Finding Leadville

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.