PHOTO COURTESY OF MIRNA VALERIO
HEALTH & WELLNESS
As a writer and speaker, Mirna Valerio continues to encourage people to live their lives to the fullest via outdoor experiences in whatever spaces and ways they enjoy most.
Learning to Live to the Fullest By Lindsay Hogeboom
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his is one of my core beliefs: that we allow people to live, to experience, and to express the fullness of their humanity every time and all the time,” reads Mirna Valerio’s website (themirnavator.com).
Valerio, who is also known as “The Mirnavator,” is many things — a former educator, ultrarunner and author, to name a few. “I am primarily a trail runner, although I run road races as well. I’m a DEI practitioner — diversity, equity and inclusion consultant,” she says in an interview with NRPA’s Cort Jones for the Open Space Radio podcast. “I’m a mom, I’m a cyclist. I get to work with a ton of amazing brands and companies just trying to get people to feel good in their bodies and to get outside in whatever way, shape or fashion is available to [them].” Valerio may be best known for 22
Parks & Recreation
her blog, Fatgirlrunning. In 2008, she had a health scare that prompted her to reignite her passion for running. Simultaneously, Valerio began documenting her experiences as a larger athlete in what she noticed was a sport dominated by thinner, whiter individuals. “I didn’t really know what blogging was. All I knew was that my friends were like, ‘Stop writing all your stuff on Facebook. Do a blog,’” she says in the Open Space Radio interview. “So, I start this blog and I got some pushback for calling it Fatgirlrunning because I identified as a fat girl who ran — same today — and I wanted to tell my story. I
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wanted to tell stories of what was important to me — what races I did, the experiences that I had, both positive and negative, and it caught on.” In 2015, Valerio’s blog was picked up by the Runner’s World website, and the exposure to her writing started a widespread conversation “about whether one can be fat and fit,” she says. “And of course, there were lots of positive and encouraging comments and conversations about this, but there were also negative and very presumptuous commentary as well. In the end, I didn’t really care, because it was about me reclaiming my own health. And if that motivated other people to do the same, to sort of reassess their life, reprioritize things, start a running habit, start a hiking habit — whatever it is, start a going
