Explore Alex Harris

Years ago I built a leadership program called 3 Peaks. 3 modules that were mapped onto three of the Seven Summits. Kilimanjaro for Passion, Carstensz Pyramid for Perseverance, and Everest for Purpose.

The original program was nine hours over a day and a half walking leaders through each module, with a short hike thrown in. After running it enough times, I noticed something that wasn't baked into the program itself, but may just have been the most important learning. Passion, Perseverance and Purpose dont move in a straight line. They're a cicle.

Here's how this plays out. we invest time into something we are passionate about. As we get better, we do it more, and this naturally pulls us into things that are harder, that ask more of us. That's persevering, whether we chose it or not. Eventually that road gets genuinely tough. Tough enough that we forget what got us there in the first place. We have to dig deep to keep moving with no guarantee its working.

And its this exact struggle, not the passion, not the perseverance alone, that produces something real; purpose. A sense of what all of this was for and who it might help beyond just us. Then the strangest thing happens, that purpose doesn't just retire us, it send us back to the beginning, our passions, but deeper than before, and the circle starts over.

I call it the Circle of Effect. I didn't design it into the 3 Peaks Program on purpose. I noticed it was already there, running underneath everything I had already built. Because its been running underneath my own life, the whole time too.

Where are you in the circle right now? still chasing the Passion? Deep in the grind of Perseverance, or just starting to see what it was actually for?

2012. Third time racing the Freedom Challenge. I held the course record and had a real shot at defending it — except for the small problem of a broken saddle for the first five days, which put someone else in the lead while I rode around South Africa in various stages of discomfort trying to fix it.

By day 8, saddle sorted, I was chasing hard. Deep in Mordor again — daylight this time — and I'd clawed my way to within two hours of the leader.

Then I found a "sneak." A semi-legal shortcut that might save five, maybe ten minutes, if you knew exactly where it went. I didn't know exactly where it went.

What followed was, in order: climbing an electric fence and getting shocked twice, knocking over a beehive, and getting stung roughly 30 times, mostly on my head, including one bee that crawled into my nose and stung me from the inside.

I rolled into the support station drugged with my own bee venom, swollen, and was handed a 2-hour penalty for the illegal shortcut.

Total damage from a shortcut meant to save me ten minutes: four hours lost on the leader.

I think about that one a lot when I see teams take a "quick" shortcut in business without actually knowing the terrain. The ten minutes you're trying to save is rarely the real cost. It's what's hiding behind the electric fence.



Erik Vermeulen thanks for another crazy pic!

There is no easy way to walk to the South Pole. Deciding to do it unassisted and unsupported borders on a thin line between courage and insanity. I guess we suffered from both.

Unassisted means only human strength — no kites, no dogs, nothing but what God gave us. Unsupported means carrying everything we’d need for two months from day one. No resupply. That meant pulling sleds of about 135kg (roughly 298 lbs).

Sibu and I both lived in Joburg. The only way to train was pulling lorry tyres up and down the streets, hour after hour, month after month, until our calves screamed. Sometimes it was so boring my mind went numb. But I knew this was the only way to train to walk 10 hours a day for more than 60 days straight, when the temps were -40.

65 days. 1,130km (about 702 miles). Hercules Inlet to the Pole. Within the first two weeks I’d broken one of my only two skis and had frostbite on my thigh, and got a touch of Arctic W***y. We spent six days stuck in our tents in high winds — a real problem, since we were only carrying 60 days of food.

Do the math on that and you’ll see we had to average 20km (about 12 miles) a day, in a place where everyone kept telling us things would get better. They were wrong. After three weeks, a front rolled in and brought the largest storm of the century. For almost ten days we walked in a whiteout — zero visibility, zero contrast. Pulling the sled felt like dragging a dead whale across a beach. Each day in that gloom I offered up a prayer: Lord, please change this weather. On about day 6 of the gloom my constant moaning must have upset some of the angels as the Lord stopped me in my tracks early in the morning and said: “I’m not going to change the weather. I brought you here because of the weather. But I can change your heart.” It cut like a knife. I sobbed for an hour in my own silent world. From that moment on, my prayer shifted. Lord, change my heart. Give me the capacity to endure.

By the halfway point, at 550km (about 342 miles), we had 20 days of food left for 500km (about 311 miles) of ice still ahead. We were slowly starving. Every calorie mattered. Every small mouthful made a difference.

On January 17, 2008 — 96 years to the day after Scott reached the same spot — we arrived. Two Africans with no real place to be there. 65 days. One meal left. I’d lost 15kg (about 33 lbs).
It was without question the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Miserable to the last, with just a hint of hope somewhere along the way. But that’s the strange thing about the human spirit — when the odds seem insurmountable, we come up with something special.

Our circumstances shape our heart. Not the other way around.

Around day 30 of our 1,000km crossing of the Empty Quarter, we approached a place called Umm as Samim — the Mother of All Poisons.

Wilfred Thesiger, one of the great desert explorers of the last century, wrote that it was so riddled with quicksand it had swallowed camels whole. A hundred square miles of it, sitting directly in our path.

We weren't permitted into Saudi Arabia, and the border ran straight through the middle of it. Too long to detour. No choice but to go straight through.

For days beforehand, I was genuinely stressed. But once we actually started walking into it, a real peace settled over me. Not because the danger was gone. Because the decision had already been made.

It took four days to cross. Someone was always out front, scouting the ground ahead for quicksand before the rest of the team stepped in it. In the end, we never saw any.

