Few things scare Caroline Paul. Not scuba diving with sharks, nor flying a motorized gyrocopter that looks like a dubious cross between a bobsled and a whirlybird. The 60-year-old adventurer has been chasing risk since she was a girl growing up in Connecticut. At 13, she attempted to break the world record in crawling—12.5 miles—but was thwarted at mile 8.5 by skinned knees and hypothermia. That same year, she went whitewater rafting on Connecticut’s Housatonic River, in a boat she and her twin sister made out of milk cartons.

Paul writes candidly about her lifelong relationship with risk in her new book, . I first connected with Paul, who lives in San Francisco, in 2016, after the publication of her bestselling memoir, Gutsy Girls. At the time, she explained the unconscious biases often evident in how we talk to children about risk in sports: we warn girls to be careful, she suggested, while encouraging boys to be brave. Fortunately, as a girl growing up in the 1960s, Paul didn’t listen to adults telling her to dial it back.

After her intrepid childhood, Paul made half a dozen kayaking first descents around the world, worked as a firefighter in San Francisco for 14 years, and took up hang gliding, Onewheeling, and skydiving. By her early fifties, though, she found herself facing a new challenge: staying adventurous through perimenopause and beyond. “I thought this was going to be a good stage,” recalls Paul, whose mother took up cycling in her forties and thrived well into her eighties, “but all around me my friends were talking about plastic surgery. I wanted to embrace elderhood, but I didn’t know how.”

So Paul set out to learn. She delved into the science of aging and searched for women who pushed the edge of adventure far into their later years. “There were always a ton of men older than me outside, but no women,” she explains. One by one, she tracked down a sisterhood of role models: an 80-year-old scuba diver; a 72-year-old champion orienteer and trail runner. There was Britta, 55, who taught her to fly a gyrocopter and land it in a crosswind, and a 52-year-old grandmother who illegally BASE-jumped off Yosemite’s El Capitan. Despite the range of sports and ages, these women all reaped the same powerful benefits from recreating outside: a strong sense of community, wellness, novelty, purpose, and positivity about aging, which Paul believes are five of the most important markers for healthy aging.

“Outdoor adventure checks all the boxes,” she says. “If we shift our mindset, our later years can be a time of exploration, adventure, and joy.” Research backs this up. As she writes in Tough Broad, studies show that daily exposure to nature relaxes frenetic brain waves, leading to improved memory and cognitive function. Take Dot Fisher-Smith, a spry 93-year-old who spent much of her golden years logging impressive long-distance treks at high altitude. Now Fisher-Smith gambols daily around her suburban neighborhood in Ashland, Oregon, planning her walking routes to maximize time among trees, grass, and bushes. “She’s onto something,” Paul writes. “Chemicals released by trees, called phytoncides, strengthen our immune system and lower blood pressure.”

Just as powerful are the psychological perks of moving around outdoors: delight, optimism, and a healthy perspective. “Old? You’re not old!” Fisher-Smith told Paul indignantly. “Just do what you’ve always done. It gets better as you get older!”

Paul was curious to find out what happened to her brain when she tried something new, so she booked a wing-walking lesson with Cynthia Hicks, a 73-year-old cancer survivor and endorphin junkie. The activity is just as hairball as it sounds: you walk onto the wing of a biplane while it’s airborne and strap into a harness, then the pilot maneuvers through hammerheads, loops, and rolls.

Paul learned to fly a single-engine Cessna when she was 20, but wing walking teetered on the far edge of extreme even for her. She thought back to the daredevil she’d once been, realizing, “The truth is, that person barreled through life with a clenched jaw. She wasn’t a show-off, but she had a lot to prove. She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself a lot of the time.” Now in her late fifties, Paul was wiser and perhaps a touch more circumspect. Was she still as piqued by adrenaline? There was only one way to find out.

On the day of her lesson, Paul watched with disbelief as her fellow students went first and then, once safely back on terra firma, flopped to the ground, exhilarated. When it was her turn, she says, “I kept thinking, Why am I getting out of the cockpit?’” Her account in Tough Broad of what happened next is mesmerizing: “The horizon curdles, falls away. Spinning earth, buffeting air, iceberg clouds flashing by
 I am no longer afraid. I am something else entirely. Oddly, I begin to laugh.”

She had discovered one of the most powerful predictors of happiness and good health at any age, and something else she’d been seeking all along: awe. “Wing walking showed me it wasn’t adrenaline I craved as much as it was awe,” says Paul, who has a new appreciation for bird-watching and “awe walking”—meandering around without destination or goal simply to notice and be present, the way Fisher-Smith does. “I used to worry I was losing my edge or becoming boring. Now I see that I can keep being myself and be more with less.”

While Paul admits to being content sitting on her couch with her wife, the illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, and her cat, she shows no signs of slowing down. After her lesson with Hicks, she got her gyrocopter license. But she’s adamant that she’s not trying to act young, or even young at heart—a phrase she rejects. “Being curious and brave and energetic aren’t just reserved for 20- or 30-year-olds. We’ve assigned them those attributes, but they belong to all of us.”

As for new adventures, Paul has plenty on her tick list. “I’ve been eyeing the electric unicycle,” she says, then catches herself and laughs. “Maybe I should wait until after my book launch, in case I get hurt!” Most of all, she wants to learn to sail. A friend has a boat and offered to teach her. “I’d like to navigate by stars with a sextant.”

By the end of Tough Broad, Paul has given us a road map for aging adventurously: stay curious, try new things, be adaptable, cultivate awe—and, above all, keep moving.

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It’s a bright, windy December day, and we’re on a boat barreling east from Belize City. For nearly three hours, the Caribbean has been choppy and rough, until the water abruptly goes still. The sudden calm can only mean we’re inside the reef. We’re almost there.

I poke my head through a porthole in the ceiling. Ahead of us on the blue horizon, a small island is growing bigger and more distinct. Longer than it is wide, it appears to consist of palm trees, a narrow crescent of yellow-sand beach, and, at the north end, a cluster of wooden, thatch-roofed cabanas. A small dock on the lee side awaits. Figures emerge, arms raised in greeting.

Belowdecks, someone’s kids are shrieking like lunatics.

I blink, letting my eyes adjust to what I’m seeing, waiting for my mind to catch up. Am I here or there? Is it then or now? What I’m seeing makes complete sense, and also it doesn’t. I’ve gone across the sea and back in time.

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One September a few years ago, when my daughters were five and seven, we went rafting down the Green River. On the last night, as we had all the previous nights, we built a small campfire on a sandbar. It was the last day of summer, and we’d spontaneously decided to stay on the river for an extra night, camping on a beach so pearly and fine it seemed impossible that we were in the desert.

My daughters and their friends gathered around and asked for a campfire story. I know many avid and capable outdoor parents, but I don’t know a single one who doesn’t groan inwardly a little when a child asks for a campfire story. After going hard all day, it would be nice to sit quietly and watch the flames lick the black night sky and the colors change from orange to crimson and take in the silence of the wilderness.

But it’s human nature to tell—and listen to—stories around a fire. We’ve been doing it since the dawn of time. Jeff English, a tai chi master I know who holds informal fireside storytelling circles, describes it this way: “Before we sat around watching the TV, we sat around watching the fire.”

