Kim Chambers told her story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re literally a ticking time bomb for hypothermia in many of these swims. I didn’t even get halfway across. I was too cold, I was too slow. But I got out of the water and I said to myself, I’m gonna come back here, and I’m gonna come back and finish it, and I’m gonna be as prepared as possible.

I wanted to show what I was made of.

I’m originally from New Zealand and I spent, gosh, over 20 years in San Francisco. I went to the US as a young 17-year-old to attend UC Berkeley. I worked in tech and then became a public speaker.

About 10 years ago, I fell down a set of stairs on my way to work, and it just snowballed into this monstrous injury. I was 30 minutes from losing my right leg from the knee down.

I’d been a ballerina growing up in New Zealand. I’d rode at UC Berkeley. I was used to using my body and having agency over my body, and that was so close to being taken away from me.

I was diagnosed with acute compartment syndrome. I spent two years learning to walk again. Through that rehabilitation period, I was only given a 1 percent chance of walking unassisted again.

Those two years were really, really, really difficult years for me. I’ve had difficult years since, but I look back on that time, and you’re literally on the sidelines watching the world go by, with no guarantee that all the hard work that you’re gonna do is gonna get you where you want to.

I came across swimming as part of my rehabilitation. Two guys that I had met at a swimming pool where I had been swimming to rehabilitate my leg had invited me to swim in the San Francisco Bay, and I thought, Wow, I’ve never heard of anyone swimming in the San Francisco Bay. But I thought, That sounds like a cool idea. I said, “What do I need to bring?” And they said, “Just a swimsuit cap and goggles.” I had no idea what I was setting myself up for.

It was a really cold November day, and they encouraged me to get in the water just wearing a regular swimsuit. I just remember looking around and I couldn’t believe that I was in this water to begin with. You can see Alcatraz from the water. You can see all these old historic ships, and you can see other people in the water.

I was freezing cold. But I guess I was just lit up like a Christmas tree.The guy said I was smiling ear to ear, and it was exhilarating. So it was just that exact moment where my whole body, my mind, every fiber of my being, literally came alive. And I was hooked from that moment.

Swimming is quite different from any other sport. You are using every muscle in your body. You’re using your mind. And having gone through this terrible injury, I was weightless in the water.

There is this buoyancy, especially in the salt water, that is just magical, where you can just glide across the top of the water and you have this experience that connects your mind and your body so intimately.

Swimming, for me, took on a life of its own.You’re swimming from one place to the next, and you’re like, If I can swim from there to there, maybe I can swim from there to there. And it really became quite intoxicating. I felt like a kid in a candy store. I was like, I want that. I want that. I want that.

I just wanted more. Of everything.

I was so excited to be a part of this community. I was starting to hear about people coming back from England and having swum the English channel, and I thought, Wow, that is so cool. I want to do that.

Throughout my swimming career, people were pretty honest with me. My good friend, a mentor, Vito Bik, said I couldn’t swim my way out of a paper bag with flippers on. And he was absolutely right. But those words really lit a fire in my belly, and I was like, You know what? I’m gonna prove you wrong.

So the most challenging swim that I have done to date was the North Channel from Northern Ireland to Scotland. That swim has very, very, cold water. Fifty-three degree water. At the time, only 25 people had completed that swim before me.

All of these swims are done without a wetsuit. You follow what’s called “English Channel Rules.” You just wear a regular swimsuit, a regular cap and goggles. We also lather ourselves in lanolin to protect chafing from the water.

You have a dedicated crew on the boat. They feed you. So every 30 minutes, for example, they throw me a drink bottle on a rope, like you’re a pet seal. You’re treading water drinking a carbohydrate protein mix. And then you keep swimming until they tell you it’s time for another feeding.

In the North Channel that year there were a lot of jellyfish, and these are Lion’s Mane jellyfish, that sit on the top of the water and can be as large as a mini car tire. Their tentacles stretch three or four feet under the surface, and they sting.

I got stung in the first hour. I continued to get stung for the next 13 hours and six minutes that it took me to complete that swim. One of my crew members described them as big trash cans floating in the water. And at one point they were blowing a whistle telling me to stop because there was one right in front of me. They would say, Kim, go left. Go right, go left.

I was delirious towards the end of that swim. I don’t remember finishing the swim. I don’t remember touching Scotland. I couldn’t tell you what Scotland looked like.

You can prepare as much as possible but mother nature is always the boss. And I think that’s what makes these swims really exciting, is you’re not given a guarantee. You don’t know how it’s gonna end.

I have completed the Ocean Seven. Those are seven swims around the world: the English Channel, North Channel, Malachi Channel, Cook Strait, and so on.

Going through a really tough swim, I think you are certainly facing your mortality. And there’s a recovery period where it’s this mixture of elation, but also pain and suffering because everything aches. You definitely take stock of your life, and you wonder, Was it worth it?

It’s not a glamorous sport. For me, there’s a lot of vomiting involved. But I am an ordinary person who got to do these extraordinary things thanks to the extraordinary help of ordinary people. And I believe that anything is possible for each of us.

It doesn’t mean that you have to swim the English channel. But I think that thinking about something that you don’t think you can do, thinking about something that someone says you can’t do, I think it’s an incredible opportunity to say, You know what, no, that’s not going to be my life.

I would’ve never imagined that I would’ve done these swims. I got to see what I was made of, and they have set a foundation for me for the rest of my life. And I have gone through difficult times since then, but I can always draw back on that hard work, I can always draw back on those achievements, and say, If I can do that, I can get through this.

In 2014, Kim Chambers became the sixth person to complete the Ocean Seven, a marathon swimming challenge consisting of seven open water channel swims around the world. A year later, she became the first woman to swim from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, a distance of about 30 miles. You can learn more about her on her website, .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen.ĚýĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚý to be featured on the show.

