This summer, headlines started popping up that the legendary endurance mountain athlete,

Killian Jornais, was headed across the Atlantic Ocean with a mission of staggering proportions,

climb all the 14ers in the lower 48 by human power.

And I saw that, and frankly, I was sort of like, that's an undertaking, but can that be a first?

I mean, people have connected Colorado's 14ers by bikes.

Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright did it with California's highest peaks, and several people

have made bike and climbing enchantments of the Cascade volcanoes.

I thought, I can't believe no one's done that before.

Not because it was easy, but in a way, it seems sort of ridiculously obvious.

In a world where we are unduly obsessed with firsts and finding the last great adventure,

here was a link up hiding in plain sight that was not at the end of the earth, rather right in our backyard.

There was an assembly of other mega adventures.

Why hadn't it been done?

And then you start to think about it.

Each of those pieces are pretty complex undertakings in their own right.

You need to zoom way, way out to see them

as something interconnected. And you need to be mind-bendingly fit to pull it off in a month. You need to

be thinking about mountains on a continental level. And really, how many people out there can even think like that?

I sat down with Killian two days after he summoned Mount Rainier in howling winds, fresh snow for a rare October summit to complete his states of elevation project, an endeavor that required 31 days of near constant motion.

The stats are staggering.

72-14ers, 403,000 feet of elevation gain, 2,568 miles of cycling, and 629 miles of running.

For those 31 days, this is sort of the craziest part when you really think about it,

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