Campfire Stories for Kids: How to Pull Them Off

Telling a campfire story isn’t hard. It’s helpful to begin with a general narrative, but you don’t need to have the plotlines fully formed in your mind. You can simply begin to talk and let the story lead you. The important thing is to maintain momentum. Don’t dawdle. You’re going for suspense and action, not a long-winded exposition. But don’t rush, either. Kids can always tell when you’re rushing. For little ones, repetition is good; lines that come at predictable intervals create rhythm and serve as a chorus that the kids can repeat with you. Then you can let the fire work its magic. Something about fire makes us talk more truly and listen more deeply.

That night on the Green, the children begged my husband, Steve, to tell his usual story. It was called “Abiyoyo,” based on a , and it was about a giant who lived in village beside a river. Perhaps you know it, too. Steve began to tell it, and I could tell he didn’t want to, but after a few lines—chanting the mesmerizing chorus of “Abiyoyo” like a drumbeat—he was into it. The story had absorbed him, and all of us.

Plot matters: in the end, a band of traveling singers saves the day (don’t they always?) by hypnotizing Abiyoyo into such a deep trance that he falls into the river and is turned from a menacing ogre into a regular-sized man, prompting a dramatic sigh of relief from the kids. But so does collaboration: together, chanting the chorus, the children were making the story their own.

Make Storytelling a Communal Activity

The best campfire story is one that children can learn to tell themselves. After all, isn’t passing the torch the entire point of parenthood? That night, as the flames dwindled and the stars popped out, my older daughter, Pippa, took a turn. “Once upon a time there was a man who crashed his car in the woods and went looking for help. He knocked on the door of a big old rambly house, and a deep, scary voice answered, ‘Waiiiittt till Martin comes.’”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Something about this story was familiar—wonderfully, eerily familiar. I knew the refrain before she said it again, the intonation, the long drawn-out vowels. “Waiiiiiiiit till Martin comes.”

The next day, I was alone in the car, driving north for a writing trip. I’d brought with me old cassettes that my father recorded of my sister and me when we were young. I popped one into my old car’s tape player. A voice came on, young and sweet, familiar. It was my sister, age seven. “Once upon a time,” she began. “A man drove into a tree and knocked on a house.” I cocked my head. I was in Wyoming, in the year 2015. The cassette was dated 1976. In her chirrupy voice, my sister continued, “A voice came through the door, saying, ‘Waiiiiiit till Martin comes.”

Lean on Campfire Stories from Your Own Childhood

Stories live inside us, in recesses of our memories. We carry them in our bodies even long after our minds have forgotten. To tell a good story is to be able to rest in the not-knowing part of our brain, the one that doesn’t need to get the plot or phrasing exactly right but understands that stories are living documents of who we are and who we once were. The stories we tell our children now will resurface around a fire a dozen years from now.

It’s good to keep a few in your back pocket. For the younger set, spooky tales with funny endings are always a winning combination, like “,” in which a hotel room is haunted by a ghost that turns out to be not a ghost, but—no spoilers—a _____. “Abiyoyo” dangles an element of danger without going into graphic detail. My girls’ sleeper favorite is “I Got Ya Where I Want Ya and Now I’m Gonna Eat Ya” (title may be interpretive), a silly yarn about a purple troll hiding in a closet. Save the real skin-crawlers like “,” about the ghost of a mother who stalks the streets at night wailing for her dead children, for more mature kiddos and tweens. You’ll thank yourself in the middle of the night when there are no teary young people trying to cram themselves into your sleeping bag.

Turn to Children’s Books for Ideas

Storybooks are a great resource, like the 1980s multivolume classic (from whence “Wait Till Martin Comes” came), but resist memorizing the stories so completely that they become scripted or stale. Campfire tales are meant to shapeshift with each telling, to come alive in the telling and the setting—a dark river canyon with a ribbon of stars overhead, the hoot of an owl in a thick forest. Most important is the element of surprise. You know you’ve nailed it when the story takes a sharp left turn into a goosebump-inducing twist at the very end, startling even you.

Last month, we went car camping near Taos, New Mexico. Steve lit a fire, and naturally we began to talk. “Tell us a story!” the girls cried. They’d outgrown “Abiyoyo,” so Steve turned to them and said, “You tell us one.” Maisy, now 11, made one up on the spot, a standard-order creepy campfire story about a gnarled old hermit lurking in the shadows of the deep, dark woods. I thought it would end predictably with an innocent soul meeting a gruesome and untimely demise.

But then Maisy took a breath—a long, ominous inhale—and went on, “When the hermit finally let the man look at him, the man saw his face and gasped.” Here she paused again, and I could almost see her imagination spinning, searching for an ending so wrong it was exactly right. “The man recognized his face. He’d been dead for ten years.”

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What if bikes could save the world? The notion is as old as the bicycle itself, but it gets a refreshing new spin in the recently released documentary , produced and narrated by veteran filmmaker Liz Canning. The film—which is anÌęofficial selection at the San Francisco Green Films Festival, the Breckenridge Film Festival, andÌęothers—celebrates the humble beginnings and revolutionary potential of the utilitarian cargo bike, those iconic, long-tail steeds designed for schlepping kids, groceries, gear, and pretty much anything else you can lash on top or on the side.Ìę

Cargo bikes aren’t sexy—at least not yet—but neither is the world in which Canning finds herself after giving birth to twins in 2008. A former commercial filmmaker turned work-from-home mom, she’s tired and despondent, mourning the freedom of her life pre-kids and the ease with which she used to take to the roads on her bike. The message in the movie’s opening scenes is familiar: child-rearing is anÌęexhaustingÌęenterprise, and if you’re not careful, you’ll spend 18 years behind the wheel, driving your kid to baby sing-along class and varsity soccer practice. Wake up when it’s over, and you’ll be a shell of your former self.

Fortunately for Canning, she lives in Fairfax, California, theÌęself-professed birthplace of mountain biking and a hotbed of cycling culture. When she begins noticing other parents pedaling cargo bikes online, she immediately wonders: Why were there no cargo bikes to be seen in Fairfax?Ìę

When she finally breaks down and buys the long-tail (her indecision serves a cinematic purpose, allowing her to digress into a brief but compelling history of bicycles and feminism), Canning discovers a fringe world of industrious, bike-obsessed individuals determined to improve their family’s health and happiness—and the planet’s—by trading four wheels for two. They ride bulky made in Holland with wooden kid carriers that look like miniature dump trucks; jerry-rigged townie bikes with handmade planks for seats; and $5,000 electric-assist cargo bikes from companies like , whose founder, Ross Evans, developed the first long-tail cargo bike in Nicaragua in 1995.

Canning is careful not to portray these parents as hardcore eccentrics or extreme athletesÌębut asÌęordinary people in ordinary towns making out-of-the-ordinary choices, just like her.Ìę“I’m not an athlete. I’m not superhuman,” says Brent Patterson, a father from Buffalo, New York. “I’m just a completely normal person like you.” It’s a heartening takeaway: ifÌęshe can do it, so can we. She introduces us to people like Emily Finch, who carts all six of her kiddos around on two wheels, and Patterson'sÌęfamily thatÌęsold itsÌęcar and travels by cargo bike year-round, even in snowstorms. Many of the people she meets—especially, it seems, the moms—endure all-too-rampant “bikelash” from aggressive drivers who shout profanities out the window, accusing them of endangering their children. Not all live in bike-friendly communities like Marin County or Portland, Oregon, and not all are as comfortably off as Canning; some had to sell their car or take out a no-interest loan in order to afford a cargo bike.Ìę

Motherload is the story of one woman’s emancipation from the drudgery of the carpool, the drop-off line, the grocery run, but it’s ultimately an aspirational look into a global movement of alternative parenting. Cargo bikers are a pared-down version ofÌę#vanlife or #tinyhomeÌędevotees, who sell their houses and possessions to live with less. You may not be able to live in your cargo bike, but you can live on it.

