Leadership Is Type 2 Fun. And That's Exactly Why It's Worth It.

If you spend any time in the mountains, on a trail, or grinding up a climb on your mountain bike, you already know about the Fun Scale, even if you have never heard of it.

 I've been an avid mountain biker since my teens. Riding, racing, exploring the mountains all over the country has brought me a ton of joy (and experience). There is a moment on every hard ride when you start to question everything. Your legs are burning, the trail is not getting easier, and somewhere in the back of your mind a very reasonable voice is asking why you thought this was a good idea. And you start questioning everything about your life that brought you to this very painful moment. And then you see it. The finish line. The top. The view. The ability to do hard things.

Type 1 Fun is exactly what it sounds like - F-U-N. A bluebird powder day. A flowy descent on a trail you know well. A long lunch next to a lake after a beautiful hike. Good food, good views, good company. Simply and obviously fun.

Type 2 Fun is different. Type 2 "fun" hurts. It tests you in ways you did not fully anticipate when you signed up. It's the mountain bike race I trained eight months for and 18 miles in my legs are screaming and I'm covered in mud and questioning my sanity. It is the summit push where the weather turns and your body is done before your mind is. It is the long training ride in the rain and hail that you almost skipped, the one that later becomes one of your favorite stories to tell.

Type 2 Fun is not fun in the moment. Type 2 Fun is profoundly, deeply fun in retrospect. And it is almost always the experience you are most proud of.

For five seasons I was a mountain bike stage racer, training six days a week to prepare for seven to nine consecutive days of racing. The hardest of those was JoBerg2C, a nine day, 900 kilometer stage race across South Africa. There were days on that course where everything hurt, where the finish line felt like a concept rather than a real thing, and moments where if it wasn't for helpers on the trail, I never would have made it. There were stages where I had nothing left and kept going anyway, because five seasons of stage racing teaches you something that nothing else quite can:

The middle is supposed to be hard. The middle is where you find out what you are made of.

On the final day, when I crossed that finish line and dipped my toes into the ocean, what I felt was not relief. It was joy. Deep, earned, full-body joy. The kind that only exists on the other side of something genuinely difficult. The kind you cannot fake or shortcut or buy. The kind that makes you look back at every hard mile and feel grateful for every single one of them. 

That is Type 2 Fun in its purest form. And that, in every way that matters, is leadership.

We tend to recognize leadership first as what we do NOT want to be. We watch leaders avoid hard conversations, confuse authority with respect, and care more about being right than about the people they are supposed to care for. You experience toxic leadership, bad leadership, and mean leadership. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, something shifts as you become a leader.

You realize you are being handed an invitation. An invitation to hold the safety, the security, and the wellbeing of other human beings in your care. Their growth. Their sense of belonging. Their ability to bring their best every day and go home feeling like it mattered.

So you lean in. And it gets hard in the best possible way.

You have difficult conversations that take everything you have. You build accountability structures nobody thanks you for. You hold the vision for your team on the days they cannot hold it for themselves. You do the invisible work of cultivating culture in a hundred small moments that never show up in any report or recognition ceremony.

And then the view arrives.

A team member tells you that something you said changed the way they lead. Your team navigates a conflict that would have stopped them two years ago and comes out the other side stronger. You look around at the culture you have helped build and realize that people genuinely want to be there. That they feel safe. That they are growing.

That is the summit. That is the view that makes every hard mile worth it.

We train hard in between the races because the race deserves our best. We grow as leaders because the people counting on us deserve someone who showed up prepared, who did the work, who earned the view.

You do not get that view without the miles.

Welcome to Type 2 Fun. You're going to love it up here.

Dr. Christine Perigen Fonner is the co-founder of the Evolving Leader Fellowship. She works with leaders and organizations to build cultures of trust, accountability, and Radical Care. Learn more at evolvingleaderfellowship.com.