No Limits

Lauren

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 06:57:16 -0700

I woke up at 11:22pm, totally disoriented. I looked around to get my bearings: okay, I'm sitting--I'm in a car. It's pitch black outside (and the stars are magnificent). And I'm so fricking cold. It takes my brain a minute to catch up and remember that it's Saturday night and I'm in the crew car. Lauren is running the Stagecoach 100 Mile Ultra from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon. Our crew car was parked at the Russell Tank Aid Station, and we had gotten there a few hours earlier and had walked down the path from the parking lot to the Arizona Trail that the runners were on. We marveled at how disoriented we were walking maybe 100 meters from the car in that absolute darkness--how were the runners doing this? As it turns out, they were also confused about which way to head on the trail after stopping for a few minutes with their crew, and had to be pointed in the right direction. It's all part of the challenge.

Okay, so this is where I am, but it's 11:22pm? At 9pm, Chris, Lauren's partner, had changed and gotten ready to jump in and pace, if needed. I was going to take a nap so I could drive and navigate, and Chris was going to head down to the trail around 10pm to wait for Lauren. It's so dark that it would be easy to miss your runner going through, so he was heading down a little early to wait for her, and then they would come back up to the car to get what she needed. I didn't fall asleep until Chris left the car at 10pm, so when I woke up at 11:22pm and got my bearings, I also got flooded with a big dose of worry--it's an hour and a half later than he thought she might come through. But job one when you're crewing an ultra is this: keep your f**king cool. Things not going as planned is baked into the whole thing, especially once it gets dark, and it doesn't do you, or your runner, any good to freak out. Until necessary. Which is usually never.

So, I took a deep breath and I waited.

Should I go find Chris? I could try that, but I...Read More

A Season of Gratitude

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 06:56:54 -0700

As of this writing, we are officially eleven weeks away from Thanksgiving, my very favorite holiday. I have some half written essays in my head and down on "paper" that deserve completion, not because what or how I'm writing is spectacular, but because they are about people who have made such an impactful imprint on my life that I quite literally would not be on the good track that I'm on without them.
At the end of January of this year I moved out of my apartment, and I've been transient ever since. I'm not without direction, but I am without a home. I am restructuring and rebuilding. One of my strong suits (and coping mechanisms) is cleaning things up. When all else fails, I organize: files, closets, kitchens, my planner, my writing, my mind...But I don't have things of my own to clean up right now, so I decided to clean up my writing, and in doing so I found some unfinished essays about people who deserve my gratitude.
I came across this photo I took of some of my favorite coffee mugs before I packed them up, and I started to associate some of the mugs with the unfinished essays about my people. I miss my mugs, but they are waiting for me when the time comes to set up my own place again. Until then, I have plenty to do in this rebuild, including, but not limited to, finishing these tributes. I have been so well loved and supported, and each one of these individuals have given me things that I will to take into my own coaching practice. I have been so, so lucky to come into contact with people who have strong wills, determination, and good hearts. They've worked hard to sharpen their skills and they are willing to share their work with and invest in those around them. And I have been the beneficiary of those things.
This era I'm in has a lot of challenging moments and it can be easy to let my mind pull me into what I've lost, and let the doubt convince me that I'm not up for the challenge of what's ahead.
OR...
I can spend...Read More

Jill

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 06:54:14 -0700

*I wrote most of this essay two years ago, after my second knee surgery in nine months. Jill was my knee Physical Therapist, extraordinaire.
It was 4:30am and I was up and getting my day started. The coffee was brewing, the fake fireplace was crackling on the tv, and it was time to work on my knee. In two hours I needed to be out the door to head to my physical therapy appointment with Jill, and I couldn't wait. It was officially Thanksgiving season, and I stopped and took a moment to say a great big, whole-hearthearted thank you to Jill.
For over a year Jill had been a constant in my life. Less than twenty-four hours after my first surgery I was back at the Surgery Center/Physical Therapy Facility--shell shocked, drugged up, and awkwardly manuevering on crutches with one leg. My leg was wrapped and braced and twice its' normal size, and I was overwhelmed, loopy, and in a great deal of pain. Just about the last thing I wanted in that moment was to be back there and to have someone messing with my leg. And then I met Jill.
To be fair, my first meeting with her is pretty fuzzy, but my big takeaway is that I immediately felt safe. I was in competent, compassionate hands and I knew it, even through the fog of drugs and pain.
Come to find out, Jill was the big cheese--the big cheese for knees. She heads up the PT team for my surgeon, and all she does is knees. She rehabs knees, she studies knees, she trains and oversees other PT's about knees, and she travels around the country and talks about knees. If I was lucky to get the surgeon I had, and I was, then multiply that luck x 1000, and that's how lucky I was to have Jill.
For the first two months following my first surgery I couldn't put weight on my surgical leg at all. I made twenty-four visits to the phycial therapy group at the Vikings Training Center during that time, and the majority of those visits were with Jill. She was tall and athletic and...Read More