The post Kim Chambers Goes All In appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Kiana Clay told her story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was knocked out for about seven minutes or so. I woke up on the back of a stretcher, and I tried moving everything, and I wasn’t able to move or feel my arm. So I started to freak out, and started screaming, “I can’t move my arm. I can’t move my arm.”

I’m 28 years old. I am an action sports junkie and a multi-professional athlete. I got into action sports when I was about four years old. I started competing probably at the age of seven, mostly in motocross. I was actually one of the top racers in the nation at 12 years old when it happened.

Back on November 18th, 2006, I was racing at Freestone County Raceway. I got landed on by another rider. His front wheel went over my neck, broke my neck and ripped the nerves out of my spinal cord. And as a result, I ended up losing the complete use of my right arm.

I was in the hospital for at least three months. When I was getting ready to go back home, me and my dad got hit by a drunk driver, and we ended up flipping in our lifted truck.

During that time, I was starting to gain some bicep muscle back, but after that car wreck, I lost everything that I was gaining back. My arm was already paralyzed, but that pretty much set it in stone that I was never gonna gain any movement back. So, I have no movement or feeling whatsoever.

I was always known as the girl that raced dirt bikes and did action sports. And it got taken away to just Kiana, and I had no idea who that was. It wasn’t just one challenge, it was probably a hundred thousand challenges.

Because I was dominant in my right hand, I had to reteach myself how to write. I’m an artist. I love art. It’s always been my way of expression, and I’ve always been big into painting and drawing. I had to reteach myself how to draw.

I had to figure out how to tie my shoes with my mouth. I had to come up with putting my hair up with a doorknob. So I really had to think outside of the box with the most daily basic tasks.

If anybody is ever up for a challenge, for one whole day, take your dominant hand and tie it behind your back, and go the entire day of just trying to figure out how to do things with your non-dominant hand. It’s a lot more challenging than what people think.

And so during that time, not only was I trying to figure out how to do daily tasks, but I was also trying to figure out who I was without racing. It was a lot to deal with because I was having to figure out puberty and boys and getting into middle school and high school. So it was just a really difficult time.

I ended up becoming a lot closer to God and I was really able to grow and mature a lot more as a person. When you step away from what you love and what you are passionate about for a certain amount of time, it really makes you appreciate those things even more. So when I got back into sports, I just completely fell in love with it even more than when I did before.

When I turned 18 and I went to college, I ended up getting a KX110 and rigging it up and figured out a way to ride with one arm again. One thing led to another, I started racing again and got on a bigger bike. I’m the first adaptive female ever to race a dirt bike. I did not foresee that at all—to qualify for regionals and all the success that has come from it.

And through motocross racing is where I found a gentleman who introduced me to adapted snowboarding. I ended up moving to Colorado full-time and training full-time. I had no idea that it was gonna lead me down this awesome path and career of being a pro snowboarder, and being third in the world in banked slalom for snowboarding. I have petitioned with Forbes and The New York Times for adding my category into the Paralympics. I’ve become the first adaptive snowboarder to ever sign with Burton Snowboards.

I’ve always loved snowboarding, but I never saw it as a career. But getting back into racing gave me snowboarding, and it also gave me skateboarding. I’ve participated in a lot of skateboarding competitions, and we’re trying to get adaptive skateboarding into the X-Games and in the Paralympics. So it’s cool to also be a part of that. Also with surfing and just the way wake surfing has cultivated I’d say in the last four or five years for me. So it’s just really awesome to be in the front lines of progressing the sports, and going out and showing what not just women are capable of, but just what human beings are capable of when you really have a passion and a love for something.

I can sit and say, Yeah, my dirt bike and racing took away my arm. But I love it so much. I’m still gonna go back to it because I just love it with everything that I have. A lot more of my dreams have come true being a disabled woman versus being a fully-abled woman.

When I was younger, my identity was so wrapped up in my bike that I really didn’t know who I was outside of that. And I think that could have been very dangerous. You want to just be a very well-rounded person. So I think it’s very smart and I think it’s very wise to just be like, OK, I can love racing, but I can also love going out with my friends. And I want to be a good artist. And I want to be educated, I want to go to college.

I hear a lot of athletes and I hear a lot of people be like, “I’m a snowboarder or I’m a motocross racer. But this is all I know.” And so let’s say they spend their entire life training and getting into this. When they get out of those things, they have no idea what to do.

Action sports are awesome, but I have other ideas. I want to get into business at some point, and I want to maybe start my own nonprofit. So being off of the bike for six and a half, seven years, was actually a blessing, because it showed me all these other areas in my life that I wanted to flourish in.

I think anything and everything negative in this life can be used as a superpower if you allow it.

Kiana Clay is a pro snowboarder and an adaptive motocross racer. She is also a surfer and skateboarder. You can follow her on Instagram .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

The post Kiana Clay Is More than an Athlete appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Lori Fox told her story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was in the hospital, my neurologist sat down to talk about what my prognosis was. I remember saying to him, “Am I gonna run again? Can I run again?” And he put his hand on mine in a very grandfather-ly way and said, “Let’s just start with walking.” And I thought, I don’t think so. I thought, No, I’m gonna run again. I definitely am.

I just retired from teaching. I was a speech language pathologist for 39 years. I’m a mom, a friend, a sister, a daughter, an aunt. I am a master coach as well.

Interestingly, I never considered myself an athlete. I never considered myself to be a runner. I grew up in the age before Title IX, so I never had that opportunity to be part of a sport. I thought it was just something that was not going to be a part of my life.

In 2011, a couple of weeks before my son was to graduate from high school, my husband at the time sat me down and said he wanted a divorce. So after he left and my son was at school, I found myself in this place that I didn’t want to be in. I didn’t know how to navigate it. And I knew I needed something for myself, not just for my physical being, but for my mental health. I felt like I was so untethered, and I needed something to ground me.

I saw a learn to run group, so I decided to join them. Running was so scary and I thought, I’m in a scary place. How much more scary can it get? So, I decided to run.

