For me, running and writing are like shoes and socks; one without the other only gets you so far. When my body is in motion my mind soars. My heart is pumps oxygen and clear thoughts through my veins.

My approach has been to sit on my experiences for a few years. It’s fair to assume that I needed to disconnect from the emotion of them completely before I had a perspective that I felt I could write from. I’m an “in over my head” girl. A free-faller who waits until the last possible second to pull the ripcord. Jumping into the deep-end with both feet and worrying about how to get to safety only after I’ve exhausted myself. It looks reckless, but it’s just living. I take risks and in return I get those breathless moments we should all measure our life by. I wear my emotions on my sleeve and the only way I’ve known to protect myself is to take them off and put them in a box on a shelf. I don’t erase, or try to forget them, I just set them aside until I’m ready to remember them. Far away from the moments they happened in, and while still emotional, I’m able to do them justice having had time to process them. Filling in the blanks is the most fun; you sort of get to rewrite history and call it storytelling.

What recently struck me was that the real free-fall is to sit down, in the moment and rip all the emotions out. Raw, unedited. Experiencing every second in minute detail. Every breath, every smell, each movement and every possible word spoken that my brain captured. I’d write it all down and experience it again, as it happened… after a few glasses of champagne.

It’s hard. Harder than anything I’ve ever written. You want to do the experience justice in it’s accuracy so you pain yourself through every detail, each one feeling more significant that the previous. It’s like it stops becoming storytelling and becomes real all over again. And I picked an experience that I’m still processing. One that caught me off guard, churned emotions that had been dormant and had me rationalizing the implausible. Like the new burning sensation in my thighs from trail training reminds me that I can do it; this makes me feel alive. My brain is taxed, my head swirling and my heart is tired from feeling this over and over. But in casting aside my old ways, I’ve stretched myself beyond my comfort as a writer, and it feels amazing.