Recently I heard about a woman called, the Mirnavator.

She encourages people to get outside, exercise, to do more than they think they can.

And when I learned she lives right up the road from me in Vermont, I thought to myself, I got to meet this person.

♪ Welcome to Windows to the Wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

Oftentimes while out on the trail, I meet people.

They stop me and want to tell me how inspired they are that a codger my age is still able to get out and about.

Well, I've always been out and about and I intend to be until I can't be anymore.

But sometimes people need a little nudge or a little inspiration to do a little more than they are.

And that's where our guest of today comes in.

I wanted to introduce you to Mirna Valerio.

Hi, Willem.

Oh, don't hug me.

I'll fall over, sweetheart.

Can I nudge you a little bit?

You can nudge me.

Okay.

Originally from Brooklyn?

Yes.

But now you're living in Vermont and you what do you do?

I do a lot of things, Willem.

Yeah.

I used to be a teacher for 18 years, and then I stopped teaching to pursue this lifestyle of running, skiing.

I've skied these mountains back here.

♪ Cycling, just being outdoors, hiking all the time, and hopefully inspiring people to do the same.

♪ And you think it's working?

I think so.

Like, do I sign up with you or something like that to do stuff or what?

All you have to do is call me.

No, no, no.

I'm.

I'm Joe Blow.

How do I get involved with you?

You know, lots of people follow me on social media.

I have a big following on Instagram and Facebook.

Yeah.

And I do a lot of speaking all over.

Sometimes I will host a short run or a hike or or something.

Or I simply invite people to come and ski with me ♪ Or come on a ride with me.

It's that simple.

♪ Just last week, I was out on a bike trail on Lake Champlain, and this woman and her daughter recognized me.

And asked me, are you the Mirnavator?

Yeah.

You really can't see me blushing, but I was blushing, and and the mom said, well, we thought that was you.

I just wanted to say I wanted to say thank you for for giving me the courage to get out and ski again.

Now, this woman, her daughter was a ski patroller.

Yeah.

And hadn't skied in a long time until she saw my videos of me learning how to ski.

That’s my favorite run.

Well, one of my favorite runs.

This is where I did my first blue ever.

My friend, who I ski with mostly every weekend, made me.

She forced me to go down my firs blue because she believed in me and she said that I had the skills to do it.

And so she felt encouraged to get at it again and so, like, my job is done.

When someone is motivated or inspired by seeing me out there, by seeing me on a trail, by seeing me on the slopes, by seeing me on a bike, I have done my job.

♪ At a very young age, Mirna walked outdoors into a place you might not think of as being outdoors.

I grew up in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York, not Brooklyn, Ohio.

And, you know, even though Brooklyn is a very urban place, we were outdoors kids.

We spent a lot of time just kind of roaming the streets, going from park to park, being kids and having we had a really great childhood in Brooklyn.

And so I've always been sort of an outdoors person, an outdoors kind of person.

♪ Here we are.

The parks of Brooklyn introduced Mirna to nature.

The next step she took convinced her.

Mirna was in elementary school when teachers led her class out of the city to a campsite in the Catskill Mountains.

By the last day of camp, I didn't want to get off.

I don't want to get off the bus.

We were back home on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue and they dropped us off.

I did not want to get off of the bus, and so because I had had such a good time, I learned how to swim at camp.

I just learned how to be in the woods by myself at camp, I grew friendships.

People they trusted me, I trusted other people.

And it was just one of those experience that was, you know, both cathartic and transformational.

And that's what sold me on the outdoors.

And I always, always wanted to be outside after that.

And that was when I was eight years old.

♪ Well, what's your next thing you're going to be doing?

The next thing I'm going to be doing is I am actually headed to France.

I'll be in Chamonix.

The outings continued, and the more Mirna experienced nature, the more comfortable she became in it.

It's because of that experience and then subsequent other experiences where I got to a camp in the Adirondacks in seventh and eighth grade with my teachers.

Those experiences made me want to be outside all the time and to experience mountains.

Actually, just last week I hiked the mountain that I learned about on one of those trips in the seventh grade, and that was Mt.

Marcy.

♪ (WATER RUSHING) ♪ So this would be a part that I would run.

I would run this part.

I run/walk, so.

Anybody wants to run with me, I think I see another sign.

We can go up this way and check out the top of the property.

Mirna took us into the woods.

She bought this land and made a place where she can hike, run and escape.

Everything that I do comes down to this, comes down to me being out in nature and being able to be like my my most human self.

The beginning of the trail, that whose sections I have named after various people in my family.

Most of them live in Brooklyn.

Yeah, so, I wanted to definitely honor my family and all that they've done to help me get where I am.

Rashid's Ascent and Joanne's Highline.

So will we be will we be cursing Rashid when we go up this ascent?

Probably.

It is the hardest.

It’s the hardest I think it's the hardest part of the trail.

Good.

I'm going with you.

Rashid is a college student, athlete and Mirna's son.

Was she is a source of inspiration for you?

Yeah, well, she kind of got me into cross country first.

Then I, I mean, kind of got me into sports.

I played tennis.

I mean, basketball was always first, but she really inspired me to start running with her and doing doing tennis.