the art of coaching

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 14:22:50 -0700

Years ago I had a house cleaning and organizing business. I was good at organizing; I've always been good at organizing. But I was young--maybe less seasoned is a better way to look at it--and when someone wanted a closet organized there was only one way to do that: my way. The closet looked great when I finished (if I do say so myself) and they were happy and off I'd go, proud and satisfied. But nine times out of ten when I returned the next week it had already begun to fall apart. This regression back to chaos, even with my weekly intervention, was usually complete by the fourth week. They had asked me to clean and organize their closet and I did, so why the tailspin back to the mess that didn't work? They still desired a functioning closet and were utterly confused as to why it kept unraveling, as if gremlins had a nightly go at it. And I was frustrated that they couldn't keep my closet clean. Oops. Their closet.
It's probably no big surprise that they did not follow Robert's Rules of Order. I had a head full of loud voices that resembled the floor of the stock exchange. Many of them are just yelling old stories at me about what I haven't done right or well over the years. They yell about what I've messed up and how I've fallen short. They show up and harass me a lot, they don't have their facts straight, and their delivery is never constructive. They sound like anger, but they aren't anger; in fact, they bully...Read More

Chip Away

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:00:43 -0700

Awhile back I had the opportunity to listen in on an interview with an Olympic runner. When asked where she believes her success comes from she answered, without hesitation, that she chips away at her goals. She talked about running in the Olympic trials a number of years ago and realizing, with only a few laps to go in the 5000m race, that she really wanted to be on the Olympic team but had fallen back into 8th place. I may have this detail a bit wrong, but what I do have right and remember clearly is this: she said she made her way onto the Olympic team the way she made her way through her running career: by chipping away. That day at the trials she did not focus on what seemed like (and probably was) the nearly impossible feat of winning the race, she focused on the runner right in front of her--just that one runner. When she caught her, she focused on the next runner, and solely concentrated on passing her. She entered the final lap in 5th place and in that one lap she chipped her way into 3rd place and a spot on the Olympic team.
I was mesmerized by this story and strategy. I went home and promptly made a sign that said CHIP AWAY and hung it over my desk. It's a very simple concept, but like many things that are easy to grasp, the application was neither simple nor easy for me. I thought chipping away would be exclusively reserved for running and daily tasks, but fear exposed areas of my life where I am faint of heart. As it turns out, the first priority was chipping away at fear.
A year had gone by and the chipping away was front and center, but I was making little progress. I was trying to chip away at a boulder of fear with a paper clip. I needed a jackhammer level experience to make some impact on my fear. And that jackhammer experience was a hyperbaric chamber.
A hyperbaric chamber is a small chamber that provides pure oxygen at a pressure that is 2 to 3 times higher than...Read More

Learning to Breathe Under Water

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 15:50:20 -0700

When I was about nine years old I decided that I wanted to go to the Olympics. I decided gymnastics was my best bet because I could practice that on my own. I desperately wanted to take lessons but that was out of the question, so occasionally I was able to get a ride to a free class taught at the junior high. In the meantime, my best friend Kristi and I decided we would team up and buy a crash mat from Kunkels Sporting Goods store so that we could practice the trickier gymnastics moves safely. Needless to say, this dream didn't go very far. There was no one in my sphere who was pursuing big goals or dreaming big dreams, or at the very least we didn't talk about these kinds of things. Certainly there was no one encouraging me to point myself in that direction. I even had adults actively trying to squash the dreams I dared to speak; so I buried my dreams deep inside and moved on.
Nurture has a lot of influence over our path in life--it's a powerful force. But...! We are also wired the way we are wired. And for all the not-so-helpful messages I received that I am working to unravel, that hard-wired desire to expand and excel is in there, too. And try as I might to destroy it--well, I can't. It's indestructable.
And now I'm in this new era, an era ruled by gigantic changes in my body, in my relationships, and in my willingness to look deeper and deeper and deeper into the forces who have been calling the shots in the depths of who I am. But I can go deeper than the wrongs that may have been done to me, perceived or real. I can go deeper than how I was treated or what I was told or what I put up with. It's not about anything that happened; it's not about anyone else. It's about me wanting to own me and to take responsiblity for me--all of me, the whole story, no matter where it came from--and to call it mine. It's all mine. And I want it back.
Recently as I began to rebuild my running fitness for a third time, my coach decided that he needed to...Read More

