Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sariya Saabye. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sariya, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

When I was growing up, at first glance it looked like I was thriving — top student, elite athlete, the one who could juggle it all and still smile through it. But behind closed doors, I was barely holding it together. I struggled with insomnia, disordered eating, and overwhelming suicidal thoughts. My mind never stopped racing, and nothing I achieved ever felt like enough.

What I didn’t understand then was that I didn’t need more hustle, more goals, or more pressure. I needed less.
Less noise. Less comparison. Less pretending.

The turning point came when I started stripping everything down — physically, mentally, spiritually. I started asking one brutal question about everything in my life:
“Will this help me beat the Reaper?”

I came to realize that everything is a race, and every race has reapers. The Reaper is anything that stands between you and true success — burnout, shame, addiction, distraction, fear. And I’m not talking about the social media or keepin’ up with the Joneses mirage of success, real success. Success on your terms. Have I said success enough? It’s a big word that most folks don’t examine nearly close enough.

That’s why I do what I do now — through Whyte Rabbit Running, my book Will It Help You Beat the Reaper?®, and the stages I speak on. My mission is to help high performers cut the noise, reclaim their identity, and run a race that actually matters — not just to the world, but to their soul.

Because if your life looks successful on paper but you’re slowly dying inside, it’s time to redefine winning on your terms.

Sariya, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I founded my company, Whyte Rabbit Running after watching traditional running coaches and health care professionals (myself included) fail runners again and again. After years of slow, chronically injured running, I made a radical shift away from the norm and became a healthy barefoot ultramarathoner starting multiple running clinics including one with Harvard University almost overnight.

This was so life changing for me and my patients that I absolutely had to make it my mission to help others.

Whyte Rabbit Running is a high-performance coaching company built for runners who want something different. Not another gimmick, fad, or insole to add to their collection. We help athletes optimize their gait, nutrition, and training using a minimalist, science-backed approach — with expert coaches, a streamlined app, and programs designed to keep people running for life.

That’s the energy that fuels Whyte Rabbit. We coach runners to perform at all levels — but we also teach them how to edit their lives so they’re not just burning calories, they’re building something that lasts.

Alongside Whyte Rabbit, I also speak internationally and write about high-performance living, mindset, and the courage to run your own race. My bestselling book, Will It Help You Beat the Reaper?®, lays out the RACE framework I teach across all my work — a system to help high performers align with what actually matters, and stop being hijacked by overwhelm, distraction, and comparison.

Whether I’m working with athletes, entrepreneurs, or professionals ready to rewrite their story, my goal is always the same: to help people rise with focus on what truly moves the needle.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Resilience is a funny thing in today’s world. We could live in complete comfort, never challenging ourselves if we wanted to, but that’s not how we were created to function. We need challenges to build resilience, especially physical ones. Since the challenges don’t come to me, I have to seek them out. It’s growth by voluntary adversity.

It’s hard to top the time I signed up for the world’s longest nonstop river race — with zero kayak experience.

The MR340 is the world’s longest non-stop unmotorized boat race, a 340-mile river race across the state of Missouri. It’s brutal. Hot. Physically punishing. Mentally relentless. People hallucinate. Boats flip. Athletes drop like flies. You have 85 hours to finish, but most don’t.

I had every reason not to line up at that starting line. I wasn’t a seasoned paddler. I wasn’t an endurance athlete, I was a tumbler. But I had something most people didn’t: a minimalist mindset and the RACE framework I now teach.

Reset your defaults.
Act with intention.
Choose your crew.
Edit relentlessly.

That’s what got me to the finish — and what saved me, honestly, in the years leading up to that race.

I used to be the girl with the perfect grades, the medals, the resume — and suicidal thoughts that no one could see. I was chasing achievements, approval, applause. But it nearly broke me. What saved me was editing my life down to what actually mattered. Clearing the noise. Rebuilding from the inside out. That’s where real resilience starts — not with pushing harder, but with getting radically clear on what you won’t carry anymore.

During the MR340, that mindset was my anchor. There’s a pacer boat called the Reaper. It’s job is simple, to move through the race at the minimum pace. If it beats you to a check point, you’re out. No second chances. In order to finish the race, I needed to do one thing, beat the Reaper. In the months leading up to the race and throughout the race itself, I ruthlessly eliminated anything that didn’t pass my critical question: Will it help you beat the Reaper?®

I paddled through the night, through heat, blisters, dehydration, and doubt. I paddled around barges, wing dikes, and peek-a-buoys (yep, it’s what it sounds like, they pop up out the water hissing at you and attack your boat). I decided going in to face every obstacle as a solvable problem, not a devastating blow. I sang and made jokes when I was scared, exhausted, hallucinating that trees were dinosaurs coming to flip my boat and feed me to all of the non-existent fresh water river sharks. And I kept going.

Because I wasn’t there to prove anything to anyone else. I was there because I wanted to challenge myself intentionally and finish my race.

I’ll never forget the moment I pulled into the final landing — not because it was glamorous (it wasn’t), but because I did something I had no business doing on paper. That year I became one of only 35 women’s solos to finish the race, and I did it with 4 hours of kayak experience. Yes I beat the Reaper, but I also beat something bigger: the voice that said I couldn’t.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Always ask “why”. Never blindly do things just because.

Growing up I didn’t do a lot of thinking for myself. Whether I was at school with teachers, at the gym with coaches, or at home with parents, I was always told what to do and how and when to do it. I learned that was the way to get the praise and accolades I desperately craved. I didn’t question why I was doing what I was doing, I just did it.

Going into physical therapy school I continued down the same path. Though I had brilliant professors with the best of intentions, they unknowingly taught me the wrong things about how to treat the foot and ankle. This narrative was emphatically reinforced by running shoe stores, commercials, physicians, my clinical instructors, the general narrative in American society, even research. But it was wrong. So wrong. I injured patients I was meant to help and injured myself running based on what I’d been taught.

The day I began actually thinking for myself, burned everything down, and started over with extreme intentionality, everything changed. Suddenly I wasn’t the chronically injured runner wheezing through a single mile before limping to a stop. I was a barefoot ultramarathoner starting running clinics with Harvard and helping hundreds of people cure their chronic knee, foot, and ankle injuries that all the experts had told them they could never overcome.

I started asking why. Why was I where I was? Why was I doing things I was doing?

It’s the reason I call my company Whyte Rabbit Running. Have you ever had a pull towards something? Maybe it makes no sense, but it’s still there. An extreme curiosity…a nagging sensation that there’s something more. Call it your conscience or for Christians like myself, it’s the Holy Spirit. We all have a Whyte Rabbit. It’s like Alice in Wonderland when she saw the white rabbit running by. She was very curious about him but was supposed to stay put and keep her pretty dress clean. She chose to follow the white rabbit down the rabbit hole and was never the same.

So that’s the lesson. Don’t blindly go. Be intentional. Ask yourself why.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.SariyaSaabye.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-sariya-saabye-0557718a/