And then that kind of went on to the gym.

I started going to the gym after she signed me up with a personal trainer.

And then ever since then, I've been going to the gym two or three times a week, lifting weights, doing the stuff that my personal trainer taught me.

So it was a lot of help from her.

♪ How helpful was it to have somebody like a cheerleader there with you?

It was it was really helpful.

It just really helped me kind of just I mean, she kind of set the stuff away for me.

And and that's just it's just really helpful to be where I am now, like a college athlete.

And if she hadn't done those things like I wouldn’t be here.

♪ As we filmed with them, Mirna asked Rashid to demonstrate something called a burpee.

There's a message here.

♪ Rashid just did a burpee.

A real burpee where you do a jump, you jump and then you get down on all fours, do a pushup like you’re supposed to do a real push up, and then you get you.

You're supposed to like sort of jump back up and and then jump again, Right?

I don't do that.

I do the old lady burpee, where I go down gently, I walk out, maybe I do a pushup and then I walk back in and then maybe I jump.

That’s if I do burpees And that's okay.

It's okay.

It's totally okay.

But I'm because I'm still doing the same motion.

Maybe there's not as much power in it, but I'm still practicing moving down onto the ground, which a lot of people have issues with.

Doing a push up, pushing myself up off the ground and then getting myself back up.

A lot of people can't even get themselves up from the floor or the ground, and that is a telltale sign of lots of like muscle weakness, cardiovascular issues.

And so you definitely want to make sure that as you age, you still can get up from the floor.

♪ Although Mirna has spent years hiking on trails, all her running was done on roads.

I had never run trails before.

I had only ever hiked.

And so I start this race and we start on our on the cinder path.

But then we immediately go into the forest and I was like, oh, wait, we run on the trails?

Uh hmm.

Oh, okay and other people were running.

So I started running too and I and about about a mile and a half and I face planted.

But I popped right back up.

I was having so much fun.

It was hard.

It was very, very challenging.

But I was also having so much fun doing this thing that I had never done with my body before.

The lower leg muscles are going to be sore because you are moving in so many different directions and you have to stabilize yourself.

So all of those like stabilizing muscles are working right now, all those little tiny ones that we don't ever think about.

I mean, that's the beauty of trail running and it's yeah, it is really soft here.

It's not super packed down yet because, you know not a lot of people have been on these trails, as you can see with all of the blow downs and all the ferns sort of growing on the trails.

But but it's nice.

It's easier on your body.

You know, it's like less pounding.

It's less, you know, like like we would have in road running, which is, you know, fun in itself but like, this is something different.

And and you also get to be in the trees.

Like that's that's really the prize here.

Do whatever that people think you shouldn't be doing because of your body size your body shape.

Mirna is known as, the Mirnavator.

But she didn't realize her potential as an inspirational force for others until she ran into a hurdle of her own.

My trajectory started in 2008 when I had a health scare and you know, this health scare prompted me to start taking care of myself again ♪ Because I had taken a break from doing races and actually just exercising in general when my son was very young.

So got back on the treadmill, started running outside again, and then people saw me.

My students saw me.

I was working at a boarding school at this point.

My students saw me going out for a run.

My colleagues saw me running, and then they would ask me, hey, Miss Valerio, can we can I run with you?

And it just started very organically.

And that's how this sort of community started growing.

They asked me at school to become a coach.

Hey, why don't you take some girls with you on that run?

We’ll pay you, you know, just do it five times a week.

And that's how I started coaching.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a bunch of girls.

It was an all girls school, and we would go running after school every day and it became a lifestyle for them.

♪ And they learned how to run.

They learned how to love their bodies even though they had been kicked off of other sports teams, even though they always felt that they were clumsy and we had a great time.

♪ It made me want to coach more.

It made me want to see that happen for other people.

♪ So, so, nowadays in my work, I what I get to do is is is really unique I think.

I get to fuse my experience as a diversity equity, inclusion and belonging facilitator, I get to use my teaching skills and I get to use my outdoor skills to to prove that the outdoors is for everyone.

It is for every race, it is for every gender, every age, every ability.

♪ I like to refer to myself as a possibility model.

So when people see me out on the trail, they know that they belong on the trail too.

I am middle aged.

I am I am African American, I'm plus size, I am from an urban background and I belong on the trail as much as anybody else does.

And I want everybody to know that.

♪ Mirna can be found on trails around the world.

When she's not racing, she coaches.

♪ This alpine trail is along the border of France and Switzerland.

♪ When not in person, ♪ Mirna connects with her community online.

As I got into longer and longer distances, I started writing a blog called Fat Girl Running.

In that I just shared stories about, you know, what it was like to run long distance in a in a plus size body.

You know, being a black woman and a plus size body.

And so, yeah, I didn't expect anything of it.

I wasn't writing for any audience beyond my family and my small community of friends.

But other people read it apparently.

Apparently they did.

Fat Girl Running continues to grab the attention of national and global media outlets.

One of the goals of the blog, Mirna says, is to challenge people to think about the word fat.

The word fat is not a word that a lot of people like to use unless they are using it in a negative way.

