Because both ask for humility, snacks, and the ability to keep moving when everything goes sideways.

After a few wild weeks of family adventure, solo parenting, and helping put on the Magnificent in New Zealand with the boys in tow, I found myself reaching for every bit of my expedition racing experience — especially in the moments when my patience was thin, everyone was hungry, and the plan (whatever the plan was) had completely fallen apart.

Now, after being back in Bend — our second home — for a week, and finally having a little more space to breathe, I’ve had time to reflect on all of it. And more than anything, what I keep coming back to is gratitude.

Gratitude for adventure racing.

This sport, the one our whole family is deeply tangled up in, has taught me so much about resilience, discomfort, flexibility, grit, humor, and perspective. But lately, more than ever, I’ve realized this: adventure racing hasn’t just shaped me as an athlete. It has shaped me as a mother.

This is the first of what will likely be a few blogs exploring these two deeply intertwined parts of my life. I’m so glad you’re here- enjoy, comment, ponder.

The longer I mother, the more I realize it has a lot in common with adventure racing.

Not the glamorous parts.
Not the finish line photos, and definitely not the “look how strong and capable and put together I am” version.

I mean the parts that rarely anyone witnesses except you and your team. The uncertainty, the wrong turns, the mental unraveling, the moments where everyone is exhausted and no one is at their best, the moments when its all taking longer than you planned, and the moments when the only thing left to do is to keep moving forward.

Motherhood, it turns out, is a lot like that. And adventure racing has made me a better mom.

Not because it made me tougher or how to keep “doing more”, but because it taught me how to stay in it.

Both Start With a Plan… and Then Laugh at Your Plan

Adventure racing loves to humble you. You can have all the meetings with your team, get the best gear, dial in your nutrition (thank you 4HourFuel – shameless plug there), plan your strategy, practice your transitions, study the terrain and have over all a beautiful well thought out plan.. but then the weather changes, someone on the team bonks, a bike or a boat breaks or you miss a turn. The race doesn’t care about your spreadsheets and plans.

Motherhood has that exact same energy.

You can read all the books, go to the specialists, listen to all the podcasts, build the routines, pack the snacks and the clothes, and create the plan – but then someone wakes up sick, another one throws a melt down over having the wrong bowl, and someone needs you in a way that doesn’t fit your timeline.

Adventure racing taught me that the plan matters… but the ability to adapt matters more.

That has helped me in motherhood more than almost anything. Because some days the win isn’t sticking to the plan, instead it’s staying calm and being resilient when the plan falls apart.

Pacing Matters More Than Speed

In endurance racing, if you go out too fast, you pay for it later.

It might not happen right away, you may feel amazing for a while and even convince yourself you’re crushing it.

Until suddenly you’re not. Your brain gets foggy, you feel cranky and like everything sucks, your legs feel like they are soaked in water and you want to ask “how much longer” so many more times than you are able.

Motherhood has taught me the same lesson in a different uniform.

I cannot sprint through every day. I can’t overcommit and say yes to everything and then expect to show up patient and grounded for school and family time.

This one has been hard for me because I love to go, and go and go. I love big days, big goals and squeezing as much life into life as I can.

But motherhood keeps teaching me that endurance is not about how hard I can push, instead it’s about how long I can stay fully present. And more often then not, the strongest thing I can do for my boys is to slow down. To lower the effort, to skip the extra thing, and to leave a margin.
This lesson did not come naturally, it came (and keeps coming) through a lot of metaphorical bonking.

Fuel Changes Everything

If you’ve ever raced (or lived for that matter) under-fueled, you know how quickly things unravel.

For me, I turn into a toddler. And not a nice, cute one that you want to cuddle. I turn into an impatient, cranky, emotional and fiery one.

Just like racing can be made better and doable with calories, a shocking amount of motherhood can also be improved by food and water.

How many kid meltdowns are actually hunger?
How many “behavior issues” are just low blood sugar and overstimulation?
How many times have I thought the day was spiraling when what we really needed was a snack, some water, and ten minutes?

And not just for the kids. For me too.

Adventure racing taught me that if I wait until I’m wrecked to take care of myself, I’ve waited WAY too long. If I wait until I’m starving, dehydrated, fried, touched out, and overstimulated to meet my own needs, I’m already deep in the hole.

It sounds simple, almost stupidly simple, but it matters:

Fed moms parent better.
Fed kids adventure better.
Hydrated humans make fewer enemies.

Discomfort Isn’t the Enemy

Adventure racing taught me how to be uncomfortable without panicking.

Wet feet for days, cold hands, long nights, uncertainty, set backs and the feeling of never knowing exactly how much farther, how much longer or how hard it’s going to get before it gets better. This is has all served me as a Mama in ways I never expected because motherhood is full of discomfort. The physical discomfort of course, but emotional kind is what keeps me on my toes.

The guilt, the overstimulation, the self-doubt, and the way that your heart can feel cracked wide open by love and worry at the exact same time.

Adventure racing has taught me that discomfort is information, and it’s rarely an emergency.

