The Next Big and Scary Goal

On how sharing big goals can be scarier than a hungry cougar - but worth it.

Forget hungry cougars, godzilla blisters, and sleepless nights, one of the very scariest parts of running the Oregon PCT was telling people about it.

On the day I decided to post something, it took me hours and hours to work up the courage to actually push that little blue share button on instagram. I sat on the edge of my swiveling chair, turning back and forth and back and forth, fingers trembling like a snake’s rattle. Heartrate jacked. Doubts charging.   

My brother kept texting me.

“IS IT TIME YET?”

“5 more minutes!” I replied. For at least 328 straight minutes.

I swiveled again. Sweat pooled in my palm. I threw my phone down.

I had so many fears wrapped up in revealing a goal that was so big and so uncertain.

“What if people think this goal is too big for me?”

“What if I can’t actually do it?”

“What if I fail and everyone knows?”

The idea of public failure was the most paralyzing of all my fears. It tempted me to pre-enroll in the witness protection program so I could go deep into hiding in the event I couldn’t finish the run. That seemed far more desirable than facing my failure in the town square of social media.

But why? Why was the idea of people knowing about my failure scarier than a ravenous mountain lion?

The possibility of failure was actually one oef the most motivating factors behind my PCT run – that was the whole point of doing it in the first place. I wanted to celebrate my mom – the woman who ran her first marathon at 50, learned to swim and started doing triathlons at 60, and jumped out of airplanes for fun and giggles. I couldn’t honor such a badass woman without doing something that was a more-than-a-little terrifying. Something that might not be possible at all.

Prior to running the PCT, I had gotten a bit stale in my running pursuits. I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to do something that I wasn’t sure I could finish. And I hated that. I’d lost my connection to one of the things I love most about running – how it lets us run straight toward the edge of our limits – to see if we can keep going.

And if there’s not at least a chance we might fail along the way, we’re probably not chasing something big enough. Prior to the PCT, I definitely hadn’t been chasing anything big enough. And I wanted to change that.

I wanted to be more like my brave mama, which is why I was heading to the Oregon-California border to try and run all the way to Washington faster than any other human.

I remembered when Danielle Snyder announced that she was going to go for the FKT on the Oregon PCT the summer before me. It was Danielle’s run that planted the seed for me to want to do it myself – that made me think I could maybe do it someday. And when I interrogate that memory and ask myself how Danielle most inspired me – it was not that she finished the run, but that she had the courage to start it.

By sharing such an audacious goal, she declared that to risk failure is not a bad thing, it means we are bold enough to try. We are brave enough to give ourselves a chance. Big and uncertain and out-in-the-world goals like Danielle’s help rewrite the narrative of failure and spin it into something that should be celebrated with champagne and chocolate cupcakes, instead of thrown into the shame cave.   

My fear of sharing my goal to run across Oregon peeled back another layer of my relationship with failure – I was afraid of the vulnerability of audacity. I wanted to do something big and scary, but I didn’t want to talk about it until I was on the other side of it. The clean, comfortable side where the possibility of failure was in the rearview mirror. Because to share it in its most tenuous state, meant being willing to also share all of the messy stuff that could happen. And that made my fingers rattle and my palms sweat. 

Finally pushing that button and sharing my goal was one of the scariest parts of running the Oregon PCT, but it is also one of the things I am proudest of myself for doing. Because I crave more audacity in running – especially from women. More celebration of our failures and the way they help us grow – as athletes and humans. More messy, vulnerable stories of how we are chasing things so big that we might fall short – and more touting that risk as a freakin’ awesome thing.

Because I suspect the more we talk about our audacious goals on the uncertain side of things, the more we’ll all be more courageous in our pursuit of big, scary stuff. I know I am more audacious and more courageous because of women like my mom and Danielle.

 I started working on a book proposal about my run across the Oregon PCT a couple of months ago. I write before sunrise more mornings than I don’t, tucked into in my little writing nook with candles flickering and coffee steaming. I chip away at this huge and overwhelming project – working on my outline, the overview, the sample chapters I will submit to agents. I enrolled in a writing workshop last month that has allowed me to share this work and get feedback from ten other writers and the editor who leads the course.

This book proposal has assumed a role in my life like any big running goal – it is something I work toward with intention and commitment and every ounce of my heart. It is the next big and bold thing that I’m doing in the spirit of my brave mother.

It feels quite a bit like the Oregon PCT in its immensity and uncertainty. There are no guarantees that a book deal is in my future or that this project will ever reach a bookshelf or nightstand. There is a very real chance that these pages will receive nothing but rejections. The possibility of failure hovers over every word I type.

But I know if I didn’t try to write this book – it would haunt me. It would always be a question mark in my creative pursuits. I would regret not giving myself a chance to see if I can do it. The possibility of failure is unquestionably worth it.

But, when I’ve thought about sharing that I’m working on this project – I’ve imagined waiting until after I have an actual book deal. I’ve pictured myself posting a screenshot of the little announcement that this book was sold to a publishing house – my signature already scrawled across the official documents. All “t”s crossed and “i”s dotted. A victorious announcement that I did a big and scary thing.

But to talk about it then would not be very scary. That would be the most comfortable way to share this huge goal. It would be declaring that I’m okay with the possibility of failure, but only after it has worked out for me. I would not be sharing my own messy, vulnerable story that I want to see more of in the world.

The same questions started running through my head as I began typing out this post. My fingers rattled again. And my palms got sweaty as I thought about sharing this new big and uncertain goal with more than just Dilly and some close friends.

“What if people think this goal is too big for me?”

“What if I can’t actually do it?”

“What if I fail and everyone knows?”

Then people know that I believe the possibility of failure is something I want to chase with every ounce of my heart, I reminded myself, as I looked at that scary publish button.

And there’s no shame in trying to see what I can do. No matter what happens with this book, whether it’s a failure or success, I am taking a bold step forward to give myself a chance. And that’s something worth celebrating, maybe with champagne and chocolate cupcakes. And a story worth sharing.

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