It’s UTMB week in Chamonix, and I have this feeling I want to name carefully, because it isn’t jealousy. Jealousy wants what someone else has. This is something muted and a little more aching: the specific homesickness of missing a place you don’t currently belong to. Missing being close to something enormous.

Please let me tell you what that something actually is, because I don’t think you need to know a single thing about trail running to feel it. You just need to know what it’s like to stand very close to people who are trying, with their whole bodies, to do something extraordinary.

Chamonix sits at the bottom of a valley, straight out of a fairytale. Stone and slate roofs, black wrought-iron balconies, a church bell, bistros with outside seating, and every running store you could dream of, hemmed in on every side by peaks so tall you have to tilt your head back just to see where they end. Mont Blanc sits over the town like it’s keeping watch, snow-capped even in August, indifferent to whatever is happening in the streets below it.

Most of the year, the town is quiet (well, “quieter”). You can hear the sound of the river you can’t see, a cowbell on an actual cow, a gondola clinking somewhere above the tree line.

And then, one week a year, it isn’t quiet at all.

My trip to Chamonix landed on UTMB week by pure accident. I hadn’t planned around the race. I didn’t know, walking in with my duffel bag over one shoulder, that I was about to step into the one week of the year when this entire valley turns itself inside out with feeling.

Wow, thanks, universe.

What I got instead of a simple mountain town was this: mountains at night that looked touched by shooting stars, headlamps trailing light up their sides in the dark. Cowbells at two in the morning, rung by people who’d been standing on that same corner for hours, on purpose, for a stranger. The particular hush of a whole crowd going still and then erupting at once, like a held breath finally let go.

I remember exactly where I was standing when Courtney Dauwalter came across the finish line in 2021. I hadn’t come to Chamonix for her, couldn’t have told you her splits. And I stood there in a crowd of people I’d never met, and I cried.

Not a “cute” little teardrop, either. The borderline ugly kind, the kind that jars you in its unexpectedness. Because there is something about watching a person cross a line after asking everything of their body for that many hours, in front of strangers who understand, without being told, exactly what it cost to get there, that undoes something in you.

For me, what I think... is that it’s not only about the running. It’s about being together, briefly, in a room, a whole town, in this case, where everyone has agreed that this moment matters.

I don’t think I’d felt anything quite like it before. I’m not sure I have since. But if I’m honest, the finish line isn’t the part I think about most, despite my tears...

It’s the coffee line. The openness to connect with others. A paper cup, a bite of brownie, strangers trying to order an espresso before dawn. (Hey KK, thank you for talking to a stranger who had absolutely no idea what she’d wandered into!) One conversation in that line turned into a dinner invitation. That dinner turned into another. And somewhere in the space of a few days, a handful of near-strangers became a small, loose constellation of humans I still think about, still softly root for, years later.

Softly, because most of what’s left now lives on the internet: a comment on a race photo, a like on a training post, a message when someone finishes something big. It’s a thin thread. But it still feels tangible.

And the connection started with a stranger being warm to me while we both waited for coffee.

That, I think, is the draw of UTMB week for me.

Not just the race, though the race is obviously the reason any of it exists at all. It’s what happens when that many people care, that fiercely, about the same difficult and beautiful thing, and gather together in one small valley for a handful of days.

Something in people softens. Everyone’s a little sleep-deprived, a little raw, a little more willing to talk to a stranger than they’d normally be, because they’re surrounded on all sides by proof that ordinary bodies can do genuinely unreasonable things if they just keep moving.

Strangers stop staying strangers.

A line for coffee becomes a dinner table. A dinner table becomes a friendship you’re still carrying years down the road. You can feel it in the air before you can explain it. That’s the closest I can get to describing it. It’s electric, like the air right before a mountain thunderstorm breaks. Caught in that ring of mountains with nowhere else to go, the feeling just builds and builds, trapped between the peaks.

And yes, UTMB pushes Chamonix to its absolute limit.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because it’s true and I don’t think the truth should get flattened just because I love it so much. A valley built to hold a few thousand people swells to hold tens of thousands more. Trails that need to stay wild get worn thin under all those feet. The last bus fills up before you get to it. The little bakery runs out of bread by nine.

