a lost loved one who’d done the same climb two years ago. My brief experience at elevation helped me see the meaning in this journey, climbing a mountain – reaching that high elevation – as a personal challenge and as a recovery. Finding up there something someone gained.