Finding Leadville: My Story to a Hallowed 100 Mile Finish Line is Barbara Powell’s powerful debut memoir about healing, self-trust, and what it means to come home to your body. Through personal essays, journal entries, and poetry, she shares the intimate road that led her to start—and finish—a 100-mile footrace at 10,000 feet in Leadville, Colorado.
After the sudden loss of a friend, Barbara packed up her life in Minnesota and drove to the Colorado mountains to train for the Leadville 100. What began as a quest for physical endurance became something more: a journey of reclaiming her strength and story.
Raised in the nineties in a Catholic home as a middle child of twelve, Barbara’s ideas of womanhood and her body were shaped early. In Finding Leadville, she threads spiritual reckoning with running and nature. The trail becomes both literal and metaphorical as she explores the body not as an object, but as a home to return to.
For anyone who’s ever asked, “Am I allowed to take up space?”—this story answers with a resounding and poetic: yes.
Finding Leadville: My Story to a Hallowed 100 Mile Finish Line is Barbara Powell’s powerful debut memoir about healing, self-trust, and what it means to come home to your body. Through personal essays, journal entries, and poetry, she shares the intimate road that led her to start—and finish—a 100-mile footrace at 10,000 feet in Leadville, Colorado.
After the sudden loss of a friend, Barbara packed up her life in Minnesota and drove to the Colorado mountains to train for the Leadville 100. What began as a quest for physical endurance became something more: a journey of reclaiming her strength and story.
Raised in the nineties in a Catholic home as a middle child of twelve, Barbara’s ideas of womanhood and her body were shaped early. In Finding Leadville, she threads spiritual reckoning with running and nature. The trail becomes both literal and metaphorical as she explores the body not as an object, but as a home to return to.
For anyone who’s ever asked, “Am I allowed to take up space?”—this story answers with a resounding and poetic: yes.
Ten thousand feet in the clouds, and I was running down a mountainside.
Well, maybe you could call it running, given the context.
It was nearing the middle of the Leadville 100 trail run, and I was about to pull into the Winfield Aid Station, which marked the official turnaround at mile fifty for the out-and-back course. Wearing daffodil-yellow shorts and a circus-pink tank top, I pulled a custom-made hat over my face to protect it from an unforgiving alpine sun. The bubblegum print, saying My First Rodeo, was scrawled in cursive threading above the gracious brim. My back was hunched, equipped with a pack that held a water bladder, now-limp bottles for liquid nutrition, and several crinkled, sticky packages of long-ago consumed gels. Aspen trees rustled their coin dollar leaves as I passed them by, tambourines of shimmering green quaking alongside the trail.
I was, at least, moving downhill on the trail faster than when I was going up. But it felt and looked more like a hobble. My head tilted, as though looking up fully would cause the nearing aid station to draw farther away from me. My feet begged for relief, opting to rebel by becoming heavier as I went further. I had ignored them the entirety of Hope Pass, a climb to 12,000 feet and back down again. Paying any attention to something that will only keep hurting is like rewarding a dog for bad behavior—it’ll just make it worse. Now, aware that reprieve was nearby, my feet were defiant as ever.
A beep from my watch prompted me to check my wrist: fifty miles. Fingers grasped white around the trusted trekking poles, and I willed my feet to keep following the directions of the day: Just keep moving.
Step, step, pole, pole.
Step, step, pole, pole.
What are you doing, a thought crept in, Why are you even out here?
The air was thin. Each foot scuffle kicked up dust on the old dirt road, caking my once-wet socks from the earlier creek crossing. The creek crossing. That seemed like a lifetime ago—a lifetime before I crawled my way to 12,500 feet in the sky, and the last time I saw my crew before the Hope Pass saga began.
The sky was a brilliant blue, nary a cloud. Flashes of the morning’s hubbub ricocheted through my mind: excited chatter at the start line and hugging my partner, Chris; the tilt of the shotgun toward the stars; the whooping shuffle of runners taking off from 6th Street toward the wilderness. The wonder I held and the curiosity that bubbled in me. The hope I felt—now a balloon that had lost some air during the long day. Already a series of memories.
How the hell am I going to turn around and do it all again?
A shuttle idled on the dirt road a few yards beyond the aid station. Its doors were open, daring each of us haggard souls to use our remaining strength to crawl inside, lay our bodies to rest, to call it quits. Cots flanked the opposing side of the road, their sturdiness and promise of respite one of the most appealing things I could lay eyes on. Forcing my awareness away from the shuttle, I collapsed onto one of the cots instead.
Looking down, I took in the power of my body: the swell of quads, blue veins working beneath skin, and the heave of lungs in the chest. Pieces of hair stuck to my cheek, and sweat had long ago dried into salted flakes of white on my skin. My eyes brimmed with tears.
I thought of how far my body—and mind—had come. I thought of the summer of training I just surpassed and the lifetime of carrying the little girl in me to this very place in time. It was a disservice to question all of that now. She nudged me — that little girl — and I kept shuffling toward the aid station. Belief, a small wisp turning into a plumage of smoke, swirled around me. My headphones were still in my ears, and instruments with their accompanying vocals throbbed inside my skull.
No matter how I felt, I was a powerful being, making her way through the clouds, on foot. The act of feeling it all—every bump, bruise, ache and twinge—meant I was alive. The mere act of it all meant I was embodying a belief, bringing it to life, and allowing it to grow into a mighty new reality. I was going to turn my ass around, leave this midpoint aid station, and return to downtown Leadville before the thirty-hour clock ran out.
“Fucking watch me,” I whistled through my teeth. “I’m doing this.” A prayer, an intention, a knowing, a desire. Call it what you will—it was a spoken agreement I continued to make with the trails of Leadville during the most difficult race of my life. An agreement I made with little Barbara ages ago to be strong, to take up space.
I knew I was going to carry my body all the way back—another fifty miles—to where this race had all begun in downtown Leadville.
Having run many ultras myself I’m o me course interested in books about running and interesting races. However, I’ve never felt the urge to publish a book myself. So I was intrigued about the story that perhaps lay behind Barbara getting to the start line. About who she was, what Leadville 100 meant to her and how she found the experience.
Barbara Powell’s memoir, Finding Leadville, is an interesting blend of personal stories, poetry, and extracts from her personal diaries, all of which lead to her journey to the start line of the Leadville 100 ultramarathon.
Like many running books it is has a simultaneous story of a challenging endurance feat and an intimate quest for healing and self-acceptance based on her life experiences.
Powell’s book begins in the aftermath of a tragic loss. Driven by grief she sets her sights on the daunting task of running 100 miles. In doing so, running becomes a space of strength, both physically and emotionally. It also becomes a space for healing.
Her writing is clear, sincere, and engaging. She balances reflection and vulnerability with a quiet, steady strength. The hardships of the trail mirror the difficulties she has faced in life, holding both her history of loss and her determination to keep going.
I ran because it felt good, because as a little girl it felt like flying. Something clicked in me when I moved like that. I didn’t have words for it then, but my legs and my heart knew. Running made me feel important. Not in a loud way, not in the way that demanded attention — but in a quiet, rooted, deeply personal way. The world made more sense when I was in motion.
As a runner I found this a really engaging book and one that I would definitely recommend.