I considered myself at that time to be kind of an introvert, so having to go somewhere on my own and say hello to both men and women was so exhilarating, and I thought myself so powerful. I thought, Oh, this is what athletes feel like. The first run, I know we didn’t run a mile. We did mostly walking, but I just felt hardcore at that point.

I was 55.

Community was the biggest and best thing I got from running because these people, especially the women that I’ve met through running, have become my running family. We’ve been through so much together, and always feel like we’re coming out the other end stronger and more empowered.

I got to the point where I thought, How do I share this with other women? How do I give back? That came with becoming a coach for 261 Fearless Running.

261 was founded in Austria, and the goal is to really empower women through running and socialization. It’s a non-competitive group, and many women come to us, probably the same way I came to running: With fear and nervousness and doubt and judgment about themselves.

My motto is I never profile anybody in a run group. You don’t know what they come with. You don’t know their story. To see a woman run her first mile and break down in tears with happiness like she never thought she could, I’m so grateful for that.

I was training for my first marathon, in 2015. I was sitting at home, I was reading, and my hand felt funny and I thought, Did I sit on my hand, that pins and needles feeling? Well, it was not that, I had a stroke.

I remember coming out of the MRI, and I was very emotional. I was teary and I thought, Knock it off, Lori, you are alive. You are in such a better place than you could be. Just pull yourself together, put big girl panties on, and let’s just go forward.

My neurologist sat down to talk about what my prognosis was, what I could look forward to in terms of rehab over the next few months. He was this kindly doctor, and he had this really warm face with these beautiful wrinkles and these beautiful eyes. He had that old-fashioned black doctor bag.

I remember saying to him, Am I gonna run again? And he said, “Let’s just start with walking.” And I thought, I don’t think so. I’m gonna run again. I definitely am. I had gained not just inner strength, but mental strength. A running coach told me, “Running is between your ears.” It’s how you think about it. It’s how you attack the course. It’s how you get in a mindset that puts one foot in front of the other. So I just relied on what I had learned in running, that mental strength to think, No, I’m gonna run again.

I did have physical therapy. I started by doing laps in the hospital, just going around the nurse’s desk. After they released me, I stayed with my mother, and she had this big Victorian house. I would just go up and down the stairs, and not wanting any help. Learning that I had to celebrate small steps. That if I could make it around the block once without stopping, walking, that was my marathon.

It was putting different expectations on myself and different goals. And just constantly saying to myself, One day at a time, one step at a time, one day at a time, one step at a time.

I learned that I’m more resilient than I thought I was.

I am in training right now to run my first marathon this October. It’s been a while, and my body’s ready. I’ve been prepared. Scared, but excited. I think only 2 percent of people in the world run marathons. Before the stroke, I always wanted to be in the top three in my age group. I never wanted to walk at all during a run.

And now I realized the actual joy of just running. And if I want to stop at one point and look at a waterfall for 30 seconds and then keep on running, I do that. Before, my runs were running to get to the end. Now my runs are running to enjoy what’s around me. I run in gratitude that I am able to run.

We are so caught up in measuring ourselves. And I would say to other runners, take your watch off. Get into a head space where you are enjoying the beauty that’s around you. Think about the fact that you have the ability to run.

Run in gratitude.

Lori Fox worked as a speech and language pathologist in a public school for 39 years, and began running in 2013. She became a 261 Fearless Coach in 2019, and master coach in 2022. She also participates in the annual Secret 3K, which helps build safe running environments for women worldwide.

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

The post Lori Fox Runs with Gratitude appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Kriste Peoples told her story to producer Tunvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

So around that time, I’m running through the neighborhood, and I have these events on my mind, these murders. I’m running through my wealthy neighborhood, and it occurs to me that I can’t run on the sidewalk, because if I run up on a white woman with the stroller, or carrying a purse, or just walking, then that could seem threatening. Somebody can look out their window and call the police on me. And if I go into the street, then I can’t run near the driver’s side door, lest somebody think I’m trying to break into their car.

It’s not safe to be anywhere in this Black body in America.

I am a trail runner. I am a writer. I am a program director at Women’s Wilderness, which is a nonprofit based in Boulder, Colorado.

When I moved to Boulder, where there are mountains all around, it was a brand new world to me, because I had grown up on the east coast, where we had beaches and flat land. I felt like some of what I was reaching for was kind of hard to find, it was like hunting around in the dark. Being able to demystify the process of getting outdoors and finding people to go with was huge.

Finding running brought me so much relief and release. Simply running. In the backcountry or running trails, sometimes people would say, Black people more often than not, “Aren’t you afraid out there of the wild animals?” And, “Black people don’t do that.”

Then came 2020. There was a mandate called Safer at Home, which said to stay within 10 miles of your home. At the time I was living just beyond 10 miles from the mountains. So that meant rather than going to the trails to run, I was going to be running through my neighborhood, which was wealthy and white. Around this time, we’d experienced the upheaval from the Ahmaud Arbery murder. This was a young Black man who was running in Georgia, and was targeted and gunned down by some people who thought he shouldn’t be there. We’d also had Breonna Taylor’s murder. She was asleep at home in her bed. And the so-called authorities busted in and shot her to death in her sleep.

And I’m running through my neighborhood, and it occurs to me, I can’t run too fast, that might draw suspicion because perhaps someone thinks I’m fleeing the scene. If I run too slow, perhaps they think I’m casing the neighborhood, looking to come back and do some harm or steal or whatever. And so it’s really top of mind for me.

A lot of the benefit that I get from running is clearing my head, helping to make sense of the world around me. So, it was a really challenging time, because it made me feel like, Well, there is no safe place.

Among our trail running group, we were having a Zoom conversation about running, coaching, what’s going on with us. We have somebody talking about nutrition, somebody else talking about gear, and then I say, “You know what? Hey everybody, I gotta say that this is a really hard time for me right now, because this Black man has been murdered. He was in a part of town people didn’t think he should be in.” And I am a Black person running on the streets, even though it’s my neighborhood, and I feel very vulnerable right now.” So, it was really emotional the more that I talked about it. And I said, “It is just very hard right now, and I am needing some support.

