The Mountain Is Not the Task

Erin Doom

Oct 6

3 min read

On building a website, ultrarunning, and the next faithful step

Commemoration of the Holy, Glorious Apostle Thomas

Glorification of St. Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow, Enlightener of the Aleuts, Apostle to the Americas

Anno Domini 2026, October 6

The mountain is real. But the mountain is not the task. The next step is the task.

Take the next step.

Tonight I'm driving home from a water demonstration and thinking about the Irenaeus Room.

It's one more part of the Podvig website that still needs to be built. But, of course, it's not simply one more page. It's writing, images, layout, links, decisions, and the inevitable discovery that what works on a desktop may become something altogether different on a tablet or phone.

The website has felt like a mountain from the beginning. Working with John Gleeson, who built the EDI website, taught me enough about using a website builder to begin, but nearly everything Podvig requires has still had to be learned one problem at a time. Every completed page reveals another decision. Every solved problem exposes the next thing that I don't know how to do...yet. If I try to hold the entire site in my mind all at once, the work becomes paralyzing.

But a month ago, almost none of it existed.

Podvig has emerged one page, one section, one image, and one decision at a time. That's easy to forget when I am staring at what remains instead of looking back at what's already been built.

I learned something about this while ultrarunning.

A hundred-mile race is an absurd distance when considered as a whole. Even fifty miles can become psychologically unbearable if, when your body begins to hurt, you keep measuring every step against all the miles still remaining.

But you don't finish an ultramarathon—anything longer than the standard 26.2-mile marathon distance—by doing one enormous fifty- or hundred-mile thing. You reach the next aid station. You eat. You refill your bottles. You begin moving again. When even the next aid station feels impossibly far away, you run to the next tree or walk to the top of the next hill.

You do not deny the distance. You stop trying to carry all of it at once.

The mountain is real. The distance is real. But the mountain is not the immediate task. The next step is the task.

There are legitimate reasons to stop. Injury eventually forced me to pull back from ultrarunning, and sometimes the next faithful step is rest, recovery, or asking for help. “Take the next step” does not mean ignoring reality and driving forward at any cost. It means responding faithfully to the reality actually in front of you.

A dissertation conclusion is written one paragraph at a time. A website is built one section at a time. A room opens after enough individual decisions have been made and individual pieces put into place.

“In a man’s heart he plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.” ~Proverbs 16:9

This proverb holds together two truths that I'm always tempted to separate. I really must plan, choose, work, and take the step. But I don't control the whole road or determine what all my labor will finally become.

This is the synergy I recently reencountered in Maximus. Grace does not eliminate my willing and working, and my effort is never self-sufficient. I choose the ascent and undertake the labor of climbing. God meets me in that movement, strengthens it, and carries it beyond what I could accomplish alone.

Tonight the mountain remains. The Irenaeus Room still needs to be built, and beyond it there will be another page, another problem, and another necessary decision.

But I don't have to build all of Podvig tonight.

I have to open the page in front of me, make the next decision, and finish the next section. Then I can look again at what is actually before me.

The mountain is real. But the mountain is not the task.

Take the next step.