There’s a real and important conversation happening about what a week like this costs the land, the wildlife, the people who live in that valley the other fifty-one weeks of the year, and I don’t want to wave that away with a pretty sentence.

However, some things can be both true, even when they seem to sit opposite each other. Welcome to the world of dichotomies!?

And this race may be one of them for me.

Because for one week, that same crowded, worn-thin valley becomes the most alive I have ever felt.

The people who show up for UTMB week are runners themselves, but a whole spectrum of them: someone who just ran their first trail 5K, and veterans who have belt buckles, medals, and thousands of miles under their feet. Regardless of experience level, I think the crowd comes for the electricity.

For the sense that, for one short week, an entire town has agreed to be brave and a little bit tender out loud, together.

It’s the kind of experience that makes you want to be a little braver in your own ordinary life, even if your version of a finish line looks nothing like a hundred-mile trail through the Alps. Maybe it’s a hard conversation you’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’s just talking to the stranger next to you in line instead of staring at your phone.

So yes, UTMB week asks a lot of Chamonix.

But that same week gave me a friend I met in a coffee line, a stranger’s finish line that made me cry, and a reason to keep coming back.

I got all of that by accident, the very first time I ever set foot in that valley, and I’ve been chasing it ever since, even from here, refreshing a tracker, watching a dot cross a mountain I’m not standing on this year.

Next time, though. Next time I want to be back inside it. Coffee cup in hand, watching it happen from the inside instead of remembering it from a screen.

But there are other places. Places where going back doesn’t feel like retrieval. Where it feels like reentry into a battle whose casualties I’m still counting.

In those places, the glint of gold can’t outshine the tarnish. I know it’s there because I know something happened to me… I was wounded there, hurt in ways that left a mark. But that’s not actually the hardest part to sit with. The hardest part is knowing I wasn’t only wounded. I fought. Sometimes in defense, throwing up my arms against something coming at me too fast to name. But sometimes, and this is the part I have to make myself say plainly, I was still willing, even mid-fight, to spill someone else’s blood onto that same pavement. To hurt back, or hurt first, and feel the guilt arrive right on schedule and still not stop.

That’s the reckoning a place like that demands. Not “you were hurt here,” which is almost comfortable in its simplicity. But “you hurt others here.” Both true. Both mine.

The blood, of course, isn’t literal; it’s the anger, the resentment, the fear, all of it spilled and dried and spilled again, and the pavement remembers it the way pavement remembers anything: badly, and forever, until weather does its slow work. Rain comes and thins it. Snow comes and briefly covers it in something clean. Sun comes, delicate as a kiss, and bleaches what’s left toward invisible. Season after season, the stain fades until a stranger walking that same ground would never know violence lived there.

But I know. The place doesn’t hold the memory for me… the wash of years handles that just fine… I hold it. And that’s the trick of returning to a place like that: it isn’t the place asking anything of me. It’s standing there again, stripping away every excuse I’ve built for not looking at it directly.

I used to think that if I could just stand in a hard place without falling apart, going back would provide closure. Close the loop, seal the wound, done. But closure was never actually on offer. What’s on offer, if I let it be, is something slower and less flattering: an honest accounting of the pain I caused alongside the pain I carried. Not one canceling out the other. Not a ledger that balances. Just both, held at once, in the same square footage.

That’s a harder kind of visit than a nostalgic one. It’s closer to visiting a grave. You don’t go to a grave to feel good; you go because something there deserves to be tended to, deserves flowers laid down even though nothing you place there will change what happened. You go because absence, when you keep avoiding it, calcifies into something worse than grief. You go because atonement isn’t a feeling that arrives on its own; it’s something you have to physically show up for.

So maybe that’s what these places are asking of me, not to reclassify them as gilded, not to force gold where there was blood, but to let them be exactly what they are: ground that holds both. Ground that can still, eventually, grow something new in it, not instead of what happened, but on top of it, the way grass eventually finds its way through cracked concrete. New memories don’t erase the old stain. They just mean the place stops being only one thing.

I don’t think I’m finished with any of this. But I’ve stopped needing the places to forgive me before I’m willing to walk back into them. Some ground you tend not because it’s clean, but because it’s yours, and because somewhere underneath the tarnish, there’s still a version of me, and of the people I hurt, that deserves the flowers.

