Zainab鈥檚 pink聽hijab聽fluttered behind her as she sprinted beneath a shower of silver poplar leaves. Her expression was playful and unconcerned, her limbs loose as she beat up聽a secluded trail in the foothills of Bamyan province, Afghanistan. She ran unencumbered, but for the brief instants when she set her jaw and, fists tightened,聽seemed to remember all she had endured to run freely in her own country.

In October 2015,聽Zainab, a petite woman of 25, became Afghanistan's first woman to complete a marathon.聽As the only Afghan female to finish聽the聽聽in Bamyan province, Zainab braved threats of violence and had defied the聽prevailing local聽wisdom that women were incapable of tough athletic feats. At her award ceremony, the Governor of Bamyan noted that Zainab would have been killed for running a marathon in other parts of the country.

Now Zainab was back in Bamyan for a women鈥檚 sport summit,聽where a group of female athletes聽would聽train together and rally local schoolgirls to join a 5k footrace聽across the high desert trails of Band-e-Amir National Park.

Commanding a crowd would be easy. After finishing the marathon in 2015,聽Zainab聽had received national media attention and the Franco-German Afghan Woman of the Year prize,聽a prestigious聽award that came with a large cash sum toward a cause of the honoree's choosing. Privately, though, she didn鈥檛 expect to perform well in the race. It was the first time she had run in the open since the her historic finish聽nine months before. Out of fear, Afghanistan鈥檚 marathon woman聽had confined herself to jogging in circles around the courtyard聽of her family's home.

Zainab聽eyed the 20 athletes who assembled in聽Bamyan聽for the聽week-long聽summit, convened by the women鈥檚 sport and development organization聽. The roster included some major trailblazers. There were female climbers from聽, who were first to scale a 17,000-foot peak聽in northeastern Afghanistan. Members of the country's first women鈥檚 ski club, its national volleyball team, and its first women's cycling team聽had also joined.聽聽had flown in to mentor them just days after taking second for women at the Western States 100.聽(For security reasons, all the local athletes' names or last names have been withheld along with their home provinces.)

Free to Run had convened them all for a broader purpose: to breathe life into Afghan women鈥檚 athletics at a time when聽violence, corruption, and discrimination threatened聽its聽very existence.

For Afghan women, running outside is a subversive act in a nation still clawing out from the shadow of Taliban rule.聽During聽that brutal era, the Taliban government jailed women for laughing too loudly, murdered them for going to school, beat them for leaving the house alone. It was illegal for women to play sports. It was illegal for women to make a sound with their footsteps.聽Burqas聽were mandatory. Today, moving freely outdoors is still less a right than a negotiation of minefields鈥攂oth literal and figurative.

Zainab knows this intimately.聽Within her relatively progressive community, men scorned athleticism among women聽as either an absurdity or an affront.聽Fathers were apt to forbid their daughters to play. By age 16, every girl in聽Zainab's聽basketball team had dropped out to marry. A year later, her women鈥檚 Tae Kwon Do studio was shut down by police.

At the time, Zainab鈥檚 fury turned to fatigue. She quit sports for good and refocused on studying and working聽to support her family. 鈥淚 was like an automatic person,鈥� she said. 鈥淗ome, school, work, waiting for my salary. I didn鈥檛 know what life was.鈥� She waited for a housewife's destiny like her mother鈥檚 to arrive, for her own footprints to trace worn circles around the kitchen in her husband's home.聽

All of that changed in early 2015 when Zainab was introduced to Stephanie Case, founder of Free to Run.聽Free to Run had been partnering with local schools to build a network of of women鈥檚 sport clubs one at a time.聽But to cultivate local leaders for the long haul, it needed to聽motivate聽Afghan girls聽to push themselves to achieve what society said they couldn't.聽It needed an audacious few to trample barriers.聽That鈥檚 how聽Zainab, who had never run before, was recruited for a brutal 250-kilometer self-supported ultramarathon across the Gobi Desert聽in China. She had four months to train.聽

Case had a plan. She paired聽Zainab聽with Nelofar, another runner with zero experience, and the two started virtual coaching sessions聽with Case and her network of ultrarunners,聽who covered聽everything from nutrition to gait analysis, which was聽cleverly filmed聽by a female聽friend standing on a skateboard with a cellphone. A male driver transported Zainab and Nelofar to daily jogs and weekly trail runs under protective police watch.