And therein lies the film’s deeper appeal. What if it’s possible for the humble cargo bike to rewrite the script for beleaguered American parents? Could a two-wheeledÌęrevolution be the antidote to our increasingly sedentary, tech-driven, risk-averse indoor lifestyle?

These are lofty claims, and Motherload stops just short of making them. It doesn’t need to.ÌęThe movie’s enthusiasm for biking is contagious, and by the time the credits roll, you’ll be crunching numbers and fantasizing about selling your car and becoming a cargo convert, just like Canning. “I love my life!” Finch exclaims. It’s a sentiment echoed by almost everyone in the film. Bicycling might be the answer to much that ails us, but at its heart, it’s freedom on two wheels, a pure embodiment of joy, and quite possibly the closest we grown-ups can get to being kids again.Ìę

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A few weeks ago, while visiting in northern New Mexico, my family and I were out on a wildlife safariÌęin a remote valley when we spotted a newborn elk calf wobbling across the road, trailed by its mother. It was late May, the beginning of calving season, and the baby elk was minutes old, its fur still wet. When it saw us, it flopped to the ground, while the cow bolted in the opposite direction, running up a ridge until she was out of sight. Distressed, we watched the calf flatten itself into the dirt, all alone.Ìę

Our guide, Pete, explained, “This is what elk mothers do. When predators approach, they run away, leaving their babies, who aren’t strong enough to walk. Most of the time, the mothers come back for their calvesÌębut only after the danger has passed.”ÌęAfter a minute, we drove on, not wanting to scare the mother away for good, while Pete continued, “Bison mothers do the opposite. After their babies are born, they’ll stand their ground, snort, and chargeÌęto keep them safe.”Ìę

Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about the difference between elk mamas and bison mamas. Their two styles of parenting seemed to encapsulate everything I’d been wrestling with since becoming a mother—the fine line between giving kids too much independence and too little, overprotection and tough love,Ìęsmothering and neglect.

My own approach to child-rearing has spanned the spectrum. When my girls were infants and toddlers, I was terrified that I’d forget them in a field while hiking and they’d be eaten by coyotes, or that left alone at home,Ìęthey’d choke on a grape or get tangled in blind cords. Their vulnerability triggered something primal and bison-like in me, and their survival was paramount, the single most defining focus of my life. Deep down, though, my inner elk grieved the freedom I’d lost when they were born; I needed time to myself to run and think and write. I hired babysitters, enrolled them in part-time daycare, and tried to tend to my own needs while tending to theirs. The time apart was as essential as it was wrenching: I hated to leave, but I always came home happier, calmer, and more myself than when I’d left.ÌęÌę

NowÌęthat myÌędaughters are older, the bison in me has taken a back seat. At ages eight and ten, they’re responsible enough to walk to school and back alone.ÌęThey can use public restrooms without me, ride the chairlift solo, and help paddle a pack raft down Class II rapids. They’re big enough to stay home alone and not have every minute scheduledÌęand to be bored. None of this is by chance: we’ve practiced and prepped for this progression—my husband and IÌęas much as them. It takes training to let go.Ìę

In today’s parenting culture, this isn’t always a popular position. Over the past generation, child-rearing has become a competitive sport, our kids’ performance a measure of our own worth, an approach that requires more intensive parental supervision than ever before. “Snowplow parents,” the latest incarnation of helicopter parents,Ìęstrive to eliminate all obstacles and hardships in the way. Such hypervigilance isn’t always in the service of our kids, though. An essential part of growing up is learning to assess risk, develop grit and resilience, and hone problem-solving skills without parents always butting in.Ìę

As Jessica Lahey writes in her ÌęThe Gift of Failure, “In order to raise healthy, happy kids who can begin to build their own adulthood separate from us, we are going to have to extricate our egos from our children’s lives and allow them to feel the pride of their own accomplishments as well as the pain of their own failures.”Ìę

I come by my elk inclinations honestly. My own mother, like most moms in the seventiesÌęand eighties,Ìęspecialized in a brand of loving,Ìęyet laissez-faire parenting typical of the time. Sure, she baked us cookies, took us to the mall to buy jeans, and was always waiting for us when we got home from school, but she was definitely not running bison interference for me the day I almost got beat up in a phone booth at junior high. (“What are you looking at?” the class bully demanded. “Nothing much,” I replied, without thinking. Whoops.)ÌęThanks to her, though, I learned to be tough, stand up for myself, and, when that didn’t work, run like hell—skills that still serve me well and that I hope to pass on to my daughters.Ìę

A week after we got back from Vermejo, we all biked into the Valles Caldera National PreserveÌęwithÌęsome friends and their children. When we reached a clear, shin-deep trout stream, the dads started fly-fishing, and the four kids, ages seven to ten, had a picnic. I kept riding another ten miles, across high valleys fringed by aspens. By the time I got back, the fathers were nowhere in sight and the children were alone in the meadow. For a moment I panicked, the bison mama in me imagining a mountain lion stalking our sweet ones from the edge of the forest. Then I looked more closely. The kids were building elaborate bark boats and floating them down theÌęmeandering rivulet in a mock regatta. I sat in the grass and watched, awed by their focus and creativity, not wanting to interfere. If I hadn’t been such an elk that day and had skipped my ride to hang out with them, they might have complained of being bored or hungry. They might have expected to be entertained. Instead they entertained me.Ìę

I was still feeling smug about my elk parentingÌęwhen, a few days later, I sent my ten-year-old, Pippa, on a walk with our black Lab, Pete. Half an hour later, she ran up the driveway, sobbing so hard she could barely talk, with Pete at her heels. She’d crossed onto private property, as we often do on our family walks, skirting an unoccupied house under construction. A worker had yelled at her that she was trespassing, then trailed her in his truck to make sure she left. Terrified that he wanted to hurt her, she hid in the bushes, then ran home the long way. She was unhurt, thankfully, but deeply shaken.

I went over scenarios in my head: I should have taught Pippa not to go onto private property. I should have reminded her to run straight home if she found herself scared or in trouble. I should have given her a walkie-talkie (she doesn’t have a phone). Maybe, like a good bison mother, I shouldn’t have let her go alone in the first place.Ìę

But then I remembered: life isn’t black and white. Good parenting can’t be reduced to labels, either-or, this or that. Sometimes, like the day in the caldera, we can be elk, but other circumstances demand that we step up and be bison. Maybe we can learn to be both at the same time.Ìę

This story might have ended here, but a few weeks ago, as I was finishing this piece, Pippa emerged from her room where she’d been reading.Ìę“I’m bored,” she announced.

“Why don’t you walk down to the library?” I suggested. Then I remembered. “Are you worried because of what happened last time?”

“No,” she said.Ìę

Good girl, I thought.Ìę

“Don’t talk to strangers,” I reminded her. “Ask to use the phone if you need to call me.”Ìę

“OK,” she said. And with that, she gave a little wave and turned and walked down the driveway.