Our trail running group shared that they too were upset by it and didn’t know what to do. And so being able to have those kinds of conversations was huge, because how often are we really talking to each other about issues that make us feel very uncomfortable? Talking about issues that don’t have easy solutions, and realizing that we don’t know what to do, but being able to even say, “We don’t know what to do and we are upset.” Being able to say that and hear each other is actually a way to bond, and to at least become more aware of what’s at stake and how we might try to take care of each other even if we can’t solve the bigger issue.

As we talked, people started offering to run in solidarity and to share about it. And they came forward and supported me by doing some honorary runs to really commemorate the life of Ahmaud Arbery.

What helped me get through that was reaching out to my communities and letting people know if I’m struggling or if I need support. Another big part of this is, I can ask for that support, but I also need to let myself receive it. And receive it in whatever form people are able to give, because we don’t always know how to handle each others’ pain and confusion.

Running together will not cure racism, and will not keep people from thinking that I do or don’t belong in certain places. But being able to share with people means that I don’t have to hold the pain alone. That empowers me. That fuels me, because I know I’m not just one lonely powerless person out here just trying to live a life with some modicum of happiness.

A lot of people do have the experience of feeling like they’re not qualified to be outside, or that they don’t belong outside, or that there’s no room for them, or they don’t see themselves represented outside. And up until very recently, the media wasn’t showing people of color in the outdoors. So, I’m still very much running a lot, and I’m out in nature a lot, and I’m still taking people out, and I’m talking about it. I’m very much engaged, and so wherever I go, I go with the understanding that I belong, that I have a right to show up, that I have a right to my dignity. And I also go with the understanding that it might make people very uncomfortable that I show up, but I can’t live my life in response to the potential that someone’s not going to like me showing up in a particular place.

I know that generations of people before me have fought and died for my right to show up in these places. That empowers me. I know that I am somebody’s dream, I am a great many peoples’ dream, and it’s important to remember that, and to lean into that whenever I’m feeling a bit tentative. If I’m going, I need to go with pride, because I don’t come from nothing. I come from strength.

Kriste Peoples is an outdoor enthusiast, guide, runner, writer, and mindfulness meditation teacher. She serves on the board of the and . When she’s not adventuring in Colorado’s Front Range, Kriste is likely recovering with carbs in a local eatery. You can find her at her website and on Instagram .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

The post Kriste Peoples Knows She Belongs appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Jim Davidson told his story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

We heard noise. We heard an avalanche ripping down a 3,000-foot wall next to us on one side. Then a second avalanche started ripping down a 6,000-foot vertical wall on the other side. I’m a geologist, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the mountains, so I thought, Two avalanches at the same time on different slopes? That doesn’t make sense. Something’s very wrong.

I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. I’ve been a climber my whole life. I emigrated out here when I was in my twenties to be near the mountains from my home state of Massachusetts.

I had one of the biggest challenges in my life when I was climbing Mount Everest in 2015. I’d been a climber for a long time, and finally was gonna grapple with that chance to grab my dream of climbing Mount Everest. I was at Camp One at an elevation of about 19,700 feet, and I was camped in a small tent on the glacier.

In the moment of crisis, the avalanches roared towards us. I yelled at my tent mate, Bart, to get outside the tent. We don’t want to be in the tent because those avalanches could push the tent under more easily. Then all of a sudden, our tent shot up into the air, kind of hovered for two seconds, and then dropped back down. Then it went up again and back down again.

Those were the waves of the earthquake rippling through the glacier that our tent was resting on. And being in the tent was like being in a life raft on the ocean, as the swells were going underneath us, picking us up and dropping us down.

We were trapped at Camp One, because our route back down the mountain had been wiped out by all the avalanches. We had aftershock after aftershock and more avalanches. So we were living in that fear and uncertainty for a very gripping 48 hours waiting for our chance to escape Mount Everest.

My mental state and my emotional state would go up and down a lot. It happened with people around me, and I might get really upset, and Bart would say, “Hey Jim, come on. We got some world-class climbers and world-class sherpas and guides here. We’re gonna figure this out.” and I would calm down.

Maybe an hour later, he would get upset. I’d go, “Come on, Bart.” So I think that’s what happens, we need to take turns lifting each other up. Putting a little hope into one another so we can make it through it.

I was also looking inside myself a lot, because we had 48 hours just to lay in the tent. We couldn’t take any action until we could get off the mountains. I would find myself thinking back on lessons that my dad and my old climbing partner Mike had taught me. I was pulling strengths from my past as well trying to grab some hope from the future to get back and see my wife and kids.

Climbers have been going to Mount Everest for over a hundred years, and there’s never been an earthquake like that while they were on the mountain. This one was an especially bad one. It was 7.8 magnitude. It was the biggest earthquake to hit Nepal in 81 years.

Very luckily for us at Camp One, nobody was hurt or killed, which was an amazing, lucky coincidence. But sadly, in Base Camp they had a bigger problem. There were 70 people wounded, and 18 people killed instantly. It was the deadliest day ever on Mount Everest.

After the helicopters were used to move the wounded off to field hospitals, we were eventually able to get everybody out of Camp One and off the mountain.

When we were descending from Mount Everest, we began to see the damage around us. It wasn’t just us climbing on Everest, it was these people’s homes, their communities. They had lost loved ones, they had lost neighbors, and we realized that was a much more important thing than any climb or any other recreational activity. So we were trying to spark some hope and resilience in them by helping to lift them up. And it kind of reflected back. So we took turns lifting each other up, and that’s energizing.

I’ve actually found that over the years, as you look back on something traumatic, you say, I can’t change that bad thing. You have to fight that urge. There are some dark days but instead you try and move forward and say, I’m gonna instead use this as a strength. That’s what they call post-traumatic growth.

