What Climbing 214 Mountains Taught Me About Goals

Setting a concrete target doesn’t diminish a hobby’s pleasure; it can deepen it by forcing time, focus and follow-through.

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I got the idea from a stranger in a pub.

A friend and I were finishing up a week of vacation in the remote corner of northwest England known as the Lake District. If you are of a certain age and were educated in the English-speaking world, you may remember it from high school literature class: Lakeland is where syllabus favorite William Wordsworth lived most of his life, and the landscape inspired much of his poetry. (More recently, Taylor Swift wrote a song about it called, simply, “the lakes.”)

I had always pictured Wordsworth wandering “lonely as a cloud” beside a docile little pond. So when we arrived on an August morning in 2016, I was stunned to discover that the region is dominated by mountains. On the last day of the trip, we decided to climb one: a pyramid of slate called Skiddaw.

The path was unrelentingly steep. Loose stones slithered out from under our boots. Wind roared in our ears; in a desperate attempt to block out the sound, I fashioned myself a makeshift turban out of a long-sleeved shirt. The view from the summit was otherworldly — the lake at the foot of Skiddaw featured briefly as an alien planet in a Star Wars movie — but I was too wind-buffeted to take it in.

After we staggered down, we headed directly for a pub, where a man who overheard our conversation asked the simple question that would change my life: “Are you doing the Wainwrights?” At our confusion, he explained that it was a list of Lakeland summits put together by a man named Alfred Wainwright.

“And how many are there?” I asked.

“214,” came the reply.

It was an insane number — even for a committed peakbagger like me. I remember thinking, Too bad I’ll never climb those.

Lots of people have hobbies they quantify. One friend is trying to visit all 39 mosques in Istanbul designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Another has spent the past 25 years reading the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels (current tally: 92). There are Vermeer obsessives who want to see all of the Dutch master’s 35 confirmed paintings, and birders who travel the globe adding orange-tufted spiderhunters to their life lists.

Peakbaggers are the hiking version of this impulse: folks who set out to hike a specific list of summits, whether it’s the Colorado 14ers (58 peaks over 14,000 feet, or 4,267 meters) the Scottish Munros (282 summits over 3,000 feet) or the Hyakumeizan of Japan (100 of the nation’s most famous mountains).

Critics call us box-tickers — the trainspotters of hiking. Mountains should be savored, they argue, not entered into a spreadsheet. To some, turning a hobby into a to-do list reeks of hustle culture, transforming leisure into just another set of obligations. Set a goal and you create a degree of pressure, even a new way to fail. Or you risk compelling yourself to soldier on, no matter the cost.

But for me, goals don’t make hiking any less pleasurable. It’s a delight to spend a day in the fresh air, tromping across springy turf or scrambling over rocks, ending with tired legs and a quiet mind.

It all comes down to how we think about our goals. Psychologists offer a few different options. Performance goals are those that focus on external standards, comparisons to others, or extrinsic rewards. The outcome is the whole point. Many workplace goals fall into this category: Close more deals than your colleagues in the first quarter and get a bonus of 15%. Sometimes these goals can foster healthy competition, but often they are stressful; comparing ourselves to others is almost always a way to feel worse.

Then there are avoidance goals. Don’t eat the donut; don’t lose your temper; don’t waste time. These goals aren’t very enjoyable, either, since they mostly stem from our fears and anxieties.

And finally, there are mastery goals. Become fluent in German; knit a sweater; write a novel. These goals often celebrate learning for learning’s sake.

Technically, it’s possible to frame a mastery goal in an avoidant way (“I must learn German so I don’t make a fool of myself when I visit Germany.”). And mastery goals are not always correlated with higher performance, especially in academia. (I vividly remember my first-grade teacher explaining to me that the goal was not to color the picture as carefully and as slowly as possible, but to color it completely in the time allotted.) But in general, mastery goals are fun. They tap into our intrinsic motivations and desire for personal growth. Working on them improves our self-esteem, adds meaning to our lives and gives us a sense of purpose. Making progress on a mastery goal can enhance our sense of autonomy, which in turn is associated with greater wellbeing and resilience.

Mastery goals are also a good way to carve out time for hobbies, which bring their own psychological benefits. People with hobbies report higher levels of life satisfaction, fewer health problems and lower rates of loneliness. Being deliberate about them prevents time from leaking into everything else: tidying the house, answering emails, doomscrolling.