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I’ve always been an accidental runner. I ran my first race, a 10K, when I was eight, on my father’sÌęsuggestion. I ran my first marathon while interviewing ultraunning phenom ; I told him I’d only run six miles, but we were so engrossed in conversation that I lost track of time and ran the whole way. And when I signed up for my first ultra, a 50K trail race at age 40, my plan was never to become an elite ultrarunner. It was to write my novel. The story had been in my head for years, but aside from a few pages in a notebook, I hadn’t written a thing. I was going to start, really I was. I was just waiting for something. For what? I told myself I needed more stamina, more willpower. I thought that if I could train myself to run for five or six hours at a time, then surely I could condition myself to sit at my desk writing for just as long. I would use ultrarunning to train for ultrawriting.

Ever since I was young, tearing around my neighborhood streets, making up stories in my head, running has always been a way that I write. When I began working as a journalist in Santa Fe, whole sentences would come to me when I ran, ideas moving through me as I moved. I would run in the mountains,Ìęhigh above my world, and find perspective on it that I didn’t always have in the midst of it, goingÌęthrough the dailiness of my life, all its ordinary tasks and demands.

Running teaches you to tolerate uncertainty, to be OK with the strange twists and turns life throws at you. It forces you to be creative when the shit hits the fanÌęand you run out of food, orÌęget hailed on and forgot your jacket, or can’t see out of one eye. You learn not to panic but to troubleshoot—maybe you’re not blind, you just need to turn on your headlamp.ÌęIt sucks sometimes to keep going, but it sucks more to quit. You learn to see the beauty even when you’re suffering. As Karnazes told me during my first marathon, in 2006, “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

After my father died, in 2010, and I was beset by anxiety and convinced I was dying, too, Karnazes’s words came back to me. I had a baby and a toddler at home, and my anxiety was like a living, breathing wild thing scrabbling inside my brain. The only way to subdue it was to run it into exhaustion. Only after I’d run 15 or 30 miles up a mountain and back was I sure I was still alive. I had to do it all over again the next day. Some days I was fast and running felt effortless, and other days I was so tired and sad I’d have to lie down in the dirt.

Trail running didn’t erase my anxiety, but it did help me manage it. I started racing ultra distances and winning. I started to want to win, and then I wanted to not want to want to win. And so I taught myself how to sit. NotÌęat the kitchen table in front of my computerÌęwriting my novel, liked I’d pictured, but on a stone bench in our backyard, against the sunny wall, feeling my breath whoosh in and out, smelling the lilacs or hearing the sound of a singleÌęfaraway hammer. I was never entirely free of my thoughts—this is a misperception about meditation—but I learned how to see them and let them drift by without getting snagged. I would meditate for five minutes, then seven. If I was really ambitious, I might make it to 12. I told myself that I was not very good at sitting because I was so good at running, but a friend of mine, a serious student of Zen, dispelled me of this myth. “You should be able to meditate for longer because you can run for so long,” he said.

Sitting isn’t so very different from running. It teaches me to hold all possibilities at once, without judging any of them. Maybe I am fast, maybe I am slow. Maybe I’m hitting my prime, or past it. Maybe I am happy. And also sad.ÌęAll are true. Most days when I get up from sitting, I go for a run. I take my sitting into my running and when I come home I bring my running into my writing. Some days I feel like I’ve stumbled onto a magical feedback loop that works in both directions: the more I run, the more I want to sit. The more I sit, the more I want to write. The more I write, the more I want to run. It’s like a motor, or a flywheel: the trick is to keep it spinning.

In the end, of course, it didn’t work out the way I’d imagined. I didn’t write my novel—not yet, at least. . Like most books about running, it’s also not about running, but about fathers and daughters, the things they love and the things they lose, the stories they tell and the secrets they keep. I wrote it by running. Things are so rarely what they seem. Isn’t that marvelous?

Contributing editor Katie Arnold is the author ofÌę.

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There’s one question that people always ask me about running alone in the backcountry. It’s the same question they ask me about taking young children down whitewater rivers. I know because it’s also the one I ask myself. Aren’t you scared?

The answer is: absolutely. In the seven years I’ve been an ultrarunner, I’ve taught myself to tolerate uncertainty, to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve run and won races ranging from 50 kilometers to 100 miles, but I still rarely leave the house without weighing my worries against my desire to run, assessing the risks of being on my own in the wilderness, thinking hard about what’s at stake. Everything.

I’m scared of getting lost and of getting hurt and of being attacked by animals wild and domesticated—even livestock. Dogs that lunge at me from yards; cattle that graze in meadows, staring at me with their mean, blank eyes when I sidle by, daring me to pass. They’re just cows, I chide myself, feeling foolish, but they are large and lumbering and ten times my weight, and they could mow me down in an instant.

I don’t worry about lone coyotes—at 40 pounds, they’re too small and skittish to do any harm—but packs of coyotes, though rarely encountered, are unpredictable. (In 2009, a female solo hiker was killed by a pair of coyotes in Nova Scotia.) Rattlesnakes are uncommon in my hometown of Santa Fe. They don’t do well above 7,000 feet, or so I thought, until the day I came upon a pair of mating rattlers in the middle of a trail. I was nearly on top of them before I realized the coiled brown rope at my feet wasn’t a rope at all, but a knot of amorous vipers, and I yelped and hurdled over them. Now I keep my eyes down.

Lightning exists in its own category of horror. On summer afternoons, heat rises above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, east of town, forming thunderstorms. I’ve been in the high country when lightning strikes were so close that white flashed behind my eyelids and the thunder roared inside my ears. I’ve seen the long, serrated scars on ponderosa pines, bark flayed top to bottom. When I run up high, I leave early in the morning so I’m off the bald peaks by early afternoon; I always keep one eye on the sky, trying to remember what to do if I get caught above the tree line. Do I squat with my shoes on or take them off and crawl under a rock? Or do I sprint like hell for cover?

Of all the objective risks, though, mountain lions scare me the most. They’re not as big as black bears—adult males usually weigh about 180 pounds, compared with a bear’s 300—but they’re much stealthier. (As the saying goes, you might never have seen a mountain lion in the wild, but they’ve seen you.) They prowl silently through the woods and can leap 40 feet in pursuit of deer, coyotes, and rabbits. Sometimes they slink out of the forest, down through the arroyos, and straight into town, lounging in neighborhood trees, crossing two-lane roads in broad daylight.

Black bears galumph around eating berries, almost endearing in their shagginess, so big they can’t hide. But cougars are wily; cougars sneak. When I run, I scan rocky outcroppings for movement and listen for rustlings. Some days I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched.

In my mind, the greatest threat to a woman alone on the trails isn’t lightning or wild animals but other people. I should know: I’m the survivor of an incident that could’ve killed me or my child.

It was November 18, 2008, a Tuesday, 4:15 P.M. My daughter Pippa was four months old and weighed ten pounds. I strapped her onto my chest and walked alone into the foothills on a trail I’d run countless times on my own. I’d hiked almost every day of my pregnancy, and walking was the only thing that could reliably put her to sleep.