Certainty

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 08:09:25 -0800

Every morning for me starts with coffee and Wordle--I don't ever skip it. Wordle, like anything, comes more easily with practice. I don't usually linger long over it, and I don't have methods or strategies or words I always start with like a lot of people do. I wing it; I play with it, and the answers usually come without a lot of effort these days. This unfettered approach to Wordle isn't really like me, and I really love it for this reason. But every once in awhile I get hung up, and the common obstacle in this case is when I am absolutely certain the word has to be this or that. And I am almost always absolutely wrong.
Here's a quick rundown for those of you who don't play Wordle: each day you get six tries to guess a five letter word. Each time you guess a word, one of the following happens:
if any of the letters in the word you guess are not in the word of the day, those letters show up gray
if any of the letters in the word you guess are in the word of the day but in the wrong place, they show up yellow
if any of the letters in the word you guess are in the correct spot in the word of the day, they show up green.
and, if a word you throw out as a guess isn't a word at all, the letters kind of "jump" and it won't count it--a saving grace, actually, so you aren't wasting turns on nonsense
So, one morning I am sipping my coffee and breezily making my guesses when my fourth guess gives me three green letters--so three letters in their correct spots: _ _ B E R. I've got it! It has to be F I B E R. Nope. That was guess number five. Without hesitating:...Read More

A New Start

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 05:26:41 -0800

You know when you're in that place, in the middle of something challenging, and it can feel like it will never be any other way then the way it is right now?
And you know that feeling when you get down the road a bit and look back on that time and it has softened and woven into your life and your new perspective becomes remember that one year when....
Well I am grateful and pleased to say that the start of this new year finds me run/walking down that road, the one that is softening and weaving the last year or so into my life. And although I can't predict the future, I've got a solid feeling that the tedious challenges of learning to bear weight on my leg and trying to bend my knee have given way to the new and exciting challenge of teaching my body to run again.
When I recently told a friend that I was actually excited about starting over he said "Yeah, there's beauty in starting over." And frankly, what are my options? Find the beauty in it or don't. And option number one has all the good energy.
Maybe the biggest gift in starting over is having all that time when I couldn't run to survey where I began and how far I've come. I am starting over but I'm certainly not at the beginning. And even though I was back in the gym ten days after my first surgery and have been training all along, the training was different, altered. I couldn't run, so in that sense I've had one giant rest period. Everything fell away, or maybe fell to pieces, and I've been able to take my time to sift through it all. What stood the test of time comes with me, and everything else stays behind with a thank you for the lessons given. It's not a bad formula for life, either--a little time out to loosen the reigns, let things fall where they may...
My running had to rest--it was begging for a rest. I think we've worked through our issues; what we know for sure is that we want to travel this life together. I've still got my big dreams, I just...Read More

It's been a minute

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 05:56:33 -0700

Yesterday I was driving and thinking about the time when, in the middle of a five mile trail race, it dawned on me that racing means racing, as opposed to just being out for a run that I pay for, I guess. I had run a number of races up to this point but it just hadn't clicked in my head that racing meant something different. I always had a race goal; I always went into the race with a strategy from my coach; and I always showed up with all the butterflies and trepidation that a start line brings. But until this particular race day I just didn't get it--not until a midwestern (kind of passive aggressive) competitor posing as a fellow middle-aged woman out for a casual race-run ran up beside me for the third time on the course.
The first interaction with her didn't hit my bullshit radar at all. She came up alongside me, said a friendly hello, then proceeded to chat about how she started the race a few minutes late, how she loved running these cross country type courses, how good she was feeling, and something about the grandkids. And then she pulled ahead.
I didn't think much about it. We were on a flat, beautiful section of the course and I could see her winding along the trail up ahead. As she hit an incline she started to slow and I closed the gap and passed her. Once the trail flattened out I heard her come up behind me again. When she caught me this time she began to tell me about how many races she had run lately and that she hadn't even been sure, right up until this morning, if she would run this one but decided to jump in. This was followed by more talk about the grandkids while sprinkling in veiled bragging about her running accomplishments. Something wasn't sitting right with me but I had been trained for 50+ years to be nice, even at my own expense, and although I was beginning to shake off that always be nice thing, I was still kind of a novice. For a second time she slowly pulled ahead and, frankly, I was glad to...Read More