We all have something that drives us forward. For some people it’s playing music. Others, it’s marathons or meditation. For me, it’s mountains. My first big mountain climb was on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. It was wintertime, but I remember reaching the summit, and I knew that I wanted to spend my life trying to recapture that feeling of awe, being in such a rare and beautiful place.

I wanted to go back because I still wanted to climb Everest, but I was afraid because I didn’t want to go through that again. And the question is: How are you gonna rise up, take on that next challenge ahead with resilience?

Being a scientist, I turned to science to give me an answer, about how many earthquakes have occurred, how big, and how the plates have released stress and everything. But in fact, the analysis of the seismology showed there was more risk. So my kind of go-to spot of science backfired on me. And I thought, Well, I have to dig a little bit deeper.

If you look to your past, you can find people who give you resilience. Your parents, a favorite grandparent, a coach or teacher. Then you look towards the future and go, Where do I want to be in the future? Who do I want to be in the future? I’ve also found in my career as a climber, now for over 40 years, that every time I take on a bigger challenge, if it makes me nervous, that’s the right size challenge. So going back to Everest again did scare me, which told me it was a challenge that had the potential to make me grow into something more.

You have to be on Everest for about a month or two to train yourself up to deal with the high altitude in the thin air. And as that was going on, I slowly settled into a little bit more confidence. I was pretty acclimatized, and I felt like I understood the mountain fairly well.

But we’d been working for weeks and weeks. So we were very tired. I had lost huge amounts of weight and muscle. We were very beat down. We were exhausted because you can’t sleep at high altitude. So I’d been up for 30 hours, or something like that.

We managed to reach the summit just before sunrise on a beautiful day. You’re walking that last little section of the true summit on this very narrow ridge, and space just drops away around you. You have an 8,000-foot drop off to your left into Nepal, and an 11,000-foot drop off to the right, down into Tibet.

The sun’s coming up, and you can look down upon all the other mountains around you there. They’re 27,000, 28,000 feet, and you’re looking down upon them. It’s almost like being in space and looking down on Earth. The stars are just the brightest I’d ever seen. It is absolutely awe-inspiring to be there. But it also makes me feel very humble because I’m just so small on this big, beautiful planet.

One thing I’ve learned through all this is that even though life is busy and crazy things can happen, you have to take time to fill up your cup with resilience. Whatever it is that brings you joy and awe and that you love spending your free time doing, take the time to do that. Even when you’re busy, even when there’s a lot going on. So you’re the strongest version of you possible moving forward to face that next challenge or opportunity ahead.

Jim Davidson is a mountaineer, environmental geologist, and motivational speaker. His book chronicles the 2015 earthquake and avalanches on the mountain, as well as the recovery effort that followed. Learn more about him and his work at .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Jim Davidson Fills His Cup with Resilience appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Stephanie Maez told her story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I remember being in the courtroom when they first had his first arraignment. I can close my eyes right now, and hear the shackles and feel the cold of the cinder block. It’s just devastating to see somebody you love so deeply in pain and you can’t stand up and give them a hug.

I’m the executive director of the Outdoor Foundation. Back in 2015, my son, who was 18 at the time, was wrongfully accused of murder. He spent almost a full year in jail. Ten-and-a half months for this crime that he had no knowledge of, was not a part of, didn’t commit. He was innocent. At that time, I was serving in the state legislature, and it became really high profile in the media. It was just a really horrific time.

I was very much in a place of survival and just getting through the next day. I also have a daughter, who was not even nine at the time, and had to try to explain to her what was going on. It was getting through the day, getting through the next court hearing, getting through the next media interview.

There were multiple times throughout the course of the wrongful arrest where my son was in jail, and I would actually sleep on my dad’s back porch, because it faced west and west was where the jail was. When I would sleep on his back porch, I felt closer to my son in a weird way. The fact that I was actually outside and I could hear the birds and the wind, there was something really comforting about that, for me as a mom.

There was this bench probably about a little less than a quarter of a mile away from the actual facility. If you sat on the bench, you could see the chain link fence, and you could hear the rec yard, and the prisoners playing basketball. So I would just go, even on my non-visitation days, and just lay on the bench and look up at the sky.

Ultimately, the charges were dropped and they found the real murderers. I had this expectation that when he was going to come home from jail, we would have this white picket fence life. That everything was going to go back to how I thought it was going to be: he would go back to school and I would potentially go back into public office. It was so far from that when he came home that it was almost debilitating, because he had experienced so much trauma in jail and came home with really severe PTSD. I think as a mom, when you see your child in so much pain and suffering, there is nothing more helpless of a feeling than that.

I started drinking really heavily, to cope and numb all of the pain. At the same time, I was numbing the joy. The world became so gray and lost all of its color. I became so numb. It was really a tough time. I found myself just going deeper and deeper into that dark space. It was a really slippery slope to a place of a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

Finally, I took my butt out into the foothills of the Sandia mountains. It’s not a real strenuous hike, but it’s enough to get the heart pumping a little bit. It’s about 15 minutes up to the top. To the west, you can look over the city, and to the east you can see the front of the Sandia mountains. It was dusk-ish. I remember closing my eyes and listening to the rustling of the trees and the birds, and that it was just peace. Just complete peace. The weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders, and I could just hear and feel and sense and see in a whole new way. It was almost divine intervention from nature that was like, you need to knock this crap off. And I did, and I quit. That was seven years ago.

I went through really intense therapy. I went to group sessions. It quickly became that I would find myself on the trail running instead or downing a bottle of wine at night. It became a place for healing and growth and getting stronger, and has been ever since.

A lot of the stoic philosophers of hundreds of years ago have said, “Maybe the obstacle is the way.” Maybe it’s through these hard times that help us become better people and learn and grow and expand. I’m not saying that we should all have to suffer in order to be better people. I am saying, though, that there is contrast in life. There’s good and bad, there’s easy times and there’s hard times. And life is so beautiful, sober.

