What I Wish I Knew About Transitions

Member Recount

When I joined Her Trails, I thought the challenge would be the running: the climbs, the long sessions, the juggling of training with everything else in life. But what surprised me most was how much the trail mirrored the transitions I was already living through.

From the outside, it looked like I was stepping forward with certainty: a new role at work, the end of a relationship, the decision to back myself in ways I hadn’t before. On the inside, it felt far less clear. Transitions, I’ve learned, don’t feel like bold leaps. They feel messy. They feel like being suspended between who you were and who you’re not yet.

The in-between can be brutal. You lose the markers of stability you once relied on. The routines, the identities, the clarity of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re doing…. gone. What’s left is ambiguity, self-doubt, and the slow, uncomfortable work of piecing yourself together again.

On the trail, it shows up in small ways. Moving from runnable flats into a climb. Watching daylight fade before you’re ready for the dark. Realising fatigue demands you to shift your stride when you want to keep pushing. At first, I resisted every change. I fought the transition. And all it did was drain me faster.

Eventually, I learned to soften. To let the terrain dictate the rhythm. To trust that if I adjusted, I would find a way through. And that lesson slowly made its way off the trail too.

What I wish I knew is that unraveling isn’t failure. That clarity doesn’t come first, it comes after. That every ending carries the energy for a beginning, even if you can’t see it yet. That grit alone won’t get you through - you need rest, softness, and people alongside you.

The truth is, transitions don’t feel like progress while you’re in them. They feel slow and invisible. But when I look back, I can see that the unraveling was also the beginning.