by Shannon Mullen, Journalist & Outdoor Girl | Dear Daily Walk, I want you to know how important you are to me, and how grateful I am for the positive effects you’ve had on my mind and body since the beginning of our three-year relationship. In fact, I’ve really never felt or looked better! Oh, there’s no use sugar-coating this… I’m just going to come right out and say it: I had a bad day, and I cheated on you. This afternoon I went for a run…

by Shannon Mullen, Journalist & Outdoor Girl
I have no idea why I spent the better part of two decades terrified to swim in deep or dark water; I practically grew up on sailboats, always within reach of a lake or the ocean; there are pictures of me as a little girl, happily floating in deep, sometimes dark, open water; but at some point since then, for some reason, I got scared…

by Shannon Mullen, Journalist & Outdoor Girl
In climbing, you learn mostly through failure,” my instructor said with a grin, “but success is that much sweeter.” I’d just fallen off the rock wall for the fifth time at an indoor climbing gym in Lander, Wyoming. The small ranching town in the Rocky Mountains is famous in this sport for its proximity to breathtaking, steep-walled canyons, towering boulders left by the glaciers that carved them, and the scores of talented athletes who come in droves to scale both…

by Shannon Mullen, Journalist & Outdoor Girl
In a few days I’m leaving almost everything I know to head west in search of new challenges, with only a sketch of a plan and the freedom to ditch it entirely. I’ve always thought that I’m the type of person who needs a big catalyst to make a decision like this, some life-altering event. Instead all it took was admitting to myself that I’ve stopped learning where I am, mostly because I can’t see past my limits…