At the trailhead, I nursed Pippa in the front seat while her spindly legs kicked the gearshift. Then I laid her on the console, wrapped her like a burrito in a cotton insert shaped like an enormous tortilla, buckled the canvas baby carrier around my shoulders and waist, and shoved the entire package inside. She was still so tiny that she faced me, legs sidesaddle, her chin to my chest. She’d almost always fall asleep before I even left the parking lot. The only trick was that I couldn’t stop, not even to tie my shoe, or else she’d wake up and start fussing to be fed. For some reason, breastfeeding her on the side of a mountain intimidated me more than climbing it.

On that day, it wasn’t Pippa’s usual nap time. As I walked up the switchbacks to the top of the hill and began descending, her marble eyes flicked open and shut, watching me watching her. I could hear hikers behind me on the trail; the sun was still up, but it wouldn’t be for long. If I hustled, I’d be back to the car before it set.

I was a quarter mile from the parking lot when I rounded a bend and saw a man ten feet away, coming toward me. He had a shag of graying hair and wore shorts and a sweatshirt. His legs were deeply bronzed, the kind of tan you get when you live outside all year long and not on purpose. I recognized him right away—a sixty-something guy who my husband, Steve, and I often saw, usually trudging alone up the side of the road, carrying a plastic grocery bag in each hand. Shorts Man, we called him. We assumed he bivouacked in a camp on the edge of the forest with another homeless local we referred to as Duster Man, for the ankle-length oilskin coat he wore in winter and summer, along with a coonskin cap.

My brain made a series of instant calculations, like a slot machine spinning. Because I’d seen him before, he was familiar, and because he was familiar, there was no reason to be afraid. I raised my hand in greeting and kept walking toward him.

Only
 something was weird. Shorts Man was missing an arm. One arm was swinging next to him the way arms naturally do, but the other was gone.

Just as my brain struggled to recalibrate, the arm appeared. It had been behind his back. This was a grand, if momentary, relief. He had an arm! And the arm was—

The arm was throwing a rock.

Shorts Man was eight feet away, maybe only five. The rock was the size of a baked potato. It wobbled at first, as though in slow motion, but it came straight at my head and hit me right above the left temple. My knees gave out. As I fell, I instinctively pressed my hand to the baby carrier and pulled Pippa toward me. My first emotion wasn’t fear but outrage: I cannot believe this fucker just threw a rock at me. At my baby! On the trail! This can’t be happening!

The blood dripping into my eyes was proof that it was. I lay in the dirt, but I couldn’t stay there, because he was running toward us.

The slot machine spun. Cherries, oranges, sevens. Fuck, help, stop. Nothing aligned, and then it did. Get up. Get up. Get up.

I staggered to my feet and began to run. Straight uphill, off the trail, smacking piñon branches with one arm, cradling Pippa’s back with the other as he chased me. Someone was screaming so ferociously it reverberated off the hills. The person screaming was me.

I took a fast glance backward. Shorts Man was nowhere. I’d dropped him. A couple of hikers ran toward me, yelling, “We’re here! What happened?” I looked down: There was blood splattered across the carrier and the canvas sun hood that covered Pippa’s head. She had not moved or made a sound during the attack. Had she been hit, too? I pushed back the flap and there she was, staring up at me without blinking. Unscathed. Like a baby bird in a nest that instinctively knew it must keep absolutely still and silent to survive.

The hikers escorted me down the trail, one on either side, and called 911. Shorts Man had vanished into the trees. Later, en route to the hospital in an ambulance, a paramedic said: “You’re lucky the rock didn’t hit your temple. It could have killed you.” An ER doctor gave me four stitches and Pippa a clean bill of health.

And this was what I didn’t say aloud that day but couldn’t stop thinking: What if the rock had struck her instead of me?

A few days later, Shorts Man was caught and arrested. He’d been living in a tent in a thicket of trees just off the trail, adjacent to some homes. Residents sometimes glassed his camp from their kitchen windows, and he was seen walking around naked from the waist down. On the morning of the attack, he was hiking back to his camp when he came across me and apparently became paranoid that I was going to hurt him. He pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and aggravated assault, both felonies, and was sentenced to 12 months in county jail.

After the attack, I stopped hiking with Pippa. I stopped hiking altogether. Even when I pushed her in her stroller on the sidewalk downtown, I flinched when someone approached us abruptly. When I started missing the trails too much, I called friends to go hiking with us.

A year later, in November 2009, I became pregnant with my second daughter, Maisy. Pippa was 16 months old by then and so boisterous that she no longer wanted to be cooped up in the carrier, so I left her at home with a babysitter and hiked alone once more. The man who’d attacked me was still in jail. What were the odds of the same thing happening twice?

Every morning, I walked up Picacho Peak, an 8,600-foot mountain on the eastern edge of Santa Fe. Together with its neighbor to the south, 9,100-foot Atalaya, Picacho is one of the predominant landmarks in Santa Fe’s foothills. And at nearly three miles and 2,000 feet of vertical gain, the trail to both summits provides the most elevation and exertion in the least amount of time.

When I hiked, I carried a small vial of pepper spray Steve had given me. On Picacho’s summit, I sat on a rock and looked for ravens. They were my sign that everything was OK—with the baby inside me and with the trail that would lead me home. I’d hear them first, their wings whooshing above the piñons and ponderosas, cawing as if through a mouthful of pebbles. Then I’d look up and see them rise on the thermals, onyx against the clear sky, whirling and chortling and dive-bombing one another, but never in malice, and relief would wash over me. They knew nothing of life on the ground. They dipped and soared, the embodiment of fearlessness and freedom.

I wasn’t always such a worrier. As a girl growing up between my mother’s house in New Jersey and my father’s farm in Virginia, I bicycled alone around my Jersey neighborhood and ran my first 10K race in Virginia, without training, at my father’s half-serious suggestion. I jumped into a frozen river on a bet Dad made with me. He was a National Geographic photographer and always had a camera at the ready to document our exploits. When I was ten, I sliced my heel open on a rock while wading barefoot in a creek; a week later, with six stitches, I hiked a mile to the top of the Delaware Water Gap, my foot swathed in a thick white tube sock. When I was 23, I moved to New Mexico sight unseen to work for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. I traded a proper nine-to-five job with benefits for a three-month internship that paid $5 an hour. In my twenties and thirties, I climbed Half Dome and kayaked whitewater rivers and ran up mountains. Thoughts of death or danger rarely crossed my mind, and when they did I dismissed them easily. I was young and unencumbered. Invincible. Dying was something that happened to other people, people who were old or unlucky. I was neither.

But in the summer of 2010, a year and a half after Pippa and I were attacked, my father got sick. He was 73, still fit and active. The cancerous tumor on his left kidney was the size of a fist, “a rather massive ugly thing,” he wrote me shortly after his diagnosis. Maisy was two months old, growing as fast as Dad was dying. Ten weeks later, he was gone.

Afterward, in the disorienting fog of sorrow, everything scared me: my babies, so small and vulnerable and precious; my own body, once so strong but now ancient and aching with grief. Grief is almost unbearably physical, and I became convinced that I was dying, too—each new, strange sensation proof of a fatal disease burrowing through my bones and blood.

