Where the Trail Meets the Heart: A Midlife Story of Strength & Healing - Paperback

by Linda a. Banks (Author)

Where the Trail Meets the Heart is the honest, sometimes funny, occasionally hard-to-read story of how one ordinary woman found her way back to herself through long-distance trail running, adventure travel, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from doing things that once felt impossible.

Linda Banks is not a superhero. She struggles with self-belief on a regular basis. She has been through surgeries, loss, and the particular exhaustion of watching someone she loved disappear slowly to dementia. She knows what it means to be the steady one, the capable one, the one who holds everything together while quietly coming apart. And she knows what it feels like to come back.

This is not a book about running. The miles are just the backdrop. What training for distance taught her is that we are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. Pushing your body and mind to keep moving when everything says stop turns out to be surprisingly good preparation for caregiving. Both ask you to show up without knowing the distance. Both take more out of you than you expected. And both will show you something about yourself that nothing else could.

Every woman finds her own way back. Running, walking, traveling, creating, healing. The vehicle doesn't matter. What matters is that she decides to start.

Where the Trail Meets the Heart is for any woman who has done hard things and forgotten to give herself credit, and is starting to wonder what she might still be capable of.