Trail Notes | Mindset

What Trail Running Taught Me

About Letting Go

Strength is not only found in holding on. Sometimes, it is found in the moment you loosen your grip and trust yourself to move through what you cannot control.

I prepare meticulously.

Shoes. Fuelling. Pacing charts. Maps. Weather. Crew notes. Backup plans. The detail matters to me, because preparation is one of the ways I increase the chance of success.

It is how I reach finish lines within cut-offs. How I stay less injured, more intact, more able to hold the other objectives I carry alongside the run. It is not just organisation. It is care. It is respect for the terrain, for my body, for the people supporting me and for the size of what I am stepping into.

That preparation has taken me far. It is what helped make the 4 Deserts Grand Slam possible. Four races. Four deserts. In one year. On paper, impossible. But layer upon layer of preparation made the impossible doable.

When the ground shifts

In Nepal, during an expedition across the Great Himalaya Trail, an earthquake struck.

The ground literally shifted. In an instant, everything dissolved. The race. The route. The plan. The future I had been orienting myself around suddenly no longer existed in the way I had imagined it.

My preparation mattered. It had built strength, capability and steadiness. But it could not hold the earth still.

What remained was trust. Adaptation. Surrender. The capacity to look at what was actually happening, rather than what I had planned for, and choose the next right step from there.

Letting go sounds simple. It is not.

We often talk about letting go as though it is soft. As though it is a gentle release. A calm exhale. A tidy decision made once we have already accepted what has happened.

But in real life, letting go can feel like panic before it feels like peace. It can feel like losing the thing that helped you feel safe. It can feel like standing at the edge of a plan that no longer works and not yet knowing what will replace it.

Letting go asks for a different kind of strength. Not the strength of control, but the strength of presence. The ability to stay with yourself when the familiar structure falls away.

Why preparation can be misunderstood

For many women, preparation is not about control for control’s sake.

It is often how we have learned to keep things together. To anticipate needs. To reduce risk. To protect people. To make sure the invisible details do not become visible failures. To give ourselves and others the best possible chance of getting through intact.

So when meticulous preparation is dismissed as being controlling, too much, anxious or overdone, it can sting. Not because we cannot hear feedback, but because it can erase the invisible work beneath it. The care. The alertness. The weight carried silently.

The trail has helped me respect both truths. Preparation matters. And preparation has limits. The question is not whether to prepare. The question is whether we can prepare deeply, then still remain open enough to adapt.

The trail does not reward rigidity

On trail, rigidity costs energy.

You cannot run rocky ground the same way you run smooth fire trail. You cannot descend technical terrain with the same posture you use on a flat road. You cannot hold one pace across climbs, mud, heat, wind, fatigue and changing light.

The runner who refuses to adapt often works harder than the runner who listens.

Trail running keeps teaching me that looseness is not carelessness. It is responsiveness. It is the ability to change stride, shift effort, hike early, fuel sooner, soften expectations and keep moving with what is actually in front of you.

Growth rarely arrives as flawless execution

Some of my deepest growth has not come from the perfect plan working perfectly.

It has come from the slip. The failure. The weather shift. The plan that no longer fit the reality. The moment when I had to stop gripping so tightly to what I thought would happen and begin responding to what was happening.

These are not the moments we usually seek. But they often become the moments that reshape us.

When the plan unravels, you meet a different version of yourself. Not the version who can perform when everything is aligned, but the version who can stay present when it is not.

What letting go can look like

It can look like changing the goal when your body is asking for care.

It can look like hiking earlier than planned, not because you are weak, but because you are wise enough to protect the rest of the run.

It can look like letting the weather change your strategy. Letting a missed session become information rather than shame. Letting fatigue tell the truth. Letting yourself be supported. Letting the day become different from what you hoped, without deciding it has become worthless.

Letting go is rarely dramatic. More often, it is a series of small internal decisions to stop fighting reality and start working with it.

The deeper strength

I still believe in preparation.

I believe in the training plan, the logistics, the detail, the map, the food, the strength work, the pacing, the hard conversations, the thoughtful structure that helps us step into difficult things with more capacity.

But trail running has taught me that preparation is not the same as control.

Preparation is how we show up with respect. Letting go is how we stay present when respect alone is not enough to shape the outcome.

Reflection

Where are you mistaking meticulous preparation for safety?

Where are you gripping a plan that once protected you, but may now be limiting what is possible?

And what might open if you trusted yourself in the unknown?