Some of the worst anxiety in business happens in the days before a hard decision — when you're still looking for an alternative that doesn't exist. Once the choice is made and you're moving, the anxiety often quiets down. Not because the risk disappeared. Because you stopped fighting a decision that was already right.

What's the Umm as Samim you're circling right now, stressed about a choice you've probably already made?

45 men. One slot canyon. A 9-mile e-bike ride just to reach the start.

Every year, my friend Billy Bourne brings a group of dads from Covenant Christian Academy on a trip like this — golf, ATVs, fellowship, and one real physical challenge to close it out. This was year five, and this year that challenge was The Narrows in Zion.

You can't move 45 men through a slot canyon as one group, so we split into four pods of about eleven, stopping every mile or so to consolidate and check in. About two hours in, one guy twisted his hip. Nothing serious, but not worth pushing on. He rested, then made his own way back down, slow and steady.

We reached our planned turnaround point, and the guys wanted to keep going. Another 5 minutes, I said. To the tree, then the rock. I get it — nobody wants to be the one who stopped the group short. But ankles and knees were starting to ache, and we still had the whole way back. Eventually I made the call: we turn around now.

8 miles and thousands of submerged rocks later, not one twisted ankle. Nothing short of a miracle.

That's the harder version of leadership. Not the moment everyone's fired up and pushing forward — the moment you have to slow people down who don't want to be slowed down, because you can see further down the trail than they can.

Billy's run this trip five years straight now. That's not an accident — that's what happens when men keep choosing to be led somewhere uncomfortable together, on purpose, once a year.

Where in your business right now is the harder call not pushing forward, but knowing when to turn around?

The Freedom Challenge is a 2,150km (about 1,335 mile) unsupported mountain bike race across South Africa. No support vehicles, no GPS allowed — just maps and a compass, the old-school way. You navigate yourself, cross endless mountains, and keep moving.

Day 8, deep in a stretch called the Baviaanskloof (also known as Mordor). Flooded rivers — one of the wettest winters in South Africa's history had turned it into a mess of debris and waist-deep water, ice cold. Midnight. Alone. My phone found a signal for about ten seconds, so I called my wife and asked her to pray for me. Something deep inside me said: you need to see this through. Not exactly the kind of clarity you get from a business plan. But it was enough.

I crossed Mordor for a second time, waded through eleven or twelve river crossings I lost count of, and came out the other side sometime around 3am. In almost four decades of expeditions — Everest, the South Pole, deserts most people never think twice about — that stretch of river in the dark is still the single most dangerous thing I've ever done. 25 hours, all told, from the last real rest.

Twelve days, fifteen hours, thirty minutes after starting in Pietermaritzburg, I rolled into Paarl. I Won that year. I don't think the win was really about the finish line. It was about the decision at midnight, in the water, with no one watching, to keep going anyway.
Most of the hardest decisions in business happen exactly like that too — alone, in the dark, with no audience and no applause waiting on the other side.

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." — Matthew 6:6

Erik Vermeulen still one of my favourite pics ever, thank you!

Two weeks ago I was in Colorado. A week ago I stood on top of three 14,000-foot peaks — Democrat, Cameron, and Lincoln — with three of my kids. 12, 15, and 17. My old friend Barry, who's shared many summits with me, was there too.

Nine hours. One route, three summits linked together along the ridge.

I'm 55 now. Not close to the fitness I had doing this kind of thing in my twenties and thirties. My kids set the pace most of the time. I didn't love that part, if I'm honest.

But I've spent thirty years putting mountains between me and my family — training for them, recovering from them, flying off to the next one. This was the first time I got to bring three of them up a real one with me, instead of leaving to go find one.

Somewhere on that ridge it struck me: this is the same terrain, the same thin air, the same legs-burning-lungs-burning grind I've chased since I was younger than my own kids are now. Except this time I wasn't chasing anything. I was just there, with them. The Lord's been faithful through thirty years of these mountains — even the ones I climbed for the wrong reasons.

Nine hours isn't a big number by my own history. It might be the best nine hours I've ever spent on a mountain.

The Empty Quarter. 250,000 square miles of sand across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE and Yemen.

Few wells, no shade, no resupply.

We crossed it unsupported — everything we needed pulled behind us on a cart, the whole way. For 40 days.

Pulling a loaded cart through dunes in 120-plus heat does something specific to your head. No summit to aim at. Just the next hour, and the one after that.

The worst part wasn't physical. The desert gives you nothing to measure progress against. Your brain starts inventing distances that aren't real.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I found myself praying every single day for the same thing: an oasis, a well, some kind of water miracle. Not dramatic prayers. Just the same request, repeated, day after day.

Some business seasons are like that. No summit. No finish line in view. Just flat terrain and the discipline to keep moving.

What's your empty quarter right now?

This is Badger Basin, a small convenience store in Hartsel, Colorado.

I hadn't stood on this exact spot since 2013, 2014, and 2015 — racing the Tour Divide, one of the toughest unsupported mountain bike races in the world. This store was one of the few places to resupply.

Back then I'd pull in here wrecked, grabbing whatever calories I could before getting back on the bike.

Last week, I stopped here with my wife on a family trip to Breckenridge. A very different kind of tired.

Somewhere on that Tour Divide route, an idea started forming: what if South Africa had its own version of this race?

That idea became The Munga — the race I founded back home, and grew for years. I'm now working through the final details of stepping away from it.

Standing in that same parking lot again, years later, in a completely different season of life, was a strange kind of full-circle moment.

You rarely recognize the pivotal moments while you're in them. Sometimes you only see the shape of the turning point years later, standing in the same parking lot.