When I climbed Skiddaw, I was only a couple of months away from finishing my first peakbagging list: the 48 4,000-footers of New Hampshire, a project I’d been working on since 2009. I knew I needed a new goal. So when the man in the pub opened the door to the Wainwrights, I walked right through it. The goal created not an obligation, but an excuse to spend my time how I wanted.

It’s a delight to spend a day in the fresh air, tromping across springy turf or scrambling over rocks, ending with tired legs and a quiet mind.

You may at some point have encountered the “SMART” framework for goal-setting. First laid out in 1981 in Management Review by consultant George T. Doran, the argument is that objectives should be specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-bound. As the approach gained traction, managers replaced assignable with “achievable” or “attainable,” and realistic evolved over time into “relevant.”

Deciding to hike 214 mountains in the Lake District National Park failed several of the SMART criteria. I never set myself a deadline for reaching my goal, nor did it seem particularly achievable. The Lake District is not exactly around the corner from where I live near Boston, Massachusetts.

Yet paradoxically, it became easier to cross off Wainwrights than to climb mountains closer to home. Between 2017 and 2019, I hiked only 15 peaks in New Hampshire, even though the White Mountains were just a two-hour drive away. In the same three-year period, I climbed 134 Wainwrights over the course of nine visits.

I made some early mistakes. In June 2017, I became cragfast — too terrified to move forward or back — on Blencathra’s Hall’s Fell ridge, a stony arȇte that Wainwright had written was “the finest way to any mountain top in the district,” warning only that “care is needed in some places.” (In contrast, he described a path over Sharp Edge as “a route to commend heartily to one’s worst enemy.”) As I froze sweaty-palmed below the summit, I watched a dozen other hikers, including children, scamper up the final, sheer rockface. Finally, after 30 minutes, I heaved myself over the top. One more for the list.

Things got better as I learned to read the map (and that my head for heights is limited). One cloudless day in late September 2018, I walked across 11 summits in an 18-mile traverse of the grassy High Street ridge (so-called because the Romans built a road on top of it). I had only the skylarks for company, and views of blue lakes and hidden valleys in every direction. The route ended at a Bronze Age stone circle called the Cockpit, and I remember walking awed through the ancient stones thinking, I am so grateful for this moment.

People would tease me: Haven’t you got mountains back home? Yes, but they didn’t seem as beautiful. They weren’t as fun to climb. They didn’t have names that sounded like they were straight out of Game of Thrones (Helvellyn, Glaramara, Pike o’ Blisco) or made up by a 12-year-old (Crinkle Crags, Great Cockup, Barf).

There was another key difference: pre-commitment. To hike a Wainwright, I had to choose the dates in advance, book tickets, get on a plane. Anyone who wants to achieve a big goal has to break it into smaller goals and then put those goals on the calendar.

That’s how Alfred Wainwright’s list came to be. In 1952, at the age of 45, he drew up a plan: He would spend the next 13 years writing a seven-volume series of “pictorial guides” to the Lakeland fells — on top of his day job as a civil servant.

“Once the idea had hit him,” writes his biographer, Hunter Davies, “he was a man possessed.” Wainwright would clamber over the mountains in a three-piece suit, pipe clenched between his teeth, making notes — ultimately climbing each summit several times. On weekends, he’d spend 10-12 hours a day hand-drawing and hand-lettering pages. Depending on the mountain, this was quite an undertaking; the entry on Blencathra, for instance, is 36 pages long.

The obsession strained his family life. “Nothing mattered to me but getting those books done,” Wainwright told a radio host in 1988. “I had a single-track mind. It ended finally with my wife walking out, taking the dog, and I never saw her again.” His son told Davies that he could only be proud of his father “up to a point” because “the human cost to family relationships was too great.”

Davies questions the idea that Wainwright’s obsession caused his divorce, arguing that the project was a distraction from an already-unhappy marriage. Still, it’s worth choosing one’s goals carefully, and scrutinizing their unintended consequences. My first Fitbit had me obsessively chasing 10,000 steps a day, to the detriment of other fitness goals that would have added muscle or raised my heart rate. Someone who vows to read 100 books in a year may find she’s spending more time alone than she really wants to.

So set the goal, but hold it lightly.

Outdoor people like to sort their adventures into three kinds of “fun.” Type 1 fun is fun in the moment (an 8-mile hike in the sunshine). Type 2 fun is difficult in the moment but rewarding in recollection (an 18-mile hike in the rain). Type 3 fun is no fun at all: just suffering you’d rather forget (any hike that ends in a call to Mountain Rescue).

