I was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in New Jersey, where I rode my royal blue Raleigh three-speed around our suburban neighborhood, pretending to be Harriet the Spy. I had permanently skinned knees and two holes where my front teeth should have been (I knocked them out on a homemade trapeze). When I was seven, my father, a National Geographic photographer, bet me $5 that I wouldn’t jump into a half-frozen stream in November. I did.

I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, just as I’ve always been a runner. For me, motion and imagination are inseparable: When I move my body, my ideas move, too. As a girl, I made up stories in my head while I played basketball or ran around the block in my Tretorns. I wrote with my notebook propped on my knees, as I still do, leaning against a tree, or at the kitchen table or in a tent, beside a river—wherever I happened to be. I learned from my father keep my eyes open and capture the details of a story as it unfolds, the way a photographer might.

I write my stories by living in them.

Occasionally I get a little carried away. Once I climbed Half Dome for a profile about a prominent Yosemite free climber, though I’d only been rock climbing a few times. A year later, I accidentally ran my first marathon while interviewing ultra running legend Dean Karnazes, my tape recorder flopping on a cord around my neck. Sometimes common sense reins me in, like the time I did not to try to paddle the Class V “Bus Eater” rapid at the World Freestyle Kayak Championships on the Ottawa River while covering the whitewater dynamo Eric Jackson.

Above all, I try to follow my curiosity and tell my stories with truth, texture, and heart, wherever they take me.