It’s an August evening in 2018 — still not yet midnight — and 46-year-old Katie Arnold, wearing yellow running shorts and a turquoise tee with her dark hair tucked beneath a visor, has been running the Leadville 100 Trail Run for over 19 hours, along with about 700 others. The iconic high elevation race, starting at over 10,000 feet and known for its 18,000 feet of elevation gain over 100 miles of rugged terrain, has been a bucket list for Arnold. She writes about this experience later, saying, “A long race is like all of life lived in a single day.”

It is dark as she approaches the finish line. She sees a shooting star before she breaks the tape as the first woman and runs into the arms of her daughters and friends. Running is Arnold’s lifeblood. It’s how she’s processing her father’s death. It is how she’s coped with the challenges of motherhood. It’s been more to her than just competing, but this is a particularly triumphant moment.

Let’s backtrack a bit here.

It’s June 23, 2016 on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, and 44-year-old Katie Arnold — an ultrarunner winning local races, an editor at Outside Magazine and a lifelong journalist and adventure lover from Santa Fe, New Mexico — is here with her husband and friends, seeking a new adventure far from home and alongside her young daughters. She’s working on her first book, Running Home, a memoir about losing her father, and a memoir about running. Arnold also has a thing for rivers. She’s embarking on six days on the Middle Fork with a large private group of experienced whitewater rafters — a long-planned trip with close to 100 rapids, many categorized as class III-IV.

She explains that, on the Middle Fork, “you travel through a canyon so rugged it’s called ‘The River of No Return.’” There aren’t very many ways in or out once you get going, and she is excited. It’s a beautiful escape, and they do trips like this as often as they can. Arnold loves running, but she also has fallen in love with rivers and fallen in love on rivers. This is also the case with her husband Steve Barrett, and this is precisely why they are here, together. She writes, “rivers are a lesson in constancy and impermanence, a true contradiction: snow becomes runoff becomes rivers, empties to the sea or is diverted to farm fields, is absorbed by plants, is offered to the world as oxygen, returns to the earth as water or snow, hail or ice and flows again into rivers. Rivers appear to move in one direction, downstream, but their path is circular, infinite.”

“Running long distances boosted my tolerance for uncertainty.”

She and her husband are in their own raft (he’s on the oars), and they’re on the first mile of the trip, the first rapid. Arnold skillfully describes the scene, the mechanics of how the boat wraps around Doors Rock, how she resists falling and what happens when she finally does in the opening scene of her book Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World. Arnold says the resistance is symbolic. “When you resist things, they become worse.” While in the water, she describes, “Right away, I can tell something is wrong. My left knee is flopping, loose, like a wobbly chicken fat jostling in its joint, side to side, up and down.” The group is faced with a decision about what to do with her and ultimately, someone suggests that it seems like a dislocated knee and she accepts this narrative. She doesn’t want to try bushwhacking with all their stuff two miles back upstream. She can’t walk. It’s not a heroic decision to stay on the river. “It was out of fear.” She’s convinced she can continue on the river, despite the pain. She doesn’t want to leave her husband, be evacuated alone. She spends the rest of the trip sitting on a cataraft with twin pontoons. Her toes “balloon(ed) up, fat and stuffy like miniature hot dogs — diminutive versions of my humongous, grotesque knee.” There’s nothing to do but sit in the unknown of what has happened to her leg. She writes that “not knowing is a form of wisdom,” and that “running long distances boosted my tolerance for uncertainty.” It is by no means easy. For a reader of her work, it begs the question for many of us — what would we do? How would we feel?

Days later back in Santa Fe, X-rays show that she’s fractured her tibial plateau. The surgery will involve plates and screws and a trauma surgeon who will need to rebreak it to fix it. The surgeon says what no athlete wants to hear: “You should find a new hobby. Running is a terrible idea. If I were you, I’d never run again.” After surgery, she’s non-weight-bearing for 14 weeks. As she says, “[I had to] come up with my own narrative for my own healing … I had to hold the possibility that he was right, but also the empowerment that I could rewrite my own story.”

For the ensuing months, Arnold describes injury as “a skip in time, a record needle slipping its groove.” She is someone who usually starts her day running up Atalaya Mountain in Santa Fe, and movement is an important part of her creative process as a journalist. And now, she sits. She replays the accident. She struggles in her marriage, dealing with anger at her husband and his mistake on the river and the reality of their life. She has to grapple with it all — mid-life, marriage, kids. Running gives her a wildness, and now she is stopped. She talks about how “injury fills me with a curious emptiness.” She describes her attempt to run on the page of the book she’s writing about running.

“Over time I’d boxed myself into a rigid idea of success that was difficult to sustain … but my broken leg had broken the cycle. Like it or not, I was a beginner again.”

Her friend Natalie Goldberg, a fellow writer, gives her a book: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryū Suzuki, where Arnold learns the simple principles of zen, including being present. And also, among other things, the concept of being a beginner. “Over time I’d boxed myself into a rigid idea of success that was difficult to sustain … but my broken leg had broken the cycle. Like it or not, I was a beginner again.” She keeps it simple, low pressure in her study of zen ideas, and finds it helpful as a mental tool in all aspects of her recovery and as a new way of approaching life.

It was a long two years that brought Arnold to race in Leadville in 2018. She dealt with fear and took her time but she also returned to rivers, and has completed the 2024 Leadville 100 MTB race, among other adventures. She shares her creative process with others in her Flow Camps. These retreats held at both High Camp Hut near Telluride and Willow House near Big Bend National Park are a great way to unplug and spend time moving and writing in an inclusive safe space outside.

Learn more at katiearnold.net/retreats.

Originally published in the summer 2025 issue of Spoke+Blossom.

Endurance Runner Katie Arnold: How Being A Beginner Again Led To A New Idea Of Success