The Runner's Trip: Run Long, Travel Far, Discover More
trail running and travel blog by Sarah Lavender Smith
When I set a goal, I do all I can to fulfill it. Therefore I have decided to “dig deep” in another way, doing more personally to support and protect public lands while hoping to inspire others to join me. I want to achieve my goal in TWO WEEKS by Saturday, September 28, the day […]
This post is about a topsy-turvy two months. I’ve been in a funk, facing fears and experiencing exaggerated moods, but I’m reminded that peace of mind and a normal rhythm return in good time.
This is a book about the therapeutic power of running and becoming a top ultrarunner. But it’s the backstory about her family, and her personal development, that drew me in, even when chapters served as a sometimes-painful mirror of self-reflection.
I’m doing this race again less as an endurance competition, more as an opportunity to revisit and revere this region up close, and ultimately do what I can to help protect it.
To breathe deeply, to see the horizon clearly, to talk to old friends, to move your legs up and down a mountain—how marvelous and precious this life on earth is, the more imperiled it becomes.
No, our dog is not part of this gear/gift guide, but something in that photo is! This time of year, I like to share recommendations for worthwhile running- and outdoor-related stuff I discovered over the past 12 months.
I wanna run and feel like I did in that photo from 2015. I can’t recall a time I felt this degree of ambivalence about running, which is supposed to be my passion. Perhaps I’m fitting the profile of burnout, but burnout usually follows overtraining, and since September I’ve been undertraining.
As soon as I saw Morgan and Clare, I said wild-eyed, “I may blow up, but those were the best 27 miles of my life.”
I decided to turn my sour grapes into fortified grape juice and attempt an upstart, scrappy race the weekend after Hardrock 100, on the same mountain range, that’s arguably even more difficult—a race so miserable in its first year on the current route that the RD admits, “I don’t think it was a good experience […]
“For these three days,” I told the group gathered for our inaugural San Juan Mountain Running Camp, “I want you to encounter and experience challenges on the trail that you don’t expect, and that perhaps intimidate you, because you’ll discover that you can get through and handle more than you think you can. And you’ll […]