Making the World Championships is a Dream. Getting There is a Nightmare.

To get to Innsbruck, Austria, Jade Belzberg first needed to make arrangements for her three dogs, 10 rabbits, five Guinea Pigs, two cats and her horse, Casper. Then came the hard part. She needed to force herself to the airport and do everything she could to keep from backing out.

On the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships website, the countdown clock is ticking. The second annual event begins June 6 and features 10 races in the heart of the Alps. The events will cap a 10-day festival that will see sponsors and journalists nestled in the back of cozy European cafes, bathing themselves in lattes and speculating on the elite field: Jim Walmsley and Zach Miller or Grayson Murphy and Allie McLaughlin? One of those runners will also be Jade.

For 14 years, she's dealt with a paralyzing fear of flying. She's backed out numerous times—last minute—at the airport. She's lost money and even had her belongings fly to cities without her. But she's determined to white-knuckle the 10-hour flight to Munich if she has to. She's done with fear. But she told herself that in March, too.

Determined to support her husband Nick's return to the Barkley Marathons, she boarded her first flight in five years. When the door closed and the engines ramped up, so did the adrenaline. She leaned on the tools she’d learned in therapy. She wrote in her notepad with her non-dominant hand. She put on her headphones and played a series of tracks called a harmonizer, which incorporates common airplane noises alongside calm, tranquilizing music. But the panic came anyway despite years of hypnotism and holistic treatments. She blurted out odd noises, trembled and shook. Her cold, tingly skin began to sweat until the plane was on the ground an hour and a half later.

During the race, she constantly thought of ways to get out of the return flight back. Maybe she could rent a car and drive home? But what about the cost? And the added stress on Nick post-race? Ultimately, she got on the plane, and the panic returned, relentless, uncaring, unabated.

Photo courtesy of Jade Belzberg

It would be easy to say it all began at 16 when a landing had to be aborted and her younger brother terrorized her with horrible what-ifs. Pushed past her anxiety threshold, she punched him in the eye. The truth behind her phobia is more complex, she believes, and multi-layered.

"God stuff," she says is a big reason. Raised Jewish, she was unprepared for the unmoored feelings she experienced when she transitioned to atheism. "I no longer had the reassured feeling that God would protect me from everything."

Before that was her parent's divorce, the all-too-common shuffling between mother and father, and the uncertainty of where home really was. In her teens, symptoms of OCD appeared and began to permeate her life. Sitting in seats where others had been was a nightmare. She’d wash her clothes as soon as she got home from a movie theater. Then, she would avoid them.

As a child, animals were her great comfort. A giant mural of them covered the walls of her room like a Noah's Ark dreamscape. She had 30 pets (at one time) and when bedtime came, she felt compelled to say goodnight to each one. If she didn't, something might happen to them. By protecting them, she felt protected. Now, she only has 21 animals and it's hard leaving them. It's hard to step out of her safe zone. It's hard to convince herself everything will be okay.

It's hard to win a championship. Innsbruck will be her first international race and her biggest test to date. For the kid nicknamed "Pickle," whose sport of choice was ballroom dancing, she still shakes her head thinking about how she got to this point. Running started when she met and married Nick, a professional trail runner. "His first gift to me was a pair of running shoes and an entry to a local trail race," she says. The King of the Hill Iron Mountain 7-miler required runners to climb up one of San Diego's more technical, rocky trails to the top of Iron Mountain and back. "By the time I had made my way back down the mountain," she says. "I was hooked."

Photo courtesy of Jade Belzberg

Last year, she was the second female to finish Angeles Crest 100 and has won four of her last five ultras. She's been pushing 80–90 miles a week and up to 24,000 feet of vert leading up to Innsbruck. She's put her heart into fast climbing and has never trained harder for a race. She also feels more assured than she did in March. "Yeah, those flights sucked," she said recently on the phone during her tapering block, "But I got through it. And I got home."

This time, instead of waiting till the last minute, she bought her ticket a month before the race. She made sure she got a window seat, one of many items on her checklist that whittle away at her anxiety. Another is touching the outside of the plane before boarding. Challenging herself to grow and expand is her current journey and more important than comfort or fear.

Plan A had been to qualify for the US team at the Sunapee Scramble, but that was in New Hampshire, and for the 30-year-old living in Sedona, that meant flying. With dual citizenship, she opted to represent Canada, which was accepting members via resumes. She was selected for both the vertical mile and the 85-kilometer trail races.

"I’m a competitive person," she says. "I take my training seriously but not to beat other women. It's always me against me."

There is no measure yet created that can register what a race means to someone, and when the podiums are erected in Innsbruck and the runners are standing atop them, there will be no medals for what it took to get there. What's easy for some is excruciatingly hard for others. That can be running up the side of a mountain or simply trying to remain calm as clouds disappear beneath your window seat, revealing a curved, limitless horizon.

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Jared Beasley is a New York-based author and journalist. His 2019 book In Search of Al Howie was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best indie books of the year.