My anxiety lasted more than a year. I tried everything, but the only remedy that worked was the one that had always worked: running. On the surface, it seemed like the least logical choice. I lived in constant terror of my body breaking down, but I pushed my limits every day, clocking long miles alone in the wilderness. I didn’t know the first thing about training for a 50K ultramarathon, but deep down it made sense. My father had raised me to find solace outside, on camping trips and bicycle trips and river trips, on long rambles through the Shenandoah Valley, up mountains in Maine, in musty tents in Nova Scotia. Maybe, I reasoned, if I ran far enough, deep enough, into the trail networks and hills, into myself, I would find my way back to the fearless girl I’d once been.

There’s a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a response to a known threat; anxiety is dread of a perceived or imagined threat, of what could happen. It is anticipatory, not actual. It’s the voice inside of us that says: That man on the trail doesn’t look right. Turn around. Now. Both fear and anxiety originate in complex circuits in the amygdala and other structures deep in the brain, triggering the classic fight-or-flight response that has kept us alive for millennia. During periods of prolonged stress or trauma, the amygdala’s warning system can become too sensitive, overriding the cortex. It’s increasingly difficult to switch off the fight-or-flight impulse and distinguish between real threats and imagined disasters. Flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, your body exists in a state of constant anxiety, immobilized in clammy terror. The worries feed on themselves, magnifying until you’re locked in a vicious cycle of perpetual alarm.

Running long distances doesn’t erase my anxiety, but it does help me manage it. Caught up in the physical effort, I detach from the circuitous worry in my brain. There are practical hazards that require my attention, like looking for bears and not tripping over my own feet and pitching off a cliff. At night I no longer lie awake in a state of hypervigilance, convinced I’m dying. I’m so exhausted that I fall asleep as soon as I turn off the light.

And while I still fret about invisible diseases, my body tells a different story. My quads are taut, my glutes more defined. I can run uphill with a friend and talk without huffing too noticeably. My skin is clear and has a healthy glow. The circles under my eyes have faded; the frown creases beside my mouth are less noticeable. Running is both cure and proof of the cure. If I can run 20 miles and come home and take the girls to the park and finish a story on deadline, I can’t possibly be dying of cancer.

From a young age, we’re conditioned to suppress fear. This has always been my strategy. I feigned bravery in front of Dad at all costs. I put myself in the crosshairs of risk to prove that I wasn’t a wimp. I worked in an office full of macho guys, where vulnerability in the wilderness, in writing, and in life was taboo.

But trying to repress fear is counterproductive. It only makes it worse. Fear itself isn’t good or bad. It’s our resistance to it—our fear of fear, our anxiety—that makes us suffer so. The trick is not to run from it but to follow it. “Make friends with your fear,” my Buddhist friend Natalie sometimes says.

This was the same thing, more or less, I’d heard when I went to Utah with another friend, Mary, not long after Dad died. We’d signed up for a skiing camp led by former world champion Kristen Ulmer, but it wasn’t your typical sports clinic focused on downhill technique. Her coaching was all mental—by training our minds to be more expansive and present, she said, we would become more confident on and off the mountain.

On the first day, I rode the chairlift with Kristen and two other participants. She gave us a scenario: envision our absolute worst fear, then close our eyes and imagine it happening. I’d done this so many times already that the image came easily. Losing one of the girls—this was the absolute worst thing. As I sat there with my skis swinging above the powdery slopes, I pictured unthinkable loss. I felt it. My eyes stung, and I started to cry. It was so painful, but for once there was nowhere to run. I just sat there, sobbing quietly.

Finally, Kristen spoke. “Breathe in your worst fear and breathe out the possibility of ever letting go of that fear.” This was not what I wanted to hear. I’d come to Alta to exorcise my anxiety once and for all, to burn it out of me in one go, or if not, to squelch it as best I could. Bad idea. “If you ignore your fear,” Kristen continued, “it becomes like a sullen teenager, raging in the basement, tearing the place apart. It becomes anxiety.” She had faced so many of her own fears—perilous couloirs, avalanches, mediocrity, failure. There is never any end to the fears. The trick is to move toward them, not away.

Running is as good a way as any to try. I’m alone with the voices in my head for hours at a time. I can study my anxiety for patterns; I see its ragged, wily persistence. I greet it with a half-hearted wave as I would someone I’ve known a very long time but am not entirely happy to see. Oh, you again. On some days my worry is more acute and on others less, but it’s always part of the package: inescapable, chronic, not so very different from love itself. The crux is to live as big as you can, to love it all even when you stand to lose it all.

On the first of April 2011, my cell phone rang. “This is the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility,” a woman’s voice said.

I couldn’t fathom why she might be calling me. I thought, Is this some kind of April Fool’s joke?

She said, “I’m calling about a case that may be of personal interest to you.”

Great, I thought, my confusion turning to irritation. Who got arrested? Steve?

No. The woman was calling to tell me that my attacker was being released that day. She explained that he was free to go where he chose and that if I had trouble with him in the future, I could file a restraining order.

I knew he probably had no memory of the attack. “Thank you for letting me know,” I replied and hung up. There was nothing else to say.

Shorts Man is back in the world now. Some days I pass him in my car on the street. He is still bronzed by the sun, still limping with his stiff-legged gait, still carrying his grocery bags. He favors one bad ankle, and he looks older, less threatening and more vulnerable. Sometimes I see him skulking along the perimeter of the playground where I take the girls to play. He’s no more than 20 feet away, his eyes lowered, and I recoil instinctively and look away to let him pass, to let my fear pass.

I’ve had to recalibrate again. In my new hierarchy of risk, running is safer than hiking, because it’s faster. I can get away more quickly. After my terrible encounter with Shorts Man, I understand things about myself that I’ve known but never quite trusted: That I can run. That I am fast. That my body and mind will always know what to do. And that running isn’t something to fear. It could save my life. It already has.

I don’t go back to the trail where it happened. I stay in my mountains, where the pitches are steeper and less accessible. These hills are farther from town and don’t border private property, and to some people the remoteness might make them seem riskier, but in my logic this makes them safer. I count cars at the trailhead. More cars means more people to help me if I need it. But the wrong cars—sketchy vans with boarded-up windows or pickup trucks with little wooden shacks listing on the bed—are worse. I go on instinct. Sometimes, when I drop into a hollow by the creek or run off the back side of a mountain into shadows and something about the light or air feels wrong, goose bumps rise on my forearms, and I pick up two small rocks, just in case.

A certain amount of fear in the wilderness is healthy. It keeps you alert. Like your lungs and your legs, courage is something you can train, and I have strategies for mitigating risk. I always tell Steve where I’m going. I never run without my cell phone (though I’m often out of range) and my pepper spray. Sometimes I take a friend’s 70-pound Rhodesian ridgeback, a breed that originated in Africa as lion trackers.

I rehearse what-ifs. If I see a mountain lion, I’ll yell and hold my pack above my head to make myself look less like prey. I’ll wave a stick in its face—never, ever run—and fight back if I have to. If I come upon a bear, I’ll back away slowly. If I fall and twist my ankle crossing the creek, I’ll soak it in the cool water and then hobble out to the nearest trailhead. If, on a desolate two-track dirt road where pickup trucks routinely rumble by with gun racks, someone pulls over and comes after me, I know what to do, because I’ve done it before. I’ll run.

I train on the same trails every week, committing them to memory, pushing a little farther and higher as the weeks go by. Each time I come home safely, I feel more comfortable. I know this is flawed logic. Animals and people are erratic, and risk factors shift with the weather, the season, the day. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

I have so many scars. The pink ripple on my knee from when I fell on Atalaya my first week in town, the nearly invisible X on my forehead where I got rammed by an old-fashioned metal chairlift at a ski resort in West Virginia when I was five. The divot in my chin from when I took a surfboard to the mouth off the coast of Mexico, the pale white line on my right heel.