You know, they might be name calling somebody or they might be feeling bad about their body, so they'll refer to them as fat.

But fat is as a thing.

Fat is as a condition of of a body.

Like it's a descriptor.

It's also a noun.

I know I'm fat and I want to take away the stigma of the word fat.

Some people are fat, some people are not, some people are thin.

And I knew that by naming my blog Fat Girl running, some people would have issues with it.

You know, I got a lot of pushback.

Well, you know, that's maybe you should call it Fit Girl Running or Fat to Fit.

I'm like, I'm pretty fit.

If I can run a half marathon every weekend and do several 5k’s during the week and swim and play tennis and do lots of other things, I'm pretty fit.

♪ I also wanted to give people an opportunity to think about the word fat and how they use it in their own daily lives and maybe change the usage to move it from being a negative thing, to move it from being a stigmatized thing to something that's just a neutral descriptor of the way somebody's body looks.

It all goes back to the idea of breaking down stereotypes and building a place in nature where we all belong.

You know, it's really tough when you feel like you don't belong.

Like it's and it's and it's also really tough when because of this issue of belonging and the perceptions that other people might have of you, the you don't even want to try or you don't have it in you to try, it's it's really tough to get somebody who's never been out on the trail because that's not what we do.

Or, I'm this age.

I'm not supposed to be doing that.

Right?

It's very tough to get out of that mindset.

So I would sign up for something, right?

I would sign up for if your local church is is sponsoring a hike or something, or if like even growing up, our neighborhood associations would offer us bus trips to the to Bear Mountain from Brooklyn to Bear Mountain.

And people would go and they would take all their picnic stuff and they would have a picnic out on Bear Mountain.

Like those things actually help people to get outside.

♪ And doing it in a way that that doesn't stigmatize them for never having been out on the trail and and being really kind and just bringing people with you because you know that nature has so many benefits and you want them to have some of that too.

♪ I do adventure, but I never torment myself.

I never put myself in a position where or I try not to put myself in a position where I’m I have to make life and death decisions.

Especially for other people, yeah.

Or or like where other people ha to make those decisions for me.

So yeah, you know, and I've had opportunities thrown at me to do some really cool things.

One, uh, one production company asked me to do the seven second highest summits in the world, and I said to myself, that they must not be outdoors people.

They must not know that K2 is the most dangerous.

It's.

That's right.

They must not know.

Oh, no.

And then, you know, you have to be a really, really experienced alpinist to do so, but that's not who I am.

I'm a lowly trail runner and I like to I like to summit mountains, but I like to summit mountains and then be able to hike down them or climb down them alive.

So, um, so yeah, they're all you know, there are, there are varying degrees of adventure.

There are varying ways that you can get outside and be in nature without, you know, without being extreme.

♪ I wondered with so much spirit whether Mirna sometimes experiences self-doubts while on trails or in front of an audience.

Am I confident about every single thing that comes at at me?

Absolutely not.

I have a really huge race coming up in a couple of months.

I am not yet confident about that.

I do have some doubts, but as I train I will build more confidence in my body and my my mental grit.

So it doesn't necessarily just exist.

I think it has to be cultivated.

♪ But now I know that I have skills and I've built up this experience that will help me get to this new thing.

And that's what confidence is, right?

You know, having again, having faith in yourself, having faith in yourself that you can do a particular thing.

But where does that faith come from?

It comes from prior experience.

And your ability to step into something even with fear, ♪ Well, we've come once again to that part of the program that I like the least, the time we have to say goodbye.

But we do.

I got to go.

You got to go and do whatever you do next.

Yeah, well, you know, I can always come see you.

We don't live that far apart.

That's true.

That's true.

We can hang.

We can do a walk.

We can come sit by the river and listen to the water.

The river is kind of muddy right now, but yeah, when it goes that way.

When it clears up.

Okay, we'll do that.

Okay.

And, thank you so much for allowing me into your life.

You know, just just briefly a time.

You're a very inspiring person.

You know that.

Thank you.

I mean, you're just a kid, but you do okay.

I'm not quite a kid, but.

You're half my age.

Okay, I'm half your age, okay.

Technically, I'm a kid to you.

Yes, you are.

Okay.

It's been fun.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Today was awesome.

Yes, it was that way.

I hope we have a few more awesome days.

That would be nice.

That cloud over there.

Yeah.

Let's hope it stays over there.

In the meantime, I got to say goodbye to these people.

So, goodbye.

I hope to see you again.

I'm Willem Lange from Windows to the Wild.

♪ Well, is this heaven?

♪ Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by the Alice J.

Rain Charitable Trust, Bailey Charitable Foundation, the Fuller Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

Make a gift to the wild and support the Willem Lange Endowment Fund, established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS To learn how you can keep environmental nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at 6038684467.

Thank you.

Hey folks, it’s the Mirnavator.

And guess who I'm with today?

I'm with Willem Lange.

Big deal.

Big deal?

You are the you are the big deal.

Yeah.

Okay, fine.

Thank you.

How are you doing today?

I've been better, but now that you're here.

Don’t I know.

I probably can't get much better than I am.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I love it.

Yeah.

Great.