What Trail Running Taught Me About Letting Go

By Samantha Gash

I prepare meticulously.
Shoes, fuelling, pacing charts, maps.
It’s how I increase the chance of success. How I reach finish lines within cut-offs. How I stay less injured, more intact, more able to hold the other objectives I carry alongside the run.

That preparation has taken me far. It’s what made the 4 Deserts Grand Slam possible. Four races. Four deserts. In one year. On paper, impossible. But layer upon layer of preparation made the impossible doable.

And yet.

No amount of planning stops a mountain from being a mountain.
In Nepal, an earthquake struck mid-expedition. The ground literally shifted. In an instant, everything dissolved. The race. The route. The plan. My preparation couldn’t hold the earth still.

What remained was trust. Adaptation. Surrender.

Letting go sounds simple. It isn’t.

Especially for women.

So much of our conditioning runs on alert. Anticipating risk. Holding the pieces together.
Preparing, often without noticing it. And when that meticulous preparation is seen by others as “controlling” or “too much”? That stings. Because it erases the invisible work. The care. The weight we’ve carried silently, to give ourselves and others the best chance of getting through intact.

The trail keeps showing me: preparation can increase the odds. But it doesn’t guarantee certainty.

And sometimes, my deepest growth has come not in the flawless execution of a plan, but in the failure. In the slip. In the unravel. When I had no choice but to loosen my grip and trust myself, step by step, in real time.

Strength isn’t only in holding on. It’s in letting go.

Reflection

• Where are you mistaking meticulous preparation for safety?
• And what might open if you trusted yourself in the unknown?