MFTG 2025 MOVE CHAMPIONS: MEET MOLLY HURFORD!

Girls Forward’s annual October campaign Move for the Girls is spotlighting some of our incredible Move Champions—advocates who embody the power of movement and the importance of empowering girls and women in sport and physical activity! Each Champion is representing Girls Forward through their unique forms of movement, sharing our mission within their communities, and raising awareness for the role that sport and physical activity play in building confidence, strength, and opportunity.

We’re excited to kick off the month by featuring one of our first Move Champions, Molly Hurford!

Hi! I’m Molly Hurford, the founder of Strong Girl Publishing and author of the Shred Girls series. I’ve been writing about running and biking for as long as I’ve been running and biking, and my goal is to bring as many girls as I can along for the adventure. Now, reading this, it might sound like I’ve always been an athlete. But the real story? I was a bookworm, and I was most definitely not an athlete. At least, not until later in my story.

I was a very shy kid who preferred reading to pretty much anything else, and that included sports. I learned how to ride a bike, sure, and I did ride up and down the road in our little neighbourhood, looking for adventure with a few kids in the neighbourhood. But play a sport, the kind with rules and scores? Absolutely not interested.

It’s funny because as I look back, I realize that I actually was an athlete: I was riding my bike and running around in the woods, building forts and climbing up trees and the occasional abandoned building (that I definitely shouldn’t have been climbing on!). But at the time, I didn’t see myself as one. And so, as I got older, I spent less time outside riding and exploring, and more time inside, reading and writing. That is, until I really started to miss feeling good in my body, and until I met a group of friends who taught me that I could be an athlete AND a bookworm.

My weird little crew of cyclists in college started me on this journey: We raced our bikes all over the East Coast, and through that, I started to get interested in triathlon, and then ultra running. I realized I had been holding myself back by telling myself that I wasn’t the type of person who did a sport. I missed out on so much fun during those years—I could have been a bookworm and the editor of the school paper and a runner or a cyclist! But I was so convinced I had to pick a single identity that I forgot that being myself meant embracing all of the parts of myