Not even a mile into our run,ÌęWhitney’s shorts are already sopping from a sudden slip into the mud. In the tall grass, it’s impossible to see what our feet will actually land on—maybe a spongy hummock, a bowl of mud pudding, or a black puddle of unknown depth.

“Sorry!” she shouts back to me, her pace quick despite the horrible footing, the baking sun, and the hot breath of humidity rising from the soggy sheep pasture we’re cutting through. “I forgot how long this section was.”

Typical, I think. We’re so forgetful about the parts that suck.

I can tell my little sister is thrilled to show off her local trailsÌęafter moving to Wanaka, New Zealand. It’s December 2018, and my husband and I have flown down to visit as part of our honeymoon. But to get to the more scenic, craggy ridgelines of the 18-mileÌę, we have to slog through this bog first. At least we’re doing it together this time, I think.

Living on opposite sides of the globe makes it difficult to stay in touch, and I often worry about Whitney. Since she moved abroad nearly six years ago, phone calls are sporadic, and we see each other in person only twice a year at best. But running has come to serve as a kind of litmus test for the condition of our inner lives, whether we’re on the trail together or awarding each other kudos on Strava from thousands of miles away.

Since the district track meet my senior year of high school, when she was a freshman, I’ve felt the push-pull of wanting Whitney to slow down so I can keep up, whileÌęalso wanting her to break through her own limits.

At 15 and 18, Whitney and I were look-alikes: two heads of white-blonde hair, two purple and gold uniforms, four legs blinding white from a winter spent indoors. Our shoes struck the track in sync as we turned the corner into the final stretch of the 800-meter district championship. We grew up best friends, and moving to a tiny new town in western Nebraska the previous year had cemented that bond. We could hear the small-town crowd’s crescendo as itÌęwatched us pull away from the rest of the pack together, shoulder to shoulder, matching strides for the final stretch. At the finish, my body crossed the line a fraction of a body width ahead of hers for first place. I’m quite sure that was intentional on Whitney’s part, because she’s been ahead of me ever since.

That fall I left for college, butÌęwe both kept running—Whitney even faster in her final years of high school track, and me clocking laps around the Colorado State University campus or jogging in the foothills. After high school, we quit competing, except for the occasional 10K or half marathon. We occasionally caught up on the phone or by e-mail, but we grew in different directions, eventually keeping our heaviest burdens and darkest secrets to ourselves. It would be five years before we lived under the same roof again for a summer, when it all finally came out.

Sitting next to me on a park bench one summer evening in 2004, Whitney told me that through high school and college she’d been wrestling with an eating disorder that took root during high school track.

She’d come to live with me and my roommates after my senior year of college in Fort Collins, Colorado, and we’d been sharing a room for a few weeks. We sat in City Park, staring across the lake, though neither of us wasÌęactually seeing it. At first I felt like punching someone—like I could punish whoever was responsible for ripping away my little sister’s innocence. But as Whitney talked, I saw that she’d been blaming herself all along. It felt like a betrayal—that running, this thing that should feel like freedom, could be part of something so insidious.

I had no idea how to help. I was getting ready to leave for a six-month stint working in Antarctica, part ofÌęa vague plan to restart my adult life after severing ties with nearly all of my college friends. Trudging through my own mire of confusion and heartbreak, I felt empty-handed.

Each of the five years since my freshman year of college, I had dived deeper into a campus religious organization that eventually threatened to swallow my life entirely. Whitney and I grew up in a devout Evangelical home, and I’d looked for a church group to join right away in college, excited to make new friends and grow spiritually. At first the group felt accepting and supportive. I appreciated how informal it seemed, meeting in small groups at people’s homes during the week and having casual services together on Saturday nights. ItÌęeven had a rock band—not something you saw in western Nebraska.

I moved up in leadership within the group, and gradually it asked more of me, and willingly I gave. More time. More commitment. More loyalty. I quit attending other campus groups andÌędoing recreational triathlons, and I cut way back on my own outdoor adventures. I eventually stopped hanging out with other students at all, unless I was trying to recruit them into the church group. The time commitment ate at my study hours, and my grades slipped. I took the church leaders’ messages to heart, to “trust God for my schoolwork,” not fully understanding what that meantÌęother than giving my time to the ministry instead of studying. My stress levels skyrocketed. Meanwhile, questions about the group’s dogma—and my own faith—started to simmer.

Finally, I broke down. I’d been struggling with depressionÌęand felt like a fraud leading others while my own faith was crumbling. Tearfully, I explained to the other church leaders why I wouldn’t just be taking a break for a couple weeks—I was leaving. For good. At 22 years old, recently graduated from college, this meant jettisoning nearly all my friends and everything else familiar in my life. Taking a janitor job at an Antarctic research base sounded like the perfect way to move on.

Boarding the military cargo plane to Antarctica, I welcomed the sensation of leaving everything behind. Except Whitney. Only a few weeks before, sitting on that park bench, I’d seen I wasn’t the only one who was fractured. Whitney and I had cried and held each other. She sounded like she was recovering, but I worried about whether she would have the support she needed in California during her final year of college. In my rush to escape my own problems, was I abandoning Whitney in her time of need?

In the dark, low-ceilinged gym at McMurdo Station in 2005, I beep-beep-beeped the button for the treadmill’s incline—up, up, up—my breath and my heart rate spiking with it until I couldn’t bear it anymore, and then down, down, down again. Desperate to stave off boredom, I jacked the pace up and down, and then the incline up and down, and then both. I’m sure I was driving anyone else in the gym nuts.

I ran because I could barely button my jeans, thanks toÌęthe fatty cafeteria food and beer—and I ran because running was the one place I felt like myself anymore.

Staying in contact with Whitney, or anyone, from Antarctica was more difficult than I’d anticipated. Six harried days a week I scrubbed showers, scoured toilets, and vacuumed floors. My roommate worked nights washing dishes, so on my days off, when I hoped to call Whitney or my parents, she was asleep in our tiny dorm room. I can count on one hand the number of times Whitney and I spoke on the phone during the five and a half months I was at McMurdo. A small computer lab in the hallway outside the galley offered infernally slow internet access, and lines of cooks, mechanics, and heavy-machine operators stacked up there on weekends and after shift changes. On the rare occasions I waited in the line, I usually found myself filling e-mails with mundane observations about station life:ÌęI saw a penguin. I came down with a cold.

I began preparing my workout clothes before I left for work each morning, so I could quickly and quietly change from my bleach-splashed Carhartts into my fleece running pants. If the weather was mild, I trotted along the volcanic dirt roads and trails around the station. I skittered down along the harbor, where the icebreaker and cargo ship would arrive, circledÌęthe hut built by Robert Falcon Scott, or scrambled up to the top of Observation Hill—the cone-shapedÌęvolcanic mound on the edge of town that was topped with a memorial to Scott and his men, who perished on their return trip from the South Pole.

I entered a 9K race organized by the rec departmentÌęand surprised myself by sprinting to the finish for first place in the women’s division. Hammering as hard as I could gave me a precious feeling of autonomy that I’d missed. At the bottom of the planet, running quietly whispered to me, “You are still you.” I wondered about Whitney, back in California, and hoped that she, too, felt like herself. Our scattershot e-mails were typically vague and, I knew, probably more upbeat than true—because typing out the words to express dark thoughts is like confirming their truth. Neither of us wasÌęprobably ready for that.

“Slow down, sister!” I whispered urgently, refreshing the Los AngelesÌęMarathon website on my laptop. Back in Denver in 2007, I was starting a fresh life after Antarctica. I was also slowly rebuilding a sense of closeness to Whitney, who was transitioning from the frying pan of college to the fire of a Hollywood job and dating in L.A. She signed up for the L.A. Marathon, and when race day rolled around, I tracked her progress online.

Since my return from Antarctica, I’d taken every chance I could to visit Whitney. We ran along the creek from her Culver City apartment out to the beach, slowly catching up on months’ worth of news. I worried she was too nice to stick up for herself against manipulative film-industry figures and the selfish, grabby men she met online. I wondered if the toughness I saw in her disciplined running strides carried over to the rest of her life.

Just the way I’d poured myself into running in Antarctica, I knew that Whitney had been passionate about her marathon training. But as I paced around my 300-square-foot apartment, munching on toast and refreshing the race tracking, I worried that maybe she hadn’t taken good enough care of herself to push so hard. Had she been eating enough? Had she been training too hard? Was she drinking enough water? Her splits had been so fast.

I knew it was a hot day, and her miles had ticked by so quickly. One by one, I saw her pass through the checkpoints, astonished at her speed and willing that she could keep it up. I felt painfully far away.

At mile 23, the minutes started to stack up. Maybe she stopped to walk, I told myself. That’s probably a good thing. But I knew in the cells of my body, which share her DNA, that Whitney wouldn’t just quit.

My heart sank as several more minutes passed and no mile-23Ìęcheck mark appeared by her name. Helpless with worry, I finally received the crushing news from my parents over the phone: Whitney had collapsed on the racecourse. Still jogging as she approached an aid station, she’d apparently wobbled, swayed, and then crumpled onto the adjacent grass, blacking out. My eyes filled with tears thinking of the medic who’d been there instead of me to scoop up her chilled, sweaty body.

Over the course of the next couple of months, she saw a doctor and got checked out for a possible stress fracture. Our parents feared she suffered from a heart problem. But to this day, she says that the collapse was a combination of not eating enough while pushing herself well beyond her body’s capacity; she didn’t accept it until she was lying in the grass alongside the racecourse, unable to recite her own address to the strangers huddled over her.

Ten years have passed since that painful marathon, but Whitney and I both still turn to running for its soul-soothing properties. Treading in her footsteps as we tour her favorite trails around her New Zealand home, I’m happy to see that Whitney’s learned a lot about taking care of herself in the previous decade. Each of her strong, confident strides on the Skyline Traverse reassures me.

Whitney left her job in Hollywood to travel and work abroad, eventually marrying an Australian man and settling in New Zealand. I lived in a van, traveling the American West for a year and a half with my now husband, eventually settling back in Denver. We each learned to fight for our own identities, and running has been a constant touchstone. Before each of our weddings, we planned ambitious trail runs to spend quality sister time together.

Aside from my husband, I only follow one person on Strava: Whitney. Even with our regular Skype chats and e-mails, Strava gives me the most visceral understanding of how my sister’s doing. When I can see where she’s been running, how far, how fast, how often, I feel connected to her. I’mÌęcomforted simply knowing she’s out there being her true self, strong and sweet.

As we finally pop up to the ridgeline above Wanaka, she points out different peaks across the saw-toothed horizonÌęand apologizes again for forgetting how tough the 5,000 feet of elevation gain would be. I’m surprised—but then, not at all surprised—at how tough she is. And at how we always seem to forget enough of the hard parts to keep moving forward. Maybe, over all these years, running has simply been there to remind us of how strong we actually are.

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From the first paragraph of her new bookÌę ($25, University of Chicago Press), out April 1, Heather Hansman plops us right into the drink with her. She weaves journalistic research into the tale of her mostly solo 2016 pack-raft trip from the headwaters of the Green River, in Wyoming,Ìęto its confluence in Utah. The book explains the history of the river and investigates its current threats, but it reads more like an adventure yarn than some of its cousins in the western-river canon.

As the greatest tributary ofÌęthe overworked Colorado River, supplies water to 33 million people, and it holds precious unallocated acre-feet of water, so it’s a lively illustration of the West’s battles over the resourceÌęin an increasingly dry landscape. The river carries Hansman through Wyoming ranches, natural-gas fields, cities, and national parks, and she finds that seemingly everyone wants a piece of its pie. So she follows her curiosity, learning where the water goes—and who’s fighting over what.

From Hansman’s speeding boat, we feel the river rise with an unexpected dam release that also floods farmers’ fields and flushes valuable trout from eddies where fishing guides take high-paying clients. From her seat at a public meeting, we feel the heat from farmers angry that endangered fish seem to carry more weight than they do when it comes to river policy and water use. “I really thought the woman in the row in front of me was going to stand up and punch someone,” Hansman told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. And we visitÌęthe boom-and-bust town of Vernal, Utah, where, Hansman writes,Ìę“if you’re a liberal or a paddler passing through, you can expect to pay a buck extra for your drink at George Burnett’s I Love Drilling Juice and Smoothie Cafe.”

Sitting down with water users all along the river, Hansman learns what’s at stake both upstream—vast amounts of agricultural landÌęwith water rights changing hands in the near future—and downstream—cities with increasing population and energy needs. She wades through the notoriously tangled weeds of western water law, explaining it in easy-to-understand terms, and she comes to grips with her own assumptions about what the western landscape should look like in the future, from flood irrigation on farmland to dam removal. Hansman, an environmental reporter and former raft guide, says her misconception going into the trip was that things would look more black and white. “I think it comes back to the idea that nobody’s the bad guy,” she says. The endangered-fish biologist, the engineer at the dam, the farmer upstream—each wants to do good. “They’re just trying to do a totally different type of good,” Hansman says.ÌęAnd when opposing sides actually sit in the same room, she says, real work starts happening.

At a short-notice public meeting in Vernal, Hansman witnesses people’s anger simmering down when they feel heard—when they see the other side as people, when they all have a chance to apologize and explainÌęand maybe even break down a few entrenched stereotypes. “I think a lot of that comes from the face to face, getting everyone in the same room, which is really, really hard to do,” she says. “And I think part of the problem [in the West as a whole] is that’s not realistic to do on a seven-state basis.”

Hansman brings a sense of humility to both her reporting and the river trip itself, admitting to moments of fear and failures of confidence during her weeks of solitude in an inflatable kayak. “There were points where I was totally freaked out, especially the first couple weeks,” she says. “I was thinking, I’m not capable of this,Ìęor What’s that noise in the night?ÌęThat was definitely there, but I didn’t want that to stop me. The fear factor felt reduced over time.”

By placing herself directly in the current of the river and taking us with her, Hansman gives us a more tangible understanding of what’s at stake. “I had to be gone, to be in it, to see the good and the bad,” she writes. “I learned that you can care about placesÌęand want to protect them, but then you’re fighting for abstractions.” In Downriver, she makes the Green River—and with it, all the water of the West—just a little less abstract for the rest of us.

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The school bus roaring past my house woke me from an email and social media stupor, and I looked up from my laptop to notice the sky growing dark. How? I whined to myself. I’d meant to sneak in a midday trail run, but somehow I was still cross-legged on the couch, running shoes still in the closet. I’d like to say I have it good as a freelancer—I work from home, and my schedule is flexible. And maybe I do get out more than most, sometimes heading to the trail midday in exchange for working late into the evening or occasionally packing up to work remotely. But I’ve learned a frustrating lesson over the years: Having a flexible schedule doesn’t mean having free time unless I make free time. I think most Americans would agree that work seems to expand to fill the time allotted to it—which, if we let it, would be all the time.

Countless legitimate obstacles stack up between us and our more adventurous dream lives: picking the kids up from school, deadlines, shifts that simply can’t get covered or swapped. But what irks me is when I know deep down I could be living more freely if I only managed my time differently. So I reached out to a time management expert to find out how to organize my life better to squeeze in more adventure. Laura Vanderkam is the author of and the upcoming . She blogs and hosts a podcast on time management and productivity. Here’s her advice—which applies for both nine-to-five workers and freelance folks.

Change the Way You Talk About Your Time

“When people sayÌę‘I don’t have time,’ what they really mean is ‘It’s not a priority,’” Vanderkam says. Of course, you may have good reasons why more adventure might not be your top priority. “If you’ve got a brand-new baby, taking a two-week hiking trip in Nepal might not be top on your list,” she says. But by choosing to say “It’s not a priority right now” instead of “I don’t have time,” you’re reminding yourself that you are in control of how to spend your time. It’s an empowering first step toward managing your time the way you want.

Make Your Downtime a Priority Just Like You Make Your Work a Priority

If you want to make free time a higher priority, whether it’s for a quick evening outing or a weeklong trip, treat it like the other important things in your life. “I think that ‘something’—work, personal obligations—always has a tendency to crowd out what is perceived as ‘nothing,’ like downtime and time for personally pleasurable activities,” Vanderkam explains. How to counter that? Turn your “nothings” into “somethings,” she says. Make commitments like joining a running club or rock climbing group. It turns fun into a specific item on your schedule, and having an obligation to other people holds you accountable.

Use Your Calendar More Than You Do Now

Even without blocking out a two-week chunk for a big trip, there are ways most of us can eke out more time for ourselves by being more efficient, Vanderkam says. “Decide each day, before you end work, what are your top three to five priorities for the next day,” she says, and place those items on your schedule. That specific planning can be the difference between working late and getting out in time for an evening hike. “If you’re a freelancer, you might consciously block out open days in your schedule and not give these times away when people ask. I’ve carved out a few open fall days to go on leaf-peeping tours.”

Become a Morning Person

“For most people, mornings are the best time for adding in things to your life that you’re not doing right now,” Vanderkam says. For example, if you want to work out more, getting up earlier a few times per week will help you fit it in. But resist the urge to pencil it in every single day; fitting it into realistic windows will help you stick to it. “Honestly, things don’t have to happen daily in order to count in our lives,” she says.

If Your Work Is Flexible or Freelance, Untether Yourself

Don’t be afraid to do a little work on your vacation if it means you can take a vacation you otherwise wouldn’t. “Maybe half an hour in the morning a few times per week is enough to make you feel on top of things but will allow you to travel and take advantage of the flexibility that comes from self-employment,” Vanderkam says. Sure, there are times when it’s important to totally unplug. But using any flexibility allowed to you can go a long way. “For freelancers, your phone and laptop can truly be your friends,” she says. “Sometimes they feel like handcuffs, but we can change this perception. If you can work from anywhere, why not try it?”

When It Comes to Taking Time Off, Done Is Better Than Perfect

“Most things matter less than we think they do,” Vanderkam says. “Can you remember what you were doing on today’s date two years ago?” It’s a good reminder, she says, that whatever is stressing you out right now most likely won’t matter much in two years. There will never be the perfect time to go for that hike or take a few days off. So stop looking for the perfect time, and instead just choose a reasonable one. “The reality is that for the vast majority of us, Earth will not stop orbiting the sun if we go on that vacation,” Vanderkam says. “We are just not that important.”

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When Samantha Puc and Alice Lesperance tweeted a few months back to gauge interest in a space to safely discuss experiences of being fat in the outdoors, they didn’t know what to expect—aside from the bullying they were already familiar with as writers and editors exploring that topic. When their tweet went viral and they received hundreds of responses, they knew they needed to do something, Puc says. A few months of editorial planning and a successful later, they’re announcing the launch of : a zine featuring work by fat women and non-binary creative people who “love being active, but don’t love toxic weight-loss culture.”

Social influencers like Fat Girls Hiking and Unlikely Hikers inspired Puc to start thinking about the project. At the suggestion of her spouse, she began looking at accounts like those when she felt negative about her body. She wanted to find other people online who were doing things in the outdoors and who looked like her.Ìę

“There’s this whole thing about coming out as fat on the Internet,” she says. “And I know a lot of fat folks who can identify with that—we learn very young how to take photos that are angled so you can’t see our chin or our neck or the chub of our cheeks, or the way our collar bones don’t jut, or our stomachs, or the way our arms are flabby. For a long, long time I felt like I didn’t even see fat people on the Internet—and then these communities started cropping up.”

Seeing communities build up around those social media accounts pushed her to join with Lesperance to create a print publication. The first issue, which they plan to publish in October, will feature personal essays, advice pieces, illustrative work, and interviews withÌęcelebrities like yoga teacher and body positivity advocate Jessamyn Stanley.

