From Outside magazine and PRX, these are dispatches.

Stories from our writers in the field.

Most of the time, when you're hearing about an athlete there's an assumption that you're hearing about them because they've just done something for the first time or the fastest time or they've come back from an injury no one thought they could come back from and that's great but those aren't the only kind of athlete stories

For the last couple of months the team here at outside has been working with Strava, the fitness app that tracks your workouts to identify and tell stories about Strava members for season two of their podcast Athletes Unfiltered.

The show is hosted by Jean Mac,

a runner who is about as fast as amateur runners get.

But it's a show that's not necessarily about the fastest athletes out there.

But people who are confronting that deep down stuff, it's not

about winning races or setting records, but why they do what they do. The stuff that everyone

grapples with when they know they need to get off the couch and out the door.

So today we're bringing you the first story from this season about Ultrarunner Myrna Valerio.

Now if you already know about Myrna, you might be able to guess where this is going, but if you don't,

Merna's story is about how running, which is usually so simple, can get pretty complicated

when you don't look like most runners.

Especially when you come on the scene and say to everyone, I want to run a marathon,

and then I want to keep going. Here's Gene. Gene. I want to walk you through this video that I'm watching right now.

It was shot on what must have been a GoPro and it opens with

this rocky path in the desert. Behind the path there is this big expanse of land and this really beautiful sunset happening along the horizon.

That little hint of giggling that you can just barely hear is coming from a woman who just appeared on screen.

She's a trailrunner and she starts running down this rocky path.

And the whole thing is just soothing it looks so relaxing and

peaceful it's hard to say exactly why but I want to be there in that moment and

...