I used to isolate myself, and I used to say I’m going to handle it by myself, I’m just going to do it. And there’s so many people who want to be there for you and want to help. You’re not alone. It can feel so alone. It can feel so lonely. But you’re not.

Stephanie Maez is a former state legislator in New Mexico, where she has sponsored and supported a slate of social justice policy proposals. She is now executive director of the Outdoor Foundation, and works to create equitable access to the outdoors. Learn more about her efforts at .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Stephanie Maez Won’t Do It All By Herself appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Jo Ann Allen told her story to producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This was in the summer of 2021. I live alone. I lost my balance in my kitchen, and fell and hit my head on the concrete floor. The impact knocked me out. I don’t know for how long, because I have no sense of time around what happened, and also it made me black out.

The next thing I knew, paramedics were knocking on my door.

I am the host of the podcast Been There, Done That, which tells the real life stories of the Baby Boom generation. I am a former radio journalist who has worked for various NPR stations. I enjoy writing; I’m writing a memoir now.

The accident happened when I was 67, almost 68. One of the scariest, if not the scariest, moments in my life was when that accident happened to me.

I think when you’ve been a journalist all your life, you’re aware of everything around you. You’re aware of other people, you’re aware of what you are doing. There’s a keen sense of knowing things that are going on, that are happening. And to lose that was just, Whoa, where did I go? What did I do? How can I find out for sure?

The fall left a wound that was bleeding and a dent in my head that I have right to this day. It’s never going to straighten out, which is a reminder of what happened. But I was lucky enough that my fall did not cause any brain injury, per se, other than the concussion.

Over the next several months, I really had to take it easy. I couldn’t do what I normally do, which is write and be on the radio, because I could tell my brain had slowed down somewhat. It didn’t require any kind of medication, just sitting still and being. Which I thought would be hard to do, but when your brain gets a jolt, sitting still and taking care of yourself is easy to do.

I kept trying to go for walks, but I waited until I started feeling OK with being outside in the fresh air and the sunshine. Seeing my neighborhood, which is a fairly nice neighborhood. Getting outdoors was part of the healing process, but I never pushed myself. I trusted when my doctors said, “Take it easy, don’t overdo it.” But it was a year of questioning, How much will I be back? Will I be back to what I feel to be a hundred percent?

I learned to really take it easy and to, in fact, slow down. The benefits of slowing down are that you get to relax. You’re not hyped up, your shoulders are not up in the air the way they would be when you’re on deadline, for example, because in radio journalism, the deadlines were constant.

Another thing is that I knew how to do radio journalism well, and it’s hard to let that go because it feels good to do well. To learn that I can get satisfaction elsewhere was important. I learned that I would be OK not doing journalism. I could move those creative juices that I have into another area, I could be much more creative as a writer and put aside journalism. This past year I’ve learned that it’s not going to be as hard to retire as I thought it was going to be, because I’ve always, all my life, ever since I was in grade school, loved telling people something new.

I always tell people who are thinking about retiring and just can’t quite do it, don’t retire and sit down and do nothing. When you retire, make sure you have one or two or three things that you really enjoy doing lined up. Whether it is golfing every day, or volunteering with a charity, or helping your neighbor in their garden, have things to do that will keep you happy and will keep you moving.

I am grateful in a sense that I had that fall, because I feel so much more aware of who I am, what I am, what I want to do, how I can go about doing those things.

There’s something about experiencing hardship and coming through it onto the other side that makes you grateful that it happened, that allows you to be as human as possible and not apologize for it.

Jo Ann Allen is the host of the podcast, , and a columnist for The Denver Post. She’s currently writing a memoir about growing up in the Jim Crow South. You can find her on Twitter .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Jo Ann Allen Takes It Slow appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Shannon Leone Fowler shared her story with producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It was edited for length and clarity.

We were in the water together. We were actually kissing. My legs were wrapped around his waist and he felt something. Something had bumped my thigh. He jumped and he dropped me and ran to the beach. Whatever had bumped my thigh felt big. It felt solid. It felt heavy.

My name is Shannon Leone Fowler. I am originally from California, and I now live in London with my three kids. I’m a marine biologist and a writer. I am currently studying seabirds in Alaska. I also write non-fiction.

When I was 28 years old, I was halfway through my PhD in marine biology. And my fiancé at the time, was named Sean. We had only just gotten engaged.

We ended up going to Thailand where he wanted to go. And we were on the island of Ko Pha- ngan. This is August of 2002.

We were in the water together. I thought a stingray had nudged me, and that Sean had stepped on it because my legs were wrapped around his waist, so they weren’t touching the sand. So I thought he’d been stung by this stingray. I’d been with people who’d been stung by stingrays before, it’s incredibly painful.

We went to the shore and he was sitting down on the beach, and he said that he was having trouble breathing and that his head felt heavy and he wanted me to go get help.

The light was fading at this point. It was about dusk. There was a bar not far down the beach, so I started to run for help and I turned back about halfway and he’d collapsed face first into the sand. That was the first moment that I thought, “This is serious.”

A number of people followed me from the bar. We tried to do CPR, we tried to give him mouth-to-mouth. I was screaming for an ambulance. There was obviously no ambulance on Ko Pha-ngan, but he was taken in the back of a truck to a clinic. They worked on him for 20 minutes, and he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Sean was stung by a box jellyfish.

That was the end of my life in a lot of ways. I was a 28-year-old marine biologist. We’d been engaged for 10 days. I just had found out I was pregnant, which was a surprise, and we were still kind of wrapping our heads around it.

I could see my whole life with him and the kids we would have, and the grandkids we would have. Living in Australia together, and working as a marine biologist. And in an absolute instant, all of that was gone.

I miscarried four days later by myself in a hotel room in Bangkok, and I lost the ocean. I didn’t know that I would ever get it back at that point. I had loved the ocean my entire life, and I [now] hated the ocean.

