A Body I Can Trust

🔥 A Body I Can Trust 🔥

Skechers Hot Chocolate Run — This Morning’s Lesson

This morning, as I dress for a run out in the cold and prepare for Skechers Hot Chocolate Run, I felt that familiar flicker inside me—the one that was once only doubt, only fear, only the quiet whisper that said, “This isn’t for you.”

For most of my life, I thought physical challenges belonged to other people. People with “runner’s bodies,” people who trained from childhood, people with natural athletic talent or discipline I assumed I didn’t have. I quietly carried the belief that obstacle courses, races, and endurance events were a world I could admire from a distance but never enter.

But that’s the thing about stories:

They don’t change until we decide to pick up the pen.

Every time I sign up for a race now, it’s not about finishing times or medals or proving anything to anyone else. It’s an act of reclamation. A rewriting of an old, inherited narrative that told me what my body couldn’t do before I ever had a chance to ask it what it could.

I race to challenge myself.

To challenge the version of me who didn’t believe she belonged here.

To challenge the old voice that spoke in limits instead of possibilities.

Each mile becomes a conversation with my body—one where I finally listen. One where I finally speak kindly. One where I build trust in the place where trauma once lived, where shame once echoed, where self-doubt once shaped my identity.

Running is becoming my rebellion.

My declaration of self-love.

My proof that I am allowed to take up space, to sweat, to struggle, to try, to grow.

And today, in the cold air of the Hot Chocolate Run, theres a shift, small but powerful. A mindset evolving. A narrative reshaping. A body remembering it is capable. A spirit remembering it is allowed.

Instead of “I can’t,” there is a new language forming:

I can. I will. I am.

I’m learning that showing up is the victory.

Crossing the start line is courage.

Crossing the finish line is transformation.

The Crow in me observes—sharp-eyed, intuitive, turning every challenge into wisdom.

The Flame in me rises—steady, warm, determined, burning away the old beliefs to make room for something stronger, truer, and deeply mine.

Today is not just a race.

It is another step toward a life where my body is not my enemy, but my partner.

Where movement isn’t punishment, but empowerment.

Where I prove to myself, again and again, that I belong in spaces I once thought were for “other people.”

Because I’m not “other people.”

I’m me.

And that’s enough.

🔥 Crow & Flame

Rewriting the story. One mile, one breath, one brave moment at a time.