Her white nose. My crow’s feet.

Somehow, without either of us noticing, we got here at the same time.

Scout turned 10 this year. In dog years, that’s roughly seventy, an age that still feels impossibly far from my own. I’m 35. Ten years ago she was a puppy who chewed through two pairs of shoes a week and slept curled up by my feet, all elbows and energy. Now she sleeps pressed against me, breathing slow, her muzzle gone the color of salt where it used to be pure copper.

I didn’t notice the change happening. Aging rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly until one morning you catch your own reflection, or your dog’s, and wonder: when did that happen?

I used to think getting older was something that happened to me alone. In a mirror. In private. A solitary reckoning with time.

But lying there this morning, our faces pressed together, I realized I’d forgotten something obvious.

I haven’t been aging alone at all.

I’ve been aging next to her.

Every year that’s softened my face has softened hers too, even if the timelines don’t quite match: her decade to my thirty-five, her muzzle to my crow’s feet. We’ve been doing this together, this slow, ordinary process of getting older, without really noticing until now.

There’s something strange and tender about growing older alongside an animal. Scout’s ten years and my thirty-five don’t run on the same clock, but we’ve landed in the same season of life anyway: both a little slower than we used to be, both a little softer around the edges, both more inclined to stay in bed five extra minutes than we were a decade ago.

She used to bound off the bed the second she heard a car door. Now she waits, stretches, and considers whether it’s worth the trip. I relate to that more than I’d like to.

I don’t say any of this to be morbid. If anything, it’s the opposite. There’s a particular kind of comfort in realizing you’re not doing this by yourself. Somewhere in your house, breathing quietly beside you, is a creature moving through time with you, whether either of you understands it or not.

Scout doesn’t know she’s seventy. She doesn’t know her nose has gone white or that vets start using words like “senior” in her charts. She just knows the sun is coming through the blinds, I’m warm, and she’d like to stay exactly where she is for as long as possible.

Maybe that’s the part worth learning from.

She’s not grieving the years behind her or bracing for the ones ahead. She’s just here, breathing in rhythm with the person she loves.

If there’s a lesson in growing older next to a dog, it might be this: the years pass either way. You might as well spend the morning close instead of worrying about the math.

I don’t know how many more years Scout and I get together. Ten in dog years already puts her well past the middle of an average lifespan, and I’m not naive about what that means. I know there will be a version of this essay someday that isn’t about crow’s feet and white muzzles but about being completely devastated that she is no longer with me. I try not to let myself live there too often, but it’s always somewhere in the background, the way it probably is for anyone who loves an animal that ages faster than they do.

But this morning wasn’t about that.

This morning was just two creatures who’ve slowly gotten older, lying side by side, still for a few extra minutes before the day began, matching each other, breath for breath.

Her white nose.

My crow’s feet.

It’s still just today.

Today, we’re here together, faces pressed close, in no hurry to be anywhere else.

I’d take the Megabus when money was tight, or the Amtrak when it wasn’t. There was something about the Amtrak that made me feel like a fancy business lady, Longchamp knock-off bag at my feet, coffee in hand, like I had somewhere important to be instead of just a boyfriend to see. Four hours each way. I never minded it. I’d watch the whole East Coast slide by the window: Baltimore, then Wilmington, then Philadelphia, then that first glimpse of the skyline that still, every single time, made my stomach flip…

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In 2015, it was the golden years of optimism, fashion bloggers, and Smorgasburg had just hit the scene, and it was incredible. We’d wait in line forty-five minutes for a ramen burger or a “raindrop cake” and think nothing of it. We’d photograph our food before we ate it, not because we were told to, but because it felt like a genuinely new thing to be able to do, to hold a whole afternoon in your hand and send it out into the world.

Virality was just taking shape. Instagram was a couple years in, and being able to see the world at your fingertips was exciting, not anxiety-inducing and numbing. It was Obama-era optimism. Love-is-love-is-love era. It was alive, and New York’s energy was fantastic, and I loved it.

I was 25 years old.

Then, I wore a hot pink J.Crew skirt and thought I’d cracked some code about myself. Now, I don’t remember the last time I bought something just because it made me feel like a different, better version of me.

