Episode 130: Out and Back with Hillary Allen

Yoke and Abundance Wise Women Podcast

Episode 130: In this episode, Alisha is talking with world-class ultra runner Hillary Allen about her recovery from a 150 foot fall off a mountain ridge, her memoir and recovery story Out and Back and how she rediscovered who she was after the fall.

Purchase Hillary Allen’s Book Out and Back

Learn More about Hillary Allen
Episode 130 Notes:
View challenges as opportunities
Documented recovery story in a way that allowed her to grow and heal
From the accident, I’m a new person, I learned so much because I took the uncomfortable feelings and roll around in them.
Everyone has struggles, everyone has hardships
The most unifying experience that everyone has in common, is struggle, everyone has something.
Empathy is impossible because we can’t experience what someone else is experiencing but we all have empathy.
Fell 150 feet off of a cliff broke 14 bones
Any time you didn’t know the right way forward
Human struggle can take so many different forms, I wanted to take this book as an example of human resilience
Dependency and nakedness
Vulnerability of asking for help, completely dependent
“I’m an independent person, and Sports and running was a way for me to express my independence”
Emotional rawness when you have to ask for help
Nakedness and having to have someone else help you on the shower is one type of vulnerability, but then you have to keep asking for help and you are completely dependent. Previously Hillary associated asking for help as weakness and this shook her because she had to re-evaluate this.
This accident stripped Hillary of who she thought she was
The question of who am I?
I told myself that I needed to be honest with my recovery, first, be honest with myself and then honesty with my community.
That honesty looked like writing.
The more honest I was with myself, the more honest I could be with others.
Integrity, you’re doing this no matter who is watching
Your community grows when you ask for help
Maybe I was giving a gift too in asking for help
Not being able to accept help was coming from me.
I love the sunrise, but I can’t get there without the darkness. What’s light for me might be darkness for someone else.
Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.
Risk, there is inate risk that is there
I have the power to walk away, the mountains will be there tomorrow.
How do you know if you have a gut knowing, a true fear, or an irrational fear?
Learning to quiet the irrational fears
Mindset work.
Believe that your best athletic days are ahead of you. Or believe that your best days are ahead of you.
This is far more than a story of recovery, it’s a call to action.
I spent so much time as an athlete being critical of my body.
Being honest about my struggles of an eating disorder in college and running helping me heal my eating disorder and then being confronted with this.
There is a way to acknowledged the ugly feelings and then challenge them, the idea that we have to fit a certain mold to fit the mold of what others have defined as beautiful.
Being strong and healthy and having nourished herself is why Hillary made it through the accident.
It’s a time that will always define me and leave its mark, and challenge me
View Challenges as an invitation to think beyond the boundaries that we hold for ourselves.
I was stronger than I thought I was, and strength isn’t what I thought it was.
Strength in vulnerability.

Photo Credit for Hillary’s Headshot Blair Speed
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