My son signed up for the October 100 km Strava challenge, and I decided to tag along. What started as a maybe I would actually do this, became much more than that.

If you are a runner, you might be thinking, well, 100 km divided by 31 days is just 3.2 km a day. That’s nothing. You could even run it all in a few days. And I get that.

I recently watched someone decide to run two marathons in a single day, just for fun. He actually did it: 84 kilometers in one go, after deciding the night before to give it a try. He got up at 1 a.m. and started running.

Isn’t the human body and mind amazing?

We get to do anything we set our minds to. And that’s a reminder I really needed.

I started running back in 2011, thanks to a boxing instructor who made us run laps to warm up. I hated every minute of it.

But after a few weeks turned into months, I started enjoying it so much that I quit boxing and kept running on a track every day.

You could say it was boring, but for me, it was freedom. I had a small baby at home, and those half-hour runs gave me space to think and breathe on my own.

I knew nothing about running. I simply showed up at the track every morning and I loved it.

A couple of years later, I got myself a running watch. I joined a few races, but kept things pretty low key. Running was my time to decompress and do something for myself as a mother of two young kids.

Even though I tracked my distance, I never cared much about my pace. Running was a joyful activity that kept me sane and happy.

In 2018, my left knee started bothering me, and I had to slow down. My daily runs became weekly, sometimes even monthly. Luckily I found Yoga, which helped me cope with not being able to run as much.

I’ve kept running and practicing yoga ever since, adding pilates to the mix. These days, I do at least one of them most days.

Running has always been my preferred activity. But I started noticing how people seemed to run faster, and harder. Running had become a competition of pace, distance and performance.

And I started wondering whether I could even call myself a runner.

Isn’t that sad?

How strange is that we can start questioning who we are simply because we don’t fit a particular mold. And who decided there was a mold in the first place?

We are constantly bombarded with images of people making everything look effortless. Runners with all the gear, perfect looking food, and impressive Strava stats.

It’s easy to start believing that if we don’t run like them, maybe we aren’t real runners.

But as I’ve been lacing up my shoes most mornings to run 100 km in the roasting Bali heat, I’ve realized something: not only am I a runner, but I’m a proud one.

I’ve had to fight my own mind playing tricks on me, trying to convince me that it’s too hot today, or that I didn’t sleep well enough to go running.

I managed to build a routine that also gave me space to get inspired. For some reason, running has brought me some of my most consistent lightbulb moments, usually while I’m drenched in sweat.

And I get to move my body, using two legs that take me to the places I choose to go to.

What a privilege.

My teenage son quit the challenge after week two, so this whole thing became a me vs. me situation.

Today, I ran the last 7 km to complete the challenge. I headed into the jungle and had a bit of a love-hate relationship with that run. The humidity was high, and the heat was from another world. But somehow, I loved every minute of it.

And as October comes to an end, I’m proud of myself for sticking with this challenge, even knowing that 100 km might not seem like a big deal to many runners.

Because what matters is that I’ve been reminded of how running makes me feel: powerful, inspired and at peace with myself.

It’s reminded me that I’m capable of more than I sometimes give myself credit for.

And most importantly, what running looks like for me, has nothing to do with anyone else.

I think I’ll keep running my own race.

What Running 100 km in October Taught Me About Myself was originally published in Modern Women on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You have an idea right now. Maybe it’s something you want to try, something you want to share, or something you want to make room for in your own life.

And you’re waiting. For the right time. For someone to ask. For someone to tell you that your experience still counts.

I know that feeling of seeing a possibility before there’s a clear place for it. In my work in education, one idea began with a conversation. Nobody assigned it to me. There was no program waiting for me to take over. I had to find out what it would take to begin.

Permission Is Not a Document

Sometimes there really is a requirement to meet.

If you want to teach in a K–12 classroom, you have to meet your state’s requirements — whether that’s full certification or an approved path that lets you teach while completing it. Those rules matter.

But most of what you want to do isn’t that. Building a program, starting a conversation, mentoring someone, filling a gap nobody’s filling. None of that comes with a licensing board. There’s no certification for having an idea and acting on it. So people invent one. They decide there must be some qualification they’re still missing, and they wait for it, and it never arrives, because it was never real.

Maybe there’s something you’ve wanted to do, too. Before you decide you’re not ready, ask yourself what’s actually required — and what you’re waiting for someone else to tell you.

I spent three decades in education. In all that time, not one of the things I’m proudest of started because someone handed me the authority to do it. They started because I saw something and said so out loud to the person who could say yes.

The Idea I Had No Business Having

I was sitting down one day, brainstorming, and the thought arrived fully formed: we need to be getting to these students in middle school.

Here’s why. I was the internship coordinator at an academy high school. Our students chose an academy, took courses that built toward it, and in their junior and senior years they went out into real internships.

By the time they reached me, though, a lot of them were already behind the decision. They were picking an academy without much sense of what a career actually was. And nobody was having that conversation with them earlier, because earlier wasn’t anybody’s job.

So I took it to my own principal first. She saw it immediately, because she knew what I knew: our students were picking their ninth grade classes back in eighth grade, sometimes over the summer, and that is far too late to understand what those courses actually lead to. Nobody had helped them make the connection.

