Overview

Finding Leadville: My Story to a Hallowed 100 Mile Finish Line is Barbara Powell's powerful debut memoir about healing, self-trust, and what it means to come home to your body. Through personal essays, journal entries, and poetry, she shares the intimate road that led her to start-and finish-a 100-mile footrace at 10,000 feet in Leadville, Colorado. After the sudden loss of a friend, Barbara packed up her life in Minnesota and drove to the Colorado mountains to train for the Leadville 100. What began as a quest for physical endurance became something more: a journey of reclaiming her strength and story. Raised in the nineties in a Catholic home as a middle child of twelve, Barbara's ideas of womanhood and her body were shaped early. In Finding Leadville, she threads spiritual reckoning with running and nature. The trail becomes both literal and metaphorical as she explores the body not as an object, but as a home to return to. For anyone who's asked, ""Am I allowed to take up space?""-this story answers with a resounding and poetic: yes.

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Reviews

""This is a great resource for anyone looking to attempt something so difficult in appears to be impossible, like the Leadville 100 Trail Run. What I wasn't expecting was Barbara's open and honest life story of how she arrived at the starting line. She shares her dreams, fears, mistakes, and victories in life without anything being held back. I started reading and could not put the book down. While it's not an operational guide to growing from a girl to a woman, it certainly is a profound chronical of her journey along the same path with her wisdom, thoughts and opinions added to fill in the blanks authors usually leave up to the reader. Her story is resilient, strong, and very brave and results in an inspiring read. Our world will be a better place with heroes like Barbara in it."" ""A great telling of the interwoven relationship between running, personal challenge and growth. The writer has the reader eager to turn the next page to see their development as a person and if they will finish the looming 100 mile race. The level of introspection was just right and the balance of prose and poetry a welcome addition. Fantastic debut memoir. Make you want to unpack key moments in your life and also rise to a challenge of personal perseverance."" ""Finding Leadville is a beautifully layered memoir that explores the power of perspective, the resilience born from early discomfort, and the deep, sometimes painful, roots of personal transformation. What makes this book unforgettable is the author's ability to trace the arc of her life with stunning clarity, drawing a line between something that felt deeply wrong in her childhood and the strength it gave her to become the woman she is today. That tension-between what was and what is-becomes the backbone of a story that's both vulnerable and fierce. At its heart, Finding Leadville is about doing the hardest thing you've ever done-not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. The journey to Leadville isn't just a place; it's a reckoning, a reclaiming. And the author takes us there with raw honesty and striking self-awareness.""

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