6 Personalities 42 P o r t l a n d monthly magazine courtesy photos Globe Trotter A manda Charlton Her- bert was eight the first time she tagged along to the therapeutic horse-rid- ing program where her mother volunteered. She remembers help- ing to brush and lead the horses, feeling no fear as a small child among the large crea- tures. By 12, she was being paid to train horses to jump. “One of my first instructors told me I was an instinctual rider, what- ever that means,” Herbert says. Ten years down the line, she was competing full-time on the hunter jumper circuit while juggling classes at NYU. But as her burgeoning ca- reer gained momentum, Herbert became disillusioned with the entire business. “I was working so hard to get far on the cir- cuit. The whole thing became so ego-driv- en and focused on winning. I lost sight of my horsemanship, of why I got into it in the first place. So I quit college and the compe- tition circuit and moved out to Wyoming to work on a guest ranch,” she says and laughs. “I guess you could call it my quar- ter-life crisis.” Life realigned for Herbert among the mountains. “I fell in love with the end- less expanse of nature, the wilderness, the whole magic of it, and I realized this was how I wanted to live my entire life.” In the years that followed, she traveled and worked across the Midwest for seasons at a time, always returning to her parents’ home in Poland. “It’s my favorite place. I see my- self settling in Maine, near my family.” A faint lilt in her accent and the occasional ‘ma’am’ belies her time in the Wild West. It was in 2016, while working on a ranch in Colorado and living “in a tiny cab- in with no water or electricity,” that Her- bert first got the idea to enter an endurance horse race. “Another rancher told me about a girl he knew who’d done the Gobi Gal- lop. I chose the Mongol Derby because it’s the world’s longest and toughest horse race. I thought, ‘If I’m going to do this, why not really go for it?’” She returned to Maine to prepare for the race, even running the Ken- nebunk Marathon “to get in the mindset for endurance.” The Mongol Derby, launched in 2009, recreates the infamous postal route estab- By sarah Moore From Maine to the Mongolian steppes, Amanda Charlton Herbert chases adventure–on four legs.