Then I checked Instagram to see what my friends were doing. Now, I have to actively decide not to check it, like it’s a door I have to choose to walk past.

Then, love felt like something you fell into, easily, the way you fall into a good song. Now, love feels like something you build, on purpose, brick by brick, and I’m not sure which one is more romantic.

Then, the future was a shape I hadn’t drawn yet, and that felt like freedom. Now, the future has some shape to it, and most days that feels like relief, not loss.

Now I’m 35, a completely new person, but that 25-year-old girl in her hot pink J.Crew skirt and black scalloped romper, can’t forget the Jack Rogers sandals, lives on. Morphed and made by the victories and failures of ten years. She has more wrinkles, more experience, more wisdom, and yet the same enthusiasm, curiosity, and love as she did then.

And the city, it’s as though time was mostly flat. Still beaming and bustling. Culture shifts between decades usually feel stark, but between the 2010s and now, it’s like time has stood still. Trends happen faster, but the broad culture hasn’t moved the way it did between, say, the 80s and the 90s. Except maybe on the optimism front.

You can date that summer by the small details, though. Groupon was still a big deal, and I used one to score a sailing trip around the Statue of Liberty, some catamaran with a name I don't remember, twenty-five dollars, maybe less. We stood at the rail like we'd never seen water before. Manhattanhenge was the big event of the summer. Whole blocks of people standing in the middle of the street, phones up, waiting for the sun to drop exactly between the buildings. Nobody performing it. Just watching, together, like it was church. Small, cheap thrills that felt enormous.

Maybe I was young, but life felt simple. Complex, but present. Sitting in parks and eating bagels. Falling in love, with each other, and with the people passing by. Life and opportunity felt endless.

Maybe I was naive, living in the bubble of my own 25-year-old making. I hadn’t even left the borders of the US yet. But the world felt inviting, in the most delicious way. The potential was there. The promise was there.

I think about her sometimes, that girl on the Amtrak with her laptop bag and her big plans, and I don’t feel sorry for her naivety. I feel grateful for it. Sometimes I miss being her. She didn’t know yet what any of it would cost: the years, the heartbreaks, the version of herself she’d have to let go of to become this one. And because she didn’t know, she got to have that summer exactly as it was. Unguarded. Unbraced.

I don’t know when I’ll be back in New York. But I know the sidewalk is still there, carrying businessmen and tourists, first dates and old friends. I know the light still finds its way between the buildings every summer, whether or not I’m there to see it.

Not everything from that summer made it this far. The certainty didn’t. The unguardedness didn’t. But the curiosity did. So did the capacity to love a stranger, a bagel, a random Tuesday. Whatever’s changed, in me, in the culture, in how much optimism we’ve got left to spend, that much held.

Still.

But it turns out I loved it.

I’m a self-proclaimed mountain girl, and mountains have been where my soul resides and my heart feels alive. There’s a version of me up there that doesn’t exist anywhere else... the one who wakes before the alarm because the light’s already doing something worth being awake for, who can go hours without talking to anyone and call it full. I’ve built a lot of my adult life around getting back to that feeling. Trips planned around it, weekends given over to it, a quiet thread running through most of my decisions that leads back to elevation.

Mountains have also taught me how to move. Not just physically, though there’s that too — the running, the hiking, legs finding a rhythm that stops being a choice and starts being instinct. It’s more that mountains have taught me to move with a reason. Even on the easy days, the ones where I’m hiking instead of running and letting myself actually stop and smell the flowers instead of blowing past them, there’s still an objective underneath it. A summit. A loop. A turnaround point I’m working toward whether I admit it or not. I can slow down out there. BUT, I don’t really dawdle.

I didn’t realize how much of my identity was built on that until I got to Paris and none of it applied.

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|There’s no trail in Paris. No objective. The whole point... the thing I kept resisting for the first day, like my body didn’t know what to do without a destination... is that you’re supposed to meander. A side street you didn’t plan on turning down. A café you didn’t reserve, that you sit at simply because a chair opened up and the light looked good. A garment you try on with no intention of buying, just because it caught your eye and there was, for once, nowhere else you needed to be. A piece of street art that makes you laugh out loud, alone, for no reason anyone else needs to understand.