But the scar from the rock is one I can’t see or feel. It’s hidden above my hairline. The doctor sewed it so neatly, it may have vanished entirely. The scar that remains is in my mind. I will never again not think about risk. I will never again take my safety in the wilderness for granted.

Yet each time I ask the questions—Am I taking too great a chance? Is it worth the risk?—the answers are always the same. The answer is no. No, I will never give up my trails for fear. That would be an even greater risk. And the answer is yes. Yes, I still love this world and its wildness, for its wildness. And for mine.

Katie Arnold () is a formerÌęmanaging editor of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. will be published in March by Random House.

The post Running Through the Fear appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This winterÌęmy husband, Steve, and IÌętook our two daughters to the Grand Canyon, an eight-hour haul from our home in Santa Fe. Our road-trip game has evolved over the years. When they were infants, they napped to Baby Mozart on the CD player for hours on end (and no stopping for gas,Ìęor else they woke up).ÌęAs toddlersÌęthey passed the time watching Little Einsteins episodes or giving monkeys perms on Toca Hair Salon on the Kindle. But ever since they learned to read, we’ve deliberately gone screen-free in the car. Now, at ages eight and ten, they pack their own art supplies and books, play car bingo, do homework, or—best of all—daydream out the window.

On this latest trip, we upped our game and finally joined the 21st century by cuing up some podcasts. The girls are mature enough now to listen to 45-minute shows with substance and heft that also interest Steve and me (or that at least won’t bore us into a mind-numbing delirium). The best family podcasts are the ones that we can all enjoy. Our audio diet tries to hit the big categories—art, science, humanity, adventure, mystery, and nature.

Short andÌęCurly

Ages 4 and up

Produced by ABC News Australia, is an ethics podcast for kids and parents that poses moral dilemmas and probing—or in Aussie lingo, “curly”—questions and gives listeners time to discuss them together. On the way home from the Grand Canyon, we listened to a show about pugs (is it humane to breed dogs whose short snouts make it hard to breathe?) and, in a compelling mock reenactment of the Titanic,Ìęthe morality of saving kids’ lives over adults’.ÌęCohosted by award-winning science journalist Carl Smith and Australian actress and filmmaker Molly Daniels, Short andÌęCurly addresses subjects ranging from science to sports, wildlife to technology. And at just about 20 minutes long, it’s succinct, as advertised, never preachy, andÌęfunny. Bonus: an Aussie ethics expertÌęchimes in with helpful perspectives.

The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel

For ages 8 to 12

Winner of the 2016 Peabody Award, is performed by kids for kids. The namesake protagonist, an Indian American middle schooler, teams up with his friends to investigate the link between missing children and a shady billionaire. Plenty of sci-fi elements keep the mystery moving forward, ensuring thatÌękids—and their grown-ups—will be hooked from the start. Now in season three, the audio episodes are short (15 to 25 minutes long) and fast-paced, ideal for action-obsessed listeners.

Invisibilia

For ages 11 and up

As a young girl, I was obsessed with the television series In Search of
Ìęabout eerie natural phenomena like Pompeii, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. Kids these days are just as hooked on the weird hidden forces that shape our lives. Enter , NPR’s narrative storytelling podcast for grown-ups that’s chockablock with strange-but-true tales about the unseeable things that affect our behavior, beliefs, and assumptions—like the latest neuroscience research on emotions;Ìęways in which we see reality (and in one story, bears) differently; and “I, I, Him,” about the stories we tell about ourselves to overcome difficult obstacles. Cohosted by Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel, of This American Life and The Atlantic, respectively,Ìęthis 45-minute show is clever and compelling.

Storynory

For ages 4 to 10

The younger set will groove on ,Ìęwhich featuresÌęoriginal stories about birds, pirates, and plucky monkeys, as well as classic fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop, and the Brothers Grimm. Only 15 to 20 minutes long, the dramatic talesÌęsuit shorter attention spans or those who tend to doze off midstory for their nap (guilty).

On Being

For ages 8 and up

For older kids asking bigger questions, Krista Tippet’s may just be the answer. On a recent backcountry hut trip in Colorado, we listened to Tippet’s 2015 interview with the late, great poet Mary Oliver. Some of it, including allusions to Oliver’s difficult childhood, was over their heads, but Tippet, who covers mindfulness, spirituality, science, and art, approaches her subjects with thoughtful consideration, humility, and a lot of heart. Afterward, I asked the girls and their seven-year-old friend to share something they’d learned. Oliver lived in Florida and loved nature, one of them said. She stood at her door every morning with her notebook in hand and wrote, another recalled. She collected shingles at the dump on the day she won the Pulitzer. The message of this episode, and much of On Being, is that if you pay attention, you’ll see that life is filled with ordinary,Ìębeautiful moments—many of them beautiful because they are so ordinary.

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Raising active kids requires patience, stamina, and ingenuity. Many daysÌęsimply getting out the door with a full complement of mittens, hats, and boots feels like an exercise in futility. Fortunately, there are tricks for mitigating the logistical and emotional breakdowns:

1. Minimize transitions, which are a major time and energy suck. If you don’t absolutely need to go home before going to the climbing gym, don’t. Pack their harnesses and just roll from one activity to the next.
2. When in doubt, always bring an extra pair of socks. You’ll thank me later.
3. On ambitious outings, bring plenty of snacks, preferably sweets, and give the littles full autonomy over when, what, and how much to eat. Let’s face it, bribery has a place in the outdoors.

And so, too, does fibbing.

I’m not proud to admit this. I strive for honesty in my life and relationships. But occasionally it helps to bend the truth in order to get kids outside and keep them there for longer than five minutes. In my decade on the job as mother, I’ve told my fair share of white lies, including but not limited to:

It’s not that far.

The water’s not cold, it’s just the air!

It’s not very steep.

The top is just up there.

One of the first fibs my husband, Steve, and I told our girls,ÌęPippa and Maisy, was that Disney WorldÌęhad closed indefinitely.ÌęThis was when they were much smaller and begged us to visit, when standing in line at an amusement park with hordes of other people was an abstract idea for them and the wrong kind of “adventure” for us. “Maybe your grandparents will take you!” we’d say encouragingly. Meanwhile, we’re going rafting.

When I try to rationalize the deceit, I think of that old existential saw: If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? Telling kids that the conditions suck automatically biases them against cold andÌęwet weather,Ìęand hearing us whine gives them permission to gripe, too. If they have the proper gear and it doesn’t feel cold to them, is it actually cold? If we know they’re strong enough to handle the hike and aren’t in any apparent danger, isn’t it OK to downplay the challenges to keep them motivated and moving forward?

As an ultrarunner, I’ve been lied to plenty of times. It’s one of the sport’s time-honored traditions and a mindset that keeps me from quitting in the middle of a grueling effort. Sometimes the one lying is me: You’re doing great, I say to myself. It’s not that far to the next aid station. Sometimes it’s my friends and family who are crewing for me, or people I’ve never met, who lie. Once during a 50K race, a kindly volunteer handed me some pretzels and told me cheerfully, without batting an eye, “The last two miles are just rolling!” when it wasÌęa hellish two-mile climb to the finish.