Being in the middle of a hard moment does not mean you are failing nor is it wrong. Sometimes the only way through is to just sit in it for a while, muck around and then keep moving.
This lesson has been taught to me over and over again out on the race course, but it has hit hardest at home.

Because some seasons of motherhood feel like being deep in a 4 day trekking stage I didn’t fully mentally prepare for -sleep deprived, wrestling with the bush, and wondering if everyone else found a better route.

But most of the time, if I stop myself from spiraling, and keep taking care of our basics while putting one foot in front of the other, we come through.

No One Does Either One Alone

There’s this myth in endurance sports that strength looks solitary. Lone wolf, independence, and tough enough to go at it alone is often seen as strength in our culture. Luckily Adventure Racing destroys this myth pretty quickly. You don’t get far without your team and infact on the world stage, you can’t even enter the race with out a team of 4.

Because in Adventure Racing, when you are going for days over varied and crazy terrain you will need someone to pull you along when you are flat, someone to talk to when your mood is low, someone to remind you to eat, someone to carry your load and in my case, someone to navigate!

Motherhood has wrecked that lone wolf myth as well.

The moment I became a mother and held both Max and Spirit B, both death and life in my arms, I knew I was not meant to do any of this alone.

Not racing, not parenting, not grieving, not work, not dreaming, not playing and not building.

And yet, like so many moms, I have absolutely fallen into the trap of trying to carry way too much like it’s proof of something.

It absolutely isn’t.

Adventure racing taught me that accepting help is not weakness. Delegating is not weakness and
leaning on your team is not weakness. Instead it’s wisdom, it’s strength, it’s vulnerability, it’s humility,it’s thriving and it’s how the long endurance game is played well.

You Rarely Feel Strong While It’s Happening

This one might be the biggest one for me. There are many moments in adventure racing where you do feel strong because thankfully your team is always flip flopping between who is feeling energetic and who’s feeling low. But 60-70% of the time? You feel hungry, slow, a little broken, wet, dirty and unsure how much is left in the tank.

And yet later- when you look back, you realize:

That was strength. And not because it looked powerful (actually I look quite dirty and disheveled much of the time that I’m racing!) – be because it required staying in my power.

Motherhood feels very much the same to me. Most days do not feel cinematic and idyllic.

They feel messy, loud, chaotic, beautiful, draining and ordinary all at once.
There are so many moments that don’t feel like strength while I’m in them and perhaps you can relate:

Holding my temper and words when I’m exhausted.
Starting over and saying I’m sorry after I’ve lost my cool.
Pushing forward with the adventure hike, when it would be so much easier to stay home and make pancakes.
Saying no to the thing that doesn’t fit.
Trying again tomorrow.

It doesn’t always feel like courage, growth and strength, but I think it is. I believe that much of motherhood is “invisible endurance” – it’s hard to explain, but I think it counts and should be treated as such.

The Goal Isn’t Perfection. It’s Forward Motion.

One of the things I love most about adventure racing is that it strips away the illusion of perfection pretty quickly. There’s no hiding the messiness. Everyone gets humbled, bonks, makes mistakes and has to recalibrate.

In my mind, the best racers aren’t the ones who never wobble, they’re the one’s who recover, problem solve and who don’t waste any energy on spiraling about the last mistake. Because mistakes happen by everyone. The quicker you are to say you’re sorry and learn from the mistake, the better you and everyone else around you becomes.

Motherhood has been teaching me that same lesson on repeat.

I am going to continue to get things wrong, to lose patience, to misread a moment, to say something I shouldn’t have said, to push to hard on things and I’m going to have many more days where I do not feel like the mother I want to be.

But what I am learning is this: the goal is not perfection. This is very hard for my type A personality. But I’m slowly getting there. Because the goal is repair, humility, returning, connecting, staying in relationship and getting back on course – again and again.

What I Hope My Kids See

I don’t know exactly what my kids will remember. Of course I hope they remember all of our travels and adventures- the hikes, windy paddles, late nights and snacks in weird places – but more than that, I hope they remember what all of those things taught us.

That we can adapt and laugh when things go sideways. That discomfort doesn’t stay for ever, that everything changes, that hard things don’t have to make us smaller and that we are capable of so much more than we think and lastly, that being a team is crucial.
I hope they see that I am still learning everyday too.
That chasing big things and raising little people can coexist, even if not always gracefully, that strength doesn’t always mean winning, and that sometimes it looks like getting everyone out the door.

And maybe most of all, I hope they see that you do not have to do it perfectly to do it well.

Motherhood Is Its Own Kind of Expedition

The longer I do both, the less separate they feel.

Adventure Racing, motherhood, building a life, loving people and chasing big goals all ask for the same things really: Humility, patience, adaptability, curiosity, humor, fuel, a willingness to get uncomfortable and the ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other when life throws curve balls.

Motherhood may not come with a map board or a finish line banner, and honestly – I don’t want it to.

It is it’s own type of quiet, never ending Expedition Race.

Long. Wild. Breath taking. Humbling.
Sometimes disorienting.
And always asking more of you than you expected.

And some how I always come out stronger and more resilient than when I went into it all.