I didn’t touch the water for a year. I didn’t know if I would ever go back to marine biology. I didn’t know if I would finish my PhD. It makes no sense. And I’m a scientist. I tend to be quite rational. But I felt betrayed by the ocean. I felt like I had given my life to the ocean, and the ocean had totally betrayed me.

I think America is a culture that doesn’t deal with grief very well. We want to [turn it into a] clichĂ©, we want to [give it] a silver lining. We want to slap a bandaid on it and think everything’s going be OK. I found that very painful and very difficult when I was going through it.

I found myself in Eastern Europe, in countries that dealt with death and grief very differently, much more openly, much more matter-of-factly.

I went to Sarajevo in 2002. The city was very visibly scarred. There were buildings that were just demolished, still rubble. Some things had very intentionally been left that way. One of the things that Sarajevans did was fill in mortar blasts where people had died with red resin. And so you would see these cracks in the pavement, these small explosions, these scars in the pavement filled with red. They would call them Sarajevo roses. I think that is a beautiful and tragic way of remembering. You’re not going to re-pave it. You’re going to mark it. Every time someone walks by, they’re going to know that somebody died there.
The way they dealt with the tragedy that they had suffered through was making it into art, making beauty out of grief. It was a bit of a turning point for me. Terrible things happen, but that doesn’t mean that life can’t be beautiful afterwards. It doesn’t mean that for life to be beautiful, you can’t acknowledge the darkness and the terrible things that have happened. And sometimes acknowledging the darkness is beautiful.

On the year anniversary of Sean’s death, I booked a long weekend to Noosa in Australia, which is a surfer’s place on the East Coast. I thought I was going to go in the water on the year anniversary. So I rented a surfboard, and I went in and I went under, and I came up and nothing changed. Somehow I thought on the anniversary, I would enter the water and I would be cleansed, I would move on. But I went under and everything was the same.

A couple of months after that, I went to Vanuatu and I went scuba diving for the first time since Sean had died. And there was one moment where all of a sudden I felt like I could breathe. There was a single inhale, and it felt like I’d filled my lungs for the first time in a year and two months.

It still took me a while to really want to be around the ocean. I think one of the things that probably helped is being a biologist. I study nature. And animals kill each other. It’s part of what happens. And I guess I learned to accept that there’s dark and light and that you can love the light and learn to deal with the dark.

I did finish my PhD. I do love the ocean again. I really do. It’s a different kind of relationship. It’s probably more realistic, more mature. I think a lot of us have probably loved things that have dark aspects. The ocean is incredibly powerful and something to be respected.

I try to not use words like move past or even recover from, because Sean’s death has been incorporated into my life, and it’s such an enormous part of who I am. There will always be this massive hole in my heart. I still think about him every day. I miss him every day.

I think my biggest lesson is that I feel that you have to find your own path through grief, and how you’re going to live with that loss. In some ways I’m not going to be OK, and that’s OK. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would be sitting here having an interview 20 years after he died and still not be able to get through it without crying, I think I would’ve found that devastating. I’m OK with that. It’s just the way it is. Life, in my opinion, is not fair, and it’s not always easy. Life can be beautiful and it can be devastating, and sometimes it can be both of those things all at once.

Shannon Leone Fowler is a marine biologist, writer and single mom of three young children. She currently lives in London and studies seabirds in Alaska. Her memoir Traveling With Ghosts is out now. You can learn more about her at shannonleonefowler.com.

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛Ô , , , or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Shannon Leone Fowler Accepts the Dark Side of Nature appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Annijke Wade shared her story with producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It was edited for length and clarity.

The next thing I know I’m floating through the air. And then my next memory is me being in the middle of the trail. At that moment, I instantly knew something was terribly wrong.

My name is Annijke Wade, and I am an adaptive athlete. Specifically, an adaptive mountain biker. I also do a lot of advocacy work within the mountain biking space, making sure that mountain biking and the communities around mountain biking are safe spaces for BIPOC individuals as well as adaptive athletes.

It was July 17th, 2021. I was mountain biking at my favorite downhill mountain biking resort, on my favorite trail with some wonderful people. It was the first run of the day. And I hit a jump just a little bit wonky. I tried to dump as much speed as I could. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to, and ended up hitting the next feature.

I could no longer feel anything below my chest, and no longer move anything below my chest. I knew at that point I was paralyzed.

I spent the next better half of the day getting to various hospitals, and eventually got a Flight for Life to Albuquerque. In Albuquerque, I stayed at the University of New Mexico Hospital for 17 days, unable to move 75 percent of my body.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few years really ingrained in the mountain biking community and really enjoy all aspects of it. For me, showing up on the trail is really important for my mental health. I love being able to take in nature in that particular mode. I like to be able to disconnect. One of the things that’s been really appealing to me about mountain biking is oftentimes when I’m on the trail, I really can’t think about other things. It’s this moment that offers me kind of a piece of solitude in Zen. So after the accident, I knew I wanted to be back on the trail.

Going through this challenging period of now facing lifelong paralysis, being a full-time wheelchair user, and all of the complications that came with having a spinal cord injury, it became really important for me to focus my energy and efforts into building my identity around adaptive mountain biking and being able to get outdoors. Three to five days after my accident, I picked out the type of adaptive mountain bike I wanted to use, and started to pour all of my time and energy into researching the sport of adaptive mountain biking.

Anybody that would come to the hospital to visit me was berated with all of these videos of adaptive athletes, shredding on adaptive mountain bikes. And I would tell folks, “That’s going to be me in less than a year. I’m gonna be back out there.” I had no idea how I was gonna get there or what that would look like, but I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

I thought, OK, well I know of a few adaptive athletes, and it’s time for me to start to figure out what my life is gonna look like after. I knew that there was gonna be a life for me in the outdoors and hopefully mountain biking.

The experience of learning how to mountain bike again has been very interesting, fun, and rewarding in so many ways. When I first got my bike, there was just this initial excitement that came along with it. Then I suddenly realized, Oh, I’m gonna have to learn how to ride this.

