As an active woman and Altra athlete, we celebrate international Women’s Day Today, and I’m honored to be in great company with @altrarunning and stories like the ones @karagoucher shares about her journey to joy and a full embrace of her body and its strength.

In my own experience, as you may know from my own previous blog posts, I didn’t start wearing shorts until two summers ago. Why? because somewhere along the line, I’d been told my thighs were too big, too masculine, that I looked mannish as a result. and I believed it.

There’s a saying that goes – or maybe I made this one up? – You don’t know you’re poor or ugly unless somebody tells you so. Like many of us, I got told a lot of lies about my body (and being under-resourced) that were intended to shut me down: I was too loud, too dark, too slow, too old, too animated, too ugly and different, too inconsequential to matter.

For me, it was a garden variety of negative messaging that made it past the gates of my thinking and lodged deep in a place that was hard to root out.

Once upon a time, long before my trail days, I struggled to run against traffic because I thought every person in every car was judging. the journey here would take me years, decades, lifetimes – one step at a time.

These days, so many miles and light years later, there’s seemingly no end to the joy I find on trails and in life while running, hiking, moving, witnessing. and I rarely miss an opportunity to tell about it.

These days, I’m all up in the booty shorts when the spirit hits. I’m all in for showing up however I’m able in this gorgeous gift of a miraculous body too. Even better, I am moving with a whole host of women who are doing the same and there’s no place I’d rather be.