Olivia Amber – On Chosen and Unchosen Suffering • Mountain & Prairie

Olivia Amber

Olivia Amber is a professional ultrarunner, climber, and adventurer, and a North Face sponsored athlete based in Bishop, California. I met Olivia at The Rut Mountain Runs in Big Sky, where she was on a public lands panel I moderated. She was also there to talk about her biggest project to date: Norman’s 13. Norman’s 13 is a route, a link-up of all thirteen of the Sierra’s 14,000-foot peaks. It’s more than 100 miles with over 40,000 feet of climbing, much of it exposed, off-trail, fifth-class scrambling. Last September, Olivia did the whole thing in one non-stop push, finishing in about 89 hours and becoming the first woman to complete it. The North Face made a short film about that effort, also called Norman’s 13, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. And earlier this summer, Olivia and her friend and fellow North Face athlete Erika Flowers set the fastest known time on Granite Peak, the highest point in Montana.

Olivia grew up in a tiny village in the woods of northern Wisconsin, the daughter of two schoolteachers who spent their summers road-tripping around the country with Olivia and her older sister. She went on to become an All-American Nordic skier at Colby College, and after graduation she made the hard decision to not pursue pro skiing. Instead, she began working in the corporate world in San Francisco, where the Bay Area trail running community pulled her in and she began to make a name for herself in the world of ultrarunning. Along the way she has dealt with serious health challenges, including a diagnosis of stage four endometriosis, which she speaks about openly and honestly.

In this conversation, we talk about her upbringing and her college years, and about her idea that choosing to suffer is a privilege, because she has become acquainted with the kind of suffering you don’t choose. We get into how she thinks about risk and ego on technical terrain, what she looks for in a mountain adventure partner, her upcoming trip to Bhutan for the Snowman Race, and the Wallace Stegner book she has reread more than any other. As you can probably tell by now Olivia is a hardcore athlete, but she’s also incredibly humble, down-to-earth and funny– the exact kind of person I love talking to on the podcast. Norman’s 13 is embedded below, and you should absolutely watch it.