One of the things for me that’s been really important has been that natural, safe progression of skills. I’m having to remember that although it is mountain biking and although I might be visiting the same locations and trails, I have a different body. I have a different lived experience at this point. And I have different equipment. Being really patient with myself has been really important throughout this process. Really just reminding myself that this is my first season as an adaptive athlete. My first season using this new piece of equipment.

It’s my first mountain bike season after my spinal cord injury and my accident. Taking that step back has allowed me to really still feel confident even in those moments of extreme uncertainty and being uncomfortable as I approach these features and trails.

Each day there’s gonna be tons of issues and complications. But, focusing on what I’m able to do in a specific moment and being present has helped me navigate all of the things that are associated with acquiring a disability. For instance, putting pants on used to be something that took less than 30 seconds, and now it can take ten minutes depending on what kind of pants I’m putting on. So as I’m engaging in that particular task, especially tasks that are really challenging, I’m just trying to stay in the moment and trying not to think about how frustrating the task is or how so much has changed, and how maybe I wish it could be different. Instead, I’m really just trying to give attention to the task.

Every single day you have the opportunity to choose to accept your situation and the reality of it or not. Some days that acceptance is going to be easier than others. Some days it’s really a struggle. That’s where being present and accepting on a minute-by-minute basis comes in. I really do think it is a choice in a lot of ways. Coming to terms with my accident, for me in particular, has been really critical in allowing me to get back outdoors and reenter mountain biking as an adaptive athlete.

Annijke Wade is an adaptive athlete who is passionate about making the outdoors and mountain biking a safe space for all. You can follow her on her journey on Instagram. She’s .

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛Ô , , , or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Annijke Wade Feels Confidence in Uncertainty appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Emmie Sperandeo shared her story with producer Tanvi Kumar for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It was edited for length and clarity.

It was just this insane experience where I’m nervous and this horse is nervous and I’m on a completely different continent—like the other side of the world. I have to accept the fact that this is just all out of my comfort zone, and I’m going to do it anyway.

I grew up in central Florida. I had never left the continent before, and I haven’t traveled internationally much. I never had the confidence or money or time to do it before.

I traveled to Namibia for the month of April and went to go work on a ranch out there. I got there and was walking around with one of the ranchers one day. And they’re like, there’s this wild horse. He’s young, two, but he’s a stallion. He came in with their herd and just kind of joined their ranch horse herd. And she was like, if we can get him in a pen, this is your project while you’re here. You can train with that horse. And I was like, I don’t know if I’m even qualified for this. You sure?

It’s definitely not normal for a wild horse to choose to be domesticated, which is what makes this story kind of unique and funny. But it is normal for a horse to eventually get kicked out of their herd when they’re a young stallion, because the older stallion is going to say it’s time to go. Basically a parent kicking their kid out of the house. And if they’re not strong enough when they’re out on their own, especially in that landscape and with that wildlife, they’re not going to survive. And he ended up just bonding with the horses at the ranch and just stuck around and went into the pasture with them one day and never left. He could have left many times, and he just decided to hang out.

I named him Kibo. It’s a peak in Africa, because Kibo had a mountain range on his neck. He was a paint horse, so he had all of these really beautiful markings and some of the markings looked like a pointy mountain range, like a peak.

I had never worked with a wild horse before, and especially one that’s used to such different wildlife than the wild horses in the U.S. They’re super reactive and ready to fight all the time.

I wasn’t even sure if I could do it. I was the first human interaction this horse has ever had. So I had to make sure he was okay with a human being that close to him. Basically, I had prepared him the best I could, but I also didn’t have a whole lot of time, like 30 days. I would usually take a lot longer for that whole process, but I only had a month there.

I don’t consider myself a horse trainer, but I’ve trained horses. And I’m always nervous for that first ride, just because you can prepare them as best as you can, but it’s also a really unpredictable situation. It’s frankly dangerous. And I knew in my head that I was eight hours from a hospital on the other side of the world, and that really added to the anxiety. But I knew that it was something I had to do.

I got on him and kind of started going through the motions of what we had been practicing on the ground, which is like, move your hind end for me, flex your neck around, be soft in the halter. Then we worked on forward movement. It was going really well, but he just spooked at one point when I pet his neck while I was on him. That’s something that he needs to get used to, so it was necessary to touch him and get him used to everything going on above him where I’m out of his line of vision. But for a wild horse whose number one predator is a leopard, their first thought is, oh, a leopard is attacking my neck. So he spooked, and I just flew off and landed right on my tailbone. I immediately knew it was fractured. But I think overall it was still really good first ride.

Getting Back on the Horse

I got on him again the day before I flew out because I didn’t want my last ride on him to be me getting hurt.

It was one of those lessons that taught me that I can do really hard things.

I was never even one to want to travel that much because I just got so in my head about it and didn’t really like to take risks because I didn’t trust that I’d be able to handle a lot of situations. And not that I hadn’t been in them necessarily, but I never even let myself try in a lot of circumstances: try to figure it out, try to get myself out of those situations. I was always just waiting for somebody to save me. And it’s the same kind of thing as where I was waiting for somebody to go with me and to start traveling the world.

We’re all capable of way more than we think, and way more than we give ourselves credit for. That’s something that people say to me all the time. They’re like, no, I could never do that. I’m like, you’d be amazed at what you can do if you just give yourself the opportunity.

I don’t like think about the poetic phrasing of the things that I use to hype myself up a lot, but I just always tell myself: it’ll either be great or it won’t. It’ll either be the best experience ever or the worst experience ever. And either way, I’ll figure it out. I adapt. That’s what I do now.

Emmie Sperandeo is a ranch hand and Western cinematographer. She lives in her horse trailer and goes coast to coast with her horses, dog, and currently a bison calf. She also travels internationally to explore agriculture around the world. You can find her on TikTok or on Instagram .Ěý

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛Ô , , , or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

The post Emmie Sperandeo Will Be Great—or She Won’t appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.