A trailblazer in the endurance world, Sam Gash first realised the power of trail running when she was in high school, describing the trails as “a restoration place” and somewhere she doesn’t “fret about what’s passed or what’s to come”.
“Finding play as an adult is really powerful,” Gash tells Women’s Agenda’s on the It Takes Boobs podcast, a conversations initiative in partnership with Stella Insurance. “Kids are so good at it but somehow we lose our way at some point.”
Following high school, she went to university and very nearly entered into a career that “wasn’t right” for her.
“I was studying a law degree and I thought that’s what I was going to be– a lawyer,” she says. “I started a job as a corporate lawyer at Baker Mackenzie, and I kept finding ways to be away from the desk thinking, ‘they don’t understand me’ and really, it just wasn’t the right place for me.”
Becoming an athlete as a career instead, came from “looking for something more” Gash says.
At just 25-years-old, she reached an incredible feat, becoming the first woman and the youngest person at the time to complete, in one calendar year, the Four Deserts Grand Slam, which is four 250 kilometre desert ultramarathons, held in four deserts around the world.
This was the start of my ultra-running career,” says Gash, who had read about other runners who were taking on big endurance challenges and felt inspired to do the same.
“I realised that no woman had ever done all four, and I just was like ‘I want to know more, I want to feel more’, and I just somehow pulled the pieces of the puzzle together to make all four happen in a year,” she says.
Rather than return to her graduate job at Baker Mackenzie, Gash began to look for a sponsor to be able to pursue professional running as a career path.
“There was a good dose of good timing for me, a bit of luck and the reality was just pushing really hard because I knew this was a point in time where, if I just kept grinding and trying to get a sponsor and just kept showing up that maybe I could make this thing happen out of nowhere,” she says.
“I do think that’s one of my strengths,” she adds. “I think I can create something from nothing if I really really believe it and I back myself.”
While Gash stands by the notion that it’s important to “back yourself”, she also notes that it can be harder for women to receive the outside recognition they deserve when completing these big endurance feats.
“I speak to a lot of female athletes, particularly in the endurance space, and it’s really hard to get– not only is it hard to get credibility, but to get the support,” says Gash, adding that “once you have the support, it’s [also] hard to get media attention.”
“I find a lot of women are doing these things not just for themselves but often for reasons beyond themselves and that’s still not good enough.”
Last year, Gash did a project across Nepal and says she found it challenging to get media attention. However, at the same time, the nation was following a male runner– Ned Brockman– who ran across the country in a viral campaign.
“His story was incredible and he deserved that attention, but I knew a bunch of women who were doing great stuff at that time that couldn’t even scratch the surface of that kind of exposure,” she says.
A passionate supporter of women runners, Gash is also the founder of Her Trails, a global adventure platform for women delivering online holistic trail running programs and in-person immersive retreats.
“That’s my focus right now,” she says of the Her Trails platform. “I’ll always still do expeditions when it’s right, but I’m doing more work with world vision.”
“We’ve got some great social impact plans moving forward, and simultaneously, what I want to keep doing is encouraging other women to find their inner wild.”
Far too often, women’s stories of resilience and leadership go untold. And we know that so often, it’s women at the forefront of the brave push for progress. With this new Women’s Agenda podcast series, ‘It Takes Boobs’, supported by Stella Insurance, we’re challenging the typical sexist trope of it “taking balls” to get big things done.