Then聽in March 2015,聽a horrific聽murder rocked Afghanistan.聽Farkhunda Malikzada, an educated Afghan woman and Koranic scholar, was brutally killed before a crowd of hundreds in downtown Kabul. She had argued with聽a man聽hawking charms outside a shrine聽about聽the piety of his profiteering聽and, enraged, he turned a mob against her. Video of the incident showed men and boys tearing Farkhunda鈥檚 body apart with their hands, crushing her with a car and burning her corpse. Policemen stood watching.

Zainab鈥檚 Afghanistan, already precarious, looked suddenly monstrous. 鈥淚 feel unsafe, I feel I am Farkhunda鈥� she wrote at the time聽on her training blog聽(which has since been taken down). 鈥淚 am scared of the men in our country.鈥� The harassment she experienced while trotting the streets, the occasional grab or jab, the frequent jeer, now terrified her.

Zainab聽and Nelofar were forced to train indoors,聽and even that wasn鈥檛 easy. No gym would allow them, and they were powerless to protest.聽In Afghanistan, even secular places segregate their wealthy聽clientele聽by gender. Fine restaurants relegate聽women to fluorescent-lit聽back rooms while men dine on embroidered divans.聽With no women's gym available,聽the pair resorted to running around their cramped courtyards聽each morning, logging as many miles as they could.

In June 2015, the two women unfurled an Afghan flag at the finish line of the arduous 250k聽Gobi March.聽Despite having never run more than a few hours in the open, they had covered roughly one marathon per day over seven days. The race was excruciating, notwithstanding聽the fleeting novelty of running safely outdoors. With Case and Free to Run board member聽Virginie Goethals by their side,聽Zainab and Nelofar聽had聽been chased through the desert by frigid snowstorms and聽blistering sandstorms under the weight of 20-pound packs.聽Case and Goethals recalled moments watching the two Afghans knelt in prayer together in the rain, one Sunni and the other Shia, and wondering if they had made a grave mistake in dragging two inexperienced runners through the Chinese wilderness.聽

Ultimately, Zainab and Nelofar willed themselves to complete the odyssey and prove their mettle for all Afghan women. Having vanquished the Gobi desert, it seemed,聽they could tackle any challenge at home. But things rarely went as planned in Afghanistan.

After the Gobi,聽Zainab聽and Nelofar decided they would take on Kabul, that beast that swallowed Farkhunda. On a hot afternoon聽in August 2015, with two friends in tow, they tentatively approached the starting point of an unofficial marathon into the capital. A small group of male runners had planned the event, promising escort vehicles would provide protection and water for the women.聽But shortly after the race began,聽the men tired of waiting for the women.聽The men and their support trucks聽vanished down the road.聽

Unable to keep pace with the pack,聽Zainab聽and her friends became prey. Villagers pelted them with stones and curses as they descended into Kabul鈥檚 smog. The women ran for seven terrifying hours, finding relief from the abuse only when one of the male runners turned聽back聽to defend them against the onlookers for the remainder of their run.聽As they finished in the dark,聽Zainab's friends聽trembled with fear. Zainab shook with rage,聽a rage that she would convert into fuel for her historic marathon run not聽two months later.

Back at the Free to Run Summit last month,聽the athletes assembled at the base of the Koh-e Babas, the 鈥済randfather mountains,鈥� whose cracked and tawny backs bend over the city of聽Bamyan.聽In the run-up to聽race day,聽the summit attendees had planned a聽strenuous聽three-day trek along an ancient mountain path.聽

As far as anyone knew, no group of women hikers had ever spent multiple days and nights in these mountains. It was so unusual, in fact, that a national television station had sent a crew along to film them. Local communities would undoubtedly take notice, too, and so careful consultation with the area鈥檚 mullahs and elders was required. The village leaders were gracious and receptive, and a few even offered the hikers places to sleep in their mud brick homes and simple meals of boiled eggs and tea.