As a parent, though, I’ve discovered that there’s a fine line between omission and deception. A big part of raising children who are competent, independent, and confident in wild places is teaching them to assess risk and effort based on their own barometers.ÌęThis will help them develop an internal dialogue that works for them, whether asÌęthe sweet-talking cheerleader or the tough-talking truth sayer. They can’t manage their own expectations and output if you’re always narrating the story for them. Sooner or later, you have to get out of their way.

Over the holidays, Steve and I took Pippa and Maisy, now ten and eight, toÌęthe Grand Canyon for the first time. I’d managed to score a last-minute cancellation for a cabin at Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon. Our hike in would entail a seven-mile trek down to the Colorado River and nine and a halfÌęmiles and nearly 5,000 vertical feet back up the next day. I knew the girls were physically capable.ÌęWe’d spent the late summer and fall doing long hikes to high elevations in New Mexico, and we’d learned that nearly every outing has its low point—sometimes several. The trick is to recognize them when they come, stay as positive as possible, and push through till things get better.

As we pulled up to the South Rim just before sunset, I was so giddy for them to witness the canyon’s majesty for the first time that I found myself saying, “The Grand Canyon’s not thatÌęspectacular.” It was a dumb joke, the kind that just sort of slipped out in the excitement, exactly the sort my dad would have said in his exaggerated, goofy voice, the one that always told me he was kidding. I thought my strategy would make them gasp with even more amazement when they peered over the edge. I didn’t think they’d believe me.

But when we got to the rim and looked down, they were both weirdly subdued. Maybe it was because they were cold and had left their hats and down jackets in the car, or because itÌęwas dusk, all the colors muted, or they were tired and apathetic after our seven-hour drive. Or maybe my silly gag had backfired.

The next day, during our three-and-a-half-hour hike down to Phantom, Pippa told me she thought I’d been telling the truth. That there would be something better, more spectacular in her lifetime, that the Grand Canyon wasn’t the single most breathtaking spectacle in practically the whole world. She’d lowered her expectations because of me, and I’d taken away that unforgettable first impressionÌęand made it ordinaryÌęand underwhelming—and no matter what I did or said now, I couldn’t give that moment back to her.

I vowed then that from then on, I would level with my daughters. If they were cold, I’d admit that it was cold. I would give them my best estimates on time and effort and distance. I’d warn them that they might sufferÌębut that sticking with it would almost definitely be worth it. Right there on the trail, I told Pippa that the hike out would be long and hard, maybe harder than anything she and her sister had ever done. But I had no doubt—zero—that they could do it. And this truth was more powerful than any lie.

The sun was just beginning to creep down the canyon walls when we left Phantom Ranch the next morning. It was barely 40 degrees and our hands were cold, the climb in front of us daunting. “Pleeease let us ride the mules,” the girls begged more than once. I’d like to think it was our honesty that powered them up the long ascent, but it might’ve also been our incentives: any dessert they wanted if they made it out without crying, and TV in the hotel room when we finished. It was easy to bargain with them.ÌęThey areÌęstill so little, and despite their occasional whining, still so game. It might not always be this way.

Motivated, they turned on their motors and cranked through the switchbacks, stopping only a few times for snacks and water. Four hours in, with less than two miles to go, they began to tire. But rather than downplay the effort, together we did the math. At our pace, we calculated, it’d be another hour to the rim, maybe more. Knowing the facts didn’t make them freak out, as I’d feared. Instead, it helped them strategize. They decided to rest briefly every 30 minutes until they got to the top. Every step would bring them closer.

After five and a half hours, they crested the last switchbackÌęand barely paused for a celebratory picture.ÌęIt would be another day, and two helpings of chocolate-mousse tacos for dessert, before they would stare over the edge, awed by the canyon and their own stamina, neither of which needed any interpretation from us.

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When I was eight years old, I spent an hour every autumn day after school shooting baskets in our driveway in New Jersey. I was small for my age, had little talent for the sport, and didn’t love it all that much; what I loved were the stories I made up in my head as I practiced my layups alone. I loved how my mind was free to wander as my arms and legs and hands went through the repetitive motion of throwing the ball. Entranced by the silence and solitude, I invented elaborate tales and characters. I never wrote them down, nor did I go on to play competitive basketball. It wasn’t the game or the plots that stuck, but the discovery that motion and imagination are inextricably linked. Move your body and your mind will follow.

Now that I’m a parent, I’m reliving it through my daughters. I watch my eight-year-old talking to herself as she lags behind on the walk to school. Sometimes I get impatient and chide her to hurry. Then I catch myself. This is what I was did when I rode my bicycle over and over around the block, pretending I was Harriet the Spy. My older daughter makes up songs and sings them aloud while she skis. When children have time and freedom to move through the world at their own pace—not necessarily unsupervised, but unstructured—they delve into their imaginations. This is the important work of childhood, and it lays the foundation for growing into curious, open-minded, problem-solving adults.

Research shows that exercise—whether team sports, individual sports, or even just goofing off outside—makes us more creative and more attentive when we come back to our desks. It can also help us imprint learning into our muscle memory, much like repetitive sports training. In a from the University of North Texas, researchers found that aerobic activity among kids led to higher scores on reading and math tests. Scientists at the University of Illinois, using MRI data to measure brain size, found that physically active nine- and ten-year-olds had larger hippocampi than their sedentary peers and scored higher on memory tests. And in an , Northeastern University psychology professor Charles Hillman has found evidence that children who run and play for 70 minutes a day exhibit better cognitive skills than those who don’t.

Why is exercise key to cognition? “There are many different mechanisms,” Hillman says. “We don’t understand them all, but one of the basic ones is that in response to cardiovascular exercise, there’s an increase in blood flow. Blood carries oxygen, which feeds the brain tissue. Another is that neuro-protecting molecules increase during exercise, and these are related, among other things, to memory.” The bottom line is movement—even a single bout of moderate physical exercise improves brain function. Says Hillman, “If you asked me to design a perfect school day, it would have 45-minute lessons, with ten- to 15-minute recesses in between so they can gain the benefits of outside activity.”

The human brain has evolved to integrate and respond to signals from all five senses—not just sight—which may help explain why kinesthetic and tactile stimuli are a boost to learning. A friend whose ten-year-old son is dyslexic sends him to a tutor who has him practice spelling words aloud while jumping on a trampoline. Repetitive, rhythmic, multisensory activities like jumping, skipping rope, dancing, hopping, and throwing a ball engage the body, not just the mind, helping us better absorb information and retain it longer. Movement, especially when it’s enjoyable, also takes our minds off what might be otherwise perceived as an onerous task.

Just how much movement do kids need? In issued in November by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee, kids ages six to 17 are advised to get one hour of moderate-to-vigorous activity every day. This is is unchanged from the previous report, but what’s new is the recommendation for even younger children: Preschoolers ages three to five should be “active throughout the day.” Team sports and organized activities are great physical outlets, but unscripted or solo free-play is also important. When they’re not responding to outward stimuli and instructions from their coaches or friends, kids are better able to tune in to their own imaginations. And according to , daydreaming is both a marker of intelligence and a conduit to greater creativity.

So the next time my girls seem too slow on their bikes and destined to be late for school, I’m going to chill out and let their minds and bodies wander.

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