“I’d really like to open up the conversation,” Puc says. “To say, hey, fat people can exist and live in our bodies and do things that you might not expect them to do and do it just because they like it—not because they’re trying to shed 40 pounds, or whatever it is that people think fat people are going to the gym to do. There’s value in the fact that outdoor spaces are for everyone, not just for one type of person.”

Through the zine, she hopes to create a space for fat-identifying peopleÌęto find advice about outdoor pursuits from biking to camping. “I’ve had so many people—fat women specifically—come to me and say things like, ‘All the dudes at my local bike shop are really thin and white, and aren’t going to understand how to help me navigate what bike works for my size and body. What do you recommend for me?’” Ìę

But Puc also sees Fatventure Mag as an important read for anybody, regardless of their size, shape, ability or activity level. “One way to really cultivate respect and to open up outdoor and active spaces to others is to just let people be there, let them do their thing. When you’reÌęparticipating in some sort of physical activity—and this goes for everybody—if you see somebody who doesn’t fit your vision of the kind of person who should be participating in that activity, and you want to open your mouth and you want to judge them for that, consider for a second that they’re there for the same reason you are.”

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I never imagined I’d finish my first marathon by plodding laps back and forth across an empty parking lot, with only my boyfriend, Brendan, to see it. No cheering fans. Nobody handing me a banana or a finisher’s medal. Then again, when I laced my shoes that morning, I had no intention of running a marathon.

Brendan had been traveling a lot and had recently been bitten by the ultrarunning bug, so I thought I’d join him for his weekend training run and share some quality time. His training schedule said 25 miles that day, so I figured I’d try to keep up for as much as I could. Over the miles, it came out that I’d never run a marathon before. “Well, if you’re shooting to run 25 today, why not just do 26.2?” he said, glancing first at his GPS watch and then sidelong to gauge my salt-encrusted expression. “It’s just another 15 minutes.”

And that—plus a healthy dose of cajoling, a few miles of walking, and several bathroom breaks—is how I found myself dragging my feet across the trailhead parking spots with Brendan, his eyes glued to his watch, waiting for it to register the magic number 26.2. As I finally disintegrated into my car seat after a sopping hug and high-five, I wondered: Is this what dating an ultrarunner looks like?

Brendan hasn’t always been an ultrarunner. In fact, I’m used to wearing the running shorts in the relationship. I’m one of those messed-up people who thinks I actually enjoy the activity. High school cross-country and track were both sweet solace for me through awkward phases; in college, I found a similar refuge in trail running. In my twenties, I entered half marathons once in a while, but I’ve almost never run with a watch, and I rarely think about time or specific distances. I relish running as more of a spontaneous, natural expression of joy that happens to be good for me. Brendan? He’s different. He’s quick to say he doesn’t like running—he likes having run. So, when he registered for his first 50K after we’d been together for three years, I was a little surprised but supportive. When he finished his second 50-miler and started looking for 100-mile races, I began to anticipate some major lifestyle adjustments. Like getting schooled at the dinner table.

“Twenty miles is automatic pizza,” Brendan declared one evening, holding the door for me at our favorite deep-dish joint in Denver. Problem was, that day I didn’t run the 25 miles with him—I only ran five. “You got this,” he said as my eating pace slowed, leaving several slices untouched. He and his running partner hadn’t stopped mowing into the pizza since it landed in front of them—and they invited me to go out for pie afterward. I always thought I was a good eater, but there was no way I could hang with these guys anymore. An hour later, I dropped my spoon into the berry-pie tin in defeat, tempted to unbutton my jean shorts. At home, it was barely an hour before Brendan was rummaging in the fridge for another snack.

Just as I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the phrase “I’m hungry” 200 times a day, I’ve also started to get used to a regular symphony of groans, gasps, and what Brendan calls “old-man noises” when he sits. And when he stands. And when he lies down. And especially when he dunks his feet into his weekly ice bath. I now refrain from panicking when I hear moans coming from behind the bathroom door.