The route itself was as daunting as the planning process. The path vaulted from tree line to snow line up two 14,000-foot mountains and traversed rivers and ridges into the villages. It was like an Outward Bound trip, done Silk Road-style. Pondering聽how women with so few opportunities to get outside would fare across the miles of swamp and shale, I ambled off the path into a crotch-high pit of mud.聽As聽an amateur runner myself (and one prone to overreaching on the trail), I was fascinated by Zainab and Nelofar's Gobi tale and had come to see them in action.

Nelofar was short with a soft, feminine build not usually found among long-distance runners.聽Her petite frame聽looked strong, however, as she scaled a glacial moraine with Indian music pumping through her earbuds. She had trained well. At home in the North, she jogged daily at dawn in a public park,聽again under the protection of police.聽Twenty-five聽female聽recruits joined her, and many more had run in two half-marathons she had covertly organized.

If聽Zainab聽struggled at the back of the pack, she didn鈥檛 say so.聽She tended to plod, yes,聽and had lost strength since her last race,聽but still she was loathe to quit. Setting a good example was important. 鈥淎fter the Gobi, I found that we are in this world to push others, to change others鈥� lives with our speech,鈥� she said. As she marched along, she talked of a future shaping women鈥檚 sport through politics.聽Of course, it was unwise to be too imaginative, she said. Afghanistan was masterful when it came to obstructing dreams.

The close of the summit brought the athletes down from the mountains and into Band-e-Amir for聽the final race. Afghanistan鈥檚 first national park was a jewel box of turquoise lakes and crystalline waterfalls ornamenting a desolate, dusty plateau. Wealthy Afghan families wrapped in their best silks had hiked in with tea kettles to picnic alongside the glittering pools. Band-e-Amir was their national treasure.

Free to Run had bussed in seventy girls for the hike and race聽after successful presentations in local schools.聽Hundreds of schoolgirls, many of whom recognized聽Zainab, had listened transfixed to the tales of running and climbing and clambered to ask for more opportunities to get outside. Those lucky enough to get their fathers' permission had come along to Band-e-Amir.聽Though the park was only a two-hour drive from town, few of the girls had ever聽visited. No one had ever spent the time or money to take them.聽The delighted children spent the day stomping around the canyon with the adult athletes.聽

Now, to close out the week, everyone trudged into place for the footrace. The younger girls looked pretty wilted. Chasing around Band-e-Amir Park聽all day聽had left them with little fuel for聽the race scheduled at dusk,聽so they behaved as adolescents anywhere would. They whined and tried to get the run canceled. The organizers would have none of it, though. The race was on.聽

Toes straightened at the start line, some in聽slippers, sandals, or heels, all hopelessly muddied by the day鈥檚 hike.聽Nazima and Nazira,聽two gangly sisters who had run a Free to Run 10k the year before,聽bent at the waist over their knobby front legs. The other girls followed suit,聽training their eyes on the finish and not on their crumpling dresses. The senior athletes formed a second row. Nelofar took the rear to urge on stragglers. An Afghan TV cameraman perched and started filming.

The flock exploded forward, sending violet, ruby, and teal veils flapping around fifty unrestrained grins. Plumes of white dust and echoes of laughter trailed the stampede as it vanished over the horizon.聽The sight of gleeful, sprinting women聽seemed to fit naturally against the backdrop of the open plateau, except that this was Afghanistan.

The journalists and race organizers stayed crouched in place for a moment, clutching their cameras as the dust聽flurried聽over their heads. Mesmerized, each thumbed through shot after shot of unreasonably powerful girls, radiant and unbounded. For a long time, not a single observer would notice Zainab鈥檚 silhouette in the back聽of the photos.聽There she remained in each frame, head heavy,聽turning away from the the unseen finish line at the moment a new generation of girls surged ahead.

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