Then she told me the part I hadn’t thought through. You’ll have to talk to the middle school principals, she said. Not one of them. Several middle schools fed into our academy high school, and every one of those buildings had someone in charge of it.

So it wasn’t one yes. It was a first yes that sent me looking for the next ones, and I had to go earn each of them the same way, sitting in another office explaining the same idea to someone who had never heard it.

You may already see something you’d like to change or try in your own life. Who could you talk to about what it would take to begin?

Here’s what I didn’t expect. They didn’t just approve it. They gave me ideas about what their students actually needed to hear, things I wouldn’t have known to say. And they worked out with me which classes I could come into and when, so that I wasn’t a disruption in the middle of their academic day. They made it work inside their building.

The First Year Was Unscripted

That first year was unscripted. No curriculum, no handouts, no outcomes on paper. Just me in a room full of thirteen-year-olds, describing a decision they didn’t know they were about to make.

I never opened by asking what they wanted to be. Ask a thirteen-year-old that and you get a shrug, or you get whatever their mother does, or you get astronaut.

So I asked a different question. What are you good at? What do you do when nobody’s making you do anything?

That they could answer. One boy told me he liked building things. That’s all he had, and that was plenty, because a hobby is the front end of something. A hobby becomes an interest when you get curious about how it works. An interest becomes a career when you find out somebody gets paid to do it all day.

That was the whole bridge I was building in those rooms. Not what do you want to be. What do you already like, what does it connect to, and who does that for a living.

I’d talk about the difference between a job and a career, too, because most of them had never heard anyone separate the two. A job is a thing you do for money. A career is a direction you’re going. You can have a job at fifteen. A career is what you’re choosing courses for.

The next year I built structure into it. Outcomes. A shape you could hand to someone else. And the high school agreed it was worth doing, and it became practice, a real part of how we brought students in.

Nobody created that program for me. There was no memo. It became a system because I ran it unscripted for a year first.

Whatever you’re considering, you may not know exactly how it will work yet. What would a small first try help you find out?

What I understand now is that I didn’t need the whole program worked out before I had that first conversation. I needed to explain what I saw, listen, and learn what it would take.

Being Early Feels Like Being Wrong

One more thing about that idea, and then I’ll get out of my own way.

At the time, talking to middle schoolers about careers was early. Nobody was asking for it. It wasn’t anyone’s job and it wasn’t on anyone’s plan.

Today, in the district where I worked, students can finish their first two years of college while they’re still in high school and graduate with an associate’s degree alongside their diploma. The application goes in during tenth grade.

Tenth grade. Which means the conversation about what you want and which courses get you there now has to happen in middle school, because by tenth grade the decision is already in front of you.

I’m not claiming I caused that. I’m telling you I could see it coming, and I went and talked to thirteen-year-olds about it years before anyone asked me to. Being early feels like being wrong. It usually isn’t.

So here’s what I want you to do with the idea you’re sitting on.

Stop asking whether you’re qualified to have it. You had it. That’s the qualification. Nobody credentials you to notice something.

And notice I’m not telling you to go get certified in something. The welder who’s been reading metal for twenty years, the stylist who knows exactly what a woman walking into her chair is really asking for, the engineer who can see the flaw in a system before anyone else does. Not one of them needs a second credential to pass that on. The one you already earned in your own field is the one that counts. What you’re missing isn’t a qualification. It’s a room and a yes.

Find the one person who can say yes. Not the committee, not the whole organization, not the field. One person with the authority to give you a room, an hour, a trial run. Tell her plainly what you see and what you’d do about it.

Then start before it’s built. My first year was unscripted and it should have been. You don’t design a system for something you’ve never done. You do it badly once, you find out what actually happens in the room, and then you build the structure around what you learned.

That’s the order. Idea, one yes, do it rough, then build it. Not idea, credential, approval, budget, title, and then someday begin.

The thing you’re waiting for isn’t coming. It was never on its way. What’s actually available to you is a conversation with one person, and a year of doing it imperfectly.

What’s one small thing you could give yourself permission to try this week?

Next week: the summer I opened my email and realized I’d stopped doing the asking.

• • •

Want to keep going?

I’m building something called The Years Within You 5.0™ — a book, a podcast, and a larger body of work for women over fifty who know there’s still life to build.

If you’re ready for your next chapter but aren’t sure where to begin, I’ve created a free self-reflection quiz to help you find a starting point.

Eight short questions explore five areas of life: strength, health, purpose, reinvention, and longevity. Your result suggests one area to explore first — a beginning, not a verdict.

Take the free Five Pillars self-reflection quiz

Enter your email to see your result and receive the free sampler, plus occasional notes from The Years Within You 5.0™. You can unsubscribe at any time.

This material is offered for information, reflection and encouragement. It is not medical, mental-health, legal or financial advice. Personal experiences are shared for conversation, not diagnosis or treatment. Please consult an appropriately qualified professional about your own circumstances.

© 2026 The Years Within You 5.0™. All rights reserved.

The Permission Myth was originally published in Modern Women on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.