None of that has an objective. That’s the entire point of it. And it turns out I’m not only very capable of that kind of openness — I just don’t experience it often, because the mountains rarely ask it of me — but I enjoy it. I relish it.

Back in my kitchen in Seattle now, Scout stretched out on the floor like the trip never happened… I keep turning it over. Every friend who texted “How is Paris?” while I was there got some version of the same reply — good, surprisingly good! — like I needed permission to say it plainly. Like loving it too easily might cost me something, some card I’d earned by choosing mountains for so long. I kept explaining myself before anyone even asked me to justify anything.

That’s the real thing I brought home, more than any photo. Not “I guess I like cities now.” Something closer to: I’ve spent so long organizing my sense of self around movement-with-a-purpose — the run, the summit, the thing I’m working toward — that I mistook it for my whole personality instead of one dimension of it. Objective-driven is real. It’s also not the only mode I have. There’s another one underneath it that doesn’t need anywhere to go. She just needs somewhere to wander, and permission to stop because something caught my attention, not because it was the plan.

I’ve noticed something else too, something that has less to do with Paris and more to do with getting older: I’m craving less objective, even out there. Not race start lines — fewer times I want to chase a number or a personal best. More days where I let a trail unfold instead of racing it, and let beauty be the whole goal instead of the thing I glimpse on the way to something else.

I’m still a mountain girl, and I will be back on trail before the week’s out, some part of me already counting elevation gain before I’ve hit the trailhead. But there’s a door in me now that Paris opened, and I don’t plan on closing it. Not a new identity to replace the old one — just a room with dimension I had been hesitant to open, because of the conflict I thought it would cause within my own sense of self. I kept thinking it would challenge the people who see me as only “mountain girl,” who expect me to run and move through the mountains as my main purpose. But I’m recognizing there are dimensions to myself, and I really like this one. I like it more than the perceived expectations of others — and more than my own perceived expectations of myself.

Seven years out, and there is a nervousness in my body when I climb on Lorenzo Jr., my Cervélo, and take to the road. It still buzzes through me. A steady hum of nerves, even as the wind whips through my hair, and the corners of my lips tilt up as I find the rhythm of the pedaling. It’s like standing below a teleph…

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My friend was in the middle of one of those moments that doesn…

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When the piano intro to Walking …

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A note before we begin: I originally wrote most of this in May 2022 as an Instagram caption. I’m expanding it here because four years later, I have more to say — and because I’ve lived through more life moments that have given the original idea a lot more weight.

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“I have a fun prompt for you, btw — what does feminine rage sound like? Is it dissonance? Is it minor-sounding? Is it loud?”

I put my phone down. Picked it up again. Put it down.

It’s a deceptively simple question, the kind that looks like it has an obvious answer unti…

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The behind-the-scenes: my last post I joked about my soul returning to my body after a long, dark winter. But all jokes aside, the sun coming bac…

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I don't want to walk alone in this life.

And admitting that still takes something from me, still makes my chest a little tighter, because walking alongside someone means letting them see how I actually move.

The stumble before I catch myself. The moments where I slow down and I know it and they know it and we just keep going anyway, the times when my step…

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It has become difficult to scroll without everything arriving already decided.

A thought arrives already decided. A caption that leaves no room for interpretation. A voice that sounds so sure of itself it almost feels like fact. And before there is even time to sit with it, to turn it over or feel where it lands, the comment section is there, rising up u…

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When I was a kid, being sick felt strangely comforting.

I grew up with a mom who was home when I was in elementary school, something I now recognize as a real privilege, so being sick did not just mean feeling terrible. It meant the world slowed down and softened around me.

There were, of course, the real sick days. And then, if I am honest, the occasiona…

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They say do it scared.
They say do it nervous.
They say do it anxious.

Well… okay.

Because this May I’m doing something that makes me all three: I’m giving my first in-real-life talk at OutdoorFest 2026, near Rattlesnake Mountain in Rumney, New Hampshire.

It feels wildly exciting and absolutely terrifying all at once.

The ironic thing is, our bodi…

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It’s a wonderful and strange thing to read something you wrote four years ago.

Part of you expects it to feel distant. Like a snapshot from another version of yourself, another season of life. But sometimes you read it back and think… wait.

How does this still feel so true?

I wrote the words below years ago during a moment when the world felt heavy.

And re…

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