Four years ago, distance runner Emily Halnon set out to break the speed record on foot across the length of Oregon. The Eugene author will talk about her achievement of the fastest-known time when she visits Bend Thursday to promote her new memoir, “To the Gorge: Running, Grief, Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.” (The event will be hosted by Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe at a space in the Old Mill District. See “If you go” for more details.)

She took the leap in honor of her deceased mom, Andrea, the towering figure in Halnon’s life who inspired Halnon to lace up running shoes and begin running in the first place.

“She’s 100% of the reason I’m a runner,” Halnon said.

Her mother had not been a runner, nor very active at all, before having her gall bladder removed in her mid-40s.

“That moved her to want to incorporate more physical activity into how she lived,” Halnon said. It started with short walks, and progressed to racewalking and then running.

“(She) climbed the ladder of distances that a lot of people do with 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons,” the author said.

‘Wildly inspired’

When Halnon was 19, her mom ran her first marathon in Burlington, Vermont, at age 50.

“Watching her run that marathon was a game-changer for me and running and absolutely just wildly inspired me to want to run one myself,” Halnon said. “That’s what jumpstarted my relationship with running.”

A few years later, she ran her first marathon — with her mom, for whom it was the fourth.

Her mom didn’t stop moving. For her 60th birthday, her mom went skydiving. That same year, she decided she wanted to do a triathlon.

“She could stay afloat, but she didn’t really know how to swim in a way that would get her through a triathlon, so she learned how to swim as a 60-year-old woman,” Halnon said. “She got totally hooked on triathlon and kept doing those.”

In fact, at 65, her mom had been signed up for another triathlon when she was diagnosed in late 2018 with a rare uterine cancer. She would live 13 more months. Through chemotherapy, she continued to walk with friends, and continued to cycle.

“She was living. She lived in a very full and wholehearted way,” Halnon said. “She was always pushing herself to do big, bold inspiring things.”

Running bold

Halnon was running a 100-mile race in the Washington Cascades when her mom was battling cancer.

“I realized I wasn’t running in the same way that she had inspired me to do back when I did that first marathon in 2007,” she said. “I knew I could get to the finish line. … I didn’t feel I was being especially brave or bold to do that run.”

There’s no one right way to be a distance runner, Halnon was quick to note, but for her, running had been about exploring her limits.

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“My mom clearly did that in such a huge way for her entire life, and as she was sick,” Halnon said. “When she passed away, I felt very moved to do that again, so I wanted to do something that checked all those boxes, that it was big, brave, bold, uncertain.”

“I said I wanted to pursue a goal that was punctuated by a question mark, and I felt like trying to run across the Oregon PCT, and do it faster than anyone else, checked all those boxes,” Halnon said. “It filled me with all of that exciting fear and uncertainty that a lot of my earlier runs had done.”

Speaking of fear and uncertainty …

Halnon said her most eventful day on the run was when she ran about 60 miles from Makenzie Pass to just north of Mount Jefferson in August. It was supposed to be a sunny warm day, “and I got hit by the worst Alpine storm that my body had ever met,” she said.

Halnon was well-prepared for all kinds of conditions, but along with battering wind, “the rain was just, like, borderline ice, drilling straight down to the marrow of your bones,” she said. “I have never been so irreparably cold and uncomfortable in my life.”

Every step of the run to the Gorge, “felt … charged by my mom,” Halnon said. “My mom was my greatest cheerleader in everything that I did, and it was easy to imagine how beyond proud she would have been, and how beyond excited she would have been, and how beyond touched she would have been that I was out there for her.

“This grief that we feel after losing someone that we have so much love for, the pain that we feel is a direct reflection of the amount of love had for them. When I lost my mom, I was left with just the absolute most painful grief I had ever known.”

If You Go

What: “To the Gorge: Running, Grief, Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail” author Emily Halnon

When: 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday, doors open 6:30 p.m.

Where: Event takes place in the Old Mill District, address provided upon RSVP (required)

Cost: Free; RSVP required; RSVP at bendbulletin.us/dudleygorge

Contact: dudleysbookshopcafe.com or 541-749-2010