Brendan and I are the kind of couple who generally leave the bathroom door closed, giving each other privacy. But applying before a run awkwardly straddles the line between public and private—it just somehow seems more intimate than applying sunscreen. Just envision all those private places that might chafe when you’re running five or more hours at a time. Not a very sexy thought. Casually strolling through the open bedroom door to talk about post-run plans, I found Brendan like a deer in headlights staring uncomfortably back at me, Body Glide in one hand, the waistband of his shorts bunched up in the other. His look warned, “You’re not going to be able to unsee what I’m about to do; you should probably turn around.”

Even my idea of what a run looks like has changed. Brendan and I don’t always run together, but when we do, it’s rarely a simple out-and-back anymore. Usually not a clean loop or lollipop trail, either. One day, hunched over before we headed out, he turned the laptop around to show me how he managed to squeeze a few hundred more feet of elevation from our neighborhood streets on his last run. The map showed a row of teeth, the route’s red line zigzagging up and down each block for almost two miles.

I blame most of this on the new GPS watch that Brendan uses to log his miles and elevation. Counting miles so carefully is new to me, and I’m beginning to learn that a trail run is rarely over just because we’re back at the car. Odds are the watch still shows we need another half-mile. Or a third of a mile. Or a tenth of a mile. So I’m learning to swallow my laughter and my pride as we trot back and forth across a parking lot or jog in circles to reach the magic number on the training calendar.

In the end, all those parking-lot circles appear to be paying off. At the finish of the in Steamboat Springs last September, I stood with Brendan’s parents and friends as the sun set and the red digital numbers on the race clock morphed from one into the next. It grew close to a half-hour until the cutoff, and we started to worry. But as Brendan and his buddy Jayson shuffled around the corner and across the finish line, I couldn’t have been more proud. They might not have been the fastest, but they put in the work and accomplished what they set out to do.

And it wasn’t long after Brendan’s old-man noises from that race started to subside that we sat across the kitchen table from each other, staring into our laptops, and I quietly clicked “submit” to enter my own first 50K. Twenty miles equals automatic pizza, after all.

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Cars droned past on the highway behind as she lowered from an easy granite crack climb in Squamish, British Columbia—the exact kind of climb that sent her world into shambles six weeks before, when she’d fallen on lead, flipping upside down and smashing her head below her helmet.

That day, James left the crag with a fractured skull and hemorrhaging brain that interfered with her ability to concentrate and remember, to feel like herself. Today, she left with a glimpse of freedom and clarity she hadn’t experienced since the accident. Not everyone around her supported James climbing again so soon—or ever—but she followed her intuition that climbing was exactly what her recovering brain needed. A growing number of specialists agree: from .

Research already supports mindfulness exercises like —they help rewire the brain connections that a TBI essentially scrambles. And though there isn’t hard data yet to support rock climbing as TBI therapy, it demands a similarly focused state of mind, says Eric Spier, a brain injury physician at Craig Hospital in Denver. “You’re not going to see that with a lot of other activities that don’t require that kind of attention and concentration,” Spier says. “It requires kinesthetic awareness of your body and movement.” The hospital has added climbing to its recreational therapy program for TBI patients in the past two years. A number of other community programs across the country, like the Ìęand in Denver have done the same. But Spier says only a handful of therapy programs across the country—including Craig’s—have begun to specifically study the TBI-climbing connection.

Millions of Americans suffer brain injuries each year, and the most severe can change a person’s sense of identity and self. But TBIs occur on a spectrum: Typical symptoms can include fatigue, memory loss, headaches, feelings of depression, and other emotional disturbances, while a severe TBI can cause more serious attention and memory issues, visual problems, speech and language disruption, and social-emotional struggles.

The potential of rock climbing as therapy lies in how it of recovery. The physical might seem obvious. “Rock climbing would offer many of the retraining components that are part of physical therapy, such as strength, coordination, and balance training,” says Rolf B. Gainer, founder of the . It can also build self-confidence. “That’s especially important to people after a brain injury, when they can say, ‘Yes, I did that.’”

