Every Day in Every Way: Better and Better

Barbara Mary
Jul 10
2 min read

Lately I’ve been clicked into the mantra: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

As I struggled my way through hill repeats yesterday at 9500 feet altitude, I couldn’t help but question this. I was on rep 3. I was surging uphill, dodging rocks and divots, pressing into loose ground and fully exposed in hot mid-afternoon mountain sunshine. It didn’t FEEL like I was getting “better” — it felt like I was struggling, getting slower. It was a slog fest.

BUT — that’s exactly where the magic happens.

That’s where the resiliency builds. Where the mindset is forged for a tougher time to come, on the trail or in life.

“Getting better and better” is not a place of comfort and ease and pure restfulness. It’s a mixed bag of surging and effort and showing up and trying our best even when our best is limited. And then, knowing when to pull back, reset, bring the heart rate down so we can do it again.

Getting better and better is an invitation to keep showing up, even when it’s hard. Taking that rest as needed. Then showing up again, stronger than ever.

My hope is that we all can show up, get better and better, to the things that matter to us.

For me, that happens to be training for this upcoming 100 miler; but also, every client call I have and every word I get to write, every dollar raised for the Life Time Foundation.

Keep showing up.

Cos then: every day, in every way, you’ll get better and better.

NEW BOOK RELEASED ON PAPERBACK

I can't wait for y'all to see the finished product. She has poetry, essays, race reports, vulnerable stories, wisdom, and joy inside of her. Please purchase and leave a kind review so that I can continue to write about things that matter.

Buy the Paperback

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