Hiking isn’t always Type 1 fun, even in a beautiful place with perfect weather. There’s a moment on every hike — usually the steepest part of the climb — when I ask myself, Why is this my hobby? Wainwright describes himself bleeding, bursting the buttons on his suspenders and sliding down the steepest trails on his “rubbery bottom.” My adventures in the Lakes saw me falling into bogs, misreading the bus schedule, losing the trail.

Experience can prevent some hairy moments, but not all. The first time I was benighted (caught out after darkness had fallen) I pulled out my headlamp, only to find the batteries dead. The second time I was benighted, I smugly pulled out my headlamp and some extra batteries… only to find the tiny lightbulb had burned out.

One gray day in early March 2020, I found myself alone, heading for Seathwaite Fell. As I trudged up the valley, the overcast sky turned a dark slate gray. By the time I reached Sprinkling Tarn, a small mountain lake in the shadow of the Scafell massif, I was ankle-deep in snow and watching the wind whip whitecaps across the water. I’d come nearly six miles and was now less than a mile from the summit — but my feet were sliding treacherously beneath me. A fall could mean hypothermia; hypothermia could turn into worse. Type 3 fun seemed perilously possible.

You can’t achieve a goal if you never persevere through the hard parts. But sometimes the right call is to quit. When I have a hard time choosing whether to plow ahead or turn back, I remind myself that my real goal is not to reach the top but to get safely back to the bottom. So on that frigid March day, I turned back.

I didn’t know it then, but it would be two years before I got back to Lakeland. I flew home as borders were slamming shut, and during the pandemic, my husband and I welcomed a daughter. The all-consuming love and obligations of parenting rushed in. Training time vaporized. Days passed in a blur of daycare colds.

I did manage to take an occasional local hike — I remember pumping milk on one summit nine weeks after giving birth — but it seemed to require a heroic amount of effort. If I hadn’t had a goal, I might have stopped hiking entirely. It’s not a hobby that fits in during naptime or after the baby has gone to bed; clawing out a Saturday for a hike meant getting buy-in from my husband, babysitting from my parents, or paying another caregiver. But that 214-summit target commanded a degree of respect, not only from those around me, but from myself. It gave me the push I needed to overcome the mom guilt and take some time for me.

Still, when I finally made it back to the Lakes, I had lost a lot of fitness. I found myself exhausted after half my usual distance. My favorite kind of mountain day — depart after breakfast, hike all day across as many summits as possible, return just in time for dinner — was out of reach now. So I replanned my routes, making them shorter. I broke the big project into even smaller pieces. My goal kept me moving forward, even if at a slower pace.

According to the Long Distance Walkers’ Association (LDWA), the first recorded completion of the 214 occurred in April 1966, the same month the last book in Wainwright’s series was published. The fastest completion (so far) is five days and 12 hours, according to records maintained by the Wainwright Society — not bad for a route involving nearly 360 miles and more than 120,000 feet of elevation gain. But many people take their time; some more than 50 years.

It took me eight years, 11 months, one week and three days.

This summer, I returned to the Lakes for my final Wainwright with my husband and a quartet of friends. (Our daughter, now 4, stayed home with her grandparents.) The six of us trudged up a grassy glacial valley dotted with wild orchids. I didn’t talk much; I was out of breath. I was also feeling pensive. When I touched the summit cairn of Yewbarrow, I felt both satisfied and sad, like I’d turned the last page in a good book.

As it turned out, the real joy was not in completing the goal, but in pursuing it. Perhaps this is why so many 214ers simply hike them all over again. (The record appears to belong to Stephen Moore, a septuagenarian who has completed the Wainwrights 61 times for an astonishing 13,054 summits.)

Wainwright finished the 13-year project that would eventually bear his name on Sept. 10, 1965, with a 2,077-foot summit called Starling Dodd. “Happy? Yes, I was happy, as anyone must be who comes to the end of a long road,” he writes of concluding his fieldwork. “Sorry? Yes, I was sorry, as anyone must be who comes to the end of a long road he has enjoyed traveling.”

Over the next 26 years, Wainwright published more than 50 books, including his guides to the Pennine Way and the Coast to Coast path. His books have since sold over 2 million copies.

As for me, I returned to Boston feeling aimless and grumpy. Without a goal, I felt lost. I considered a few lists in new places, but — my love of Lakeland now firmly a hopeless obsession — none of them appealed. Then, when I registered my completion with the LWDA, I got an intriguing message back. “You could consider the Birkett hills next,” my correspondent replied. That’s all the Lake District fell tops over 1,000 feet, a total of 541 summits.

What a great idea.