But the mental benefits of rock climbing go beyond a sense of accomplishment, says Spier. Climbing could, for example, help rebuild the damaged neural networks that allow for concentration and focus. “When those [networks] are disrupted, you’re more likely to have headaches and have disrupted sleep and stress and other medical problems that are downstream of that,” he explains. Rock climbing, Spier says, could help patients work on those pathways in the brain that better allow them to maintain attention in resting states—which could help , while improving a patient’s sleep-wake cycle and sense of well-being.

Craig DeMartino has seen this firsthand in his work with in Denver, climbing with veterans who’ve suffered TBIs from exploding IED shockwaves. The program, which has been working with veterans for ten years, isn’t specifically TBI-focused, but DeMartino says he sees the connection. A longtime rock climber himself, he explains that getting on the wall quickly narrows focus to the three feet immediately in front of a person. “These guys don’t have that, ever,” DeMartino says of the TBI victims. “They come back, and their brain is doing whatever it’s doing from the injury, and they don’t get that focus.” For the clients he’s taken climbing as part of a partnership with Veterans Affairs, that newfound clarity is like a gift, he says. “When they come down, [the mental noise] comes back, obviously, right away. But they understand that by doing this on a repeated schedule, they’re actually going to be able to keep that noise quiet for a little bit.”

For some, like professional rock climber , climbing has helped alleviate the emotional side of symptoms. Harrington suffered several concussions throughout her childhood and early adulthood, many from freestyle-skiing crashes—including one that left her unable to speak Spanish after previously being fluent. She fell into a depressive state. “It had taken my personality away—I wasn’t me,” Harrington says. “I knew what I was expected to act like, so I’d put on a false persona. I didn’t feel anger or any emotion. I was like a zombie. And I had no focus, no inspiration, motivation.” She had been seeing a therapist, trying to find out what from her past might have led to the depression.

It wasn’t until after another injury, at age 20, that Harrington saw a concussion specialist who helped her make the connection between her brain injuries and her emotional state. Beginning to understand her condition for what it was, she was slowly waking from a three-month depressive lull when she took her first trip to to learn to crack climb—and began to glimpse her normal self again. The key? Harrington thinks it may have been the challenge of learning something new that put her in the moment but wasn’t physically risky. She was climbing on a top-rope, so she wouldn’t take big falls. “It took the risk factor out of the equation, and I could just focus on learning new techniques, like solving a physical puzzle.”

Since then, Harrington has found that climbing helps clear her head and motivate her. She’s now a pro climber with a wide range of accomplishments, from big walls to 5.13 trad routes, and was the in Patagonia’s Fitz Roy massif in 2015.

Gainer points out that brain injury recovery doesn’t come in a quick fix. The process of relearning cognitive and physical skills after a TBI can take months, and patients need to continue skills maintenance over subsequent years. That can look different for each person depending on level of injury and will range from intense inpatient therapy to occasional recreational therapy like DeMartino’s climbing outings. The crucial thing, Gainer says, is to keep TBI patients inspired throughout their recovery, when it can be difficult and emotionally challenging. “It’s important for the person to stay motivated and healthy in mind, body, and spirit to climb Mount Brain Injury,” he says.

That’s a final potential strength of rock climbing: For a certain type of person, climbing can be motivating in a way other types of mindfulness exercises aren’t. Gaby James, for example, started off with recommended brain exercises on her phone after her injury. They left her feeling frustrated. James was already uncharacteristically sedentary following her accident, and the brain apps felt even more mundane. They also gave her headaches, because her vision was impaired. “The most reasonable way I believed to turn my brain on and get it moving was by the basic function of it telling my limbs where to go and initiate problem-solving,” says James.

Climbing can work the same way as those mindfulness exercises, says Spier. It’s like practicing meditation—except you don’t have to sit still. The point is simply training the mind. Spier points to studies performed on meditating Buddhist and European monks: “They’ve looked at functional MRIs of these monks versus controls, and [the monks] can maintain focus much better because they’ve practiced that state of mindfulness.” Turns out, when you’ve got only a nubbin of rock to hold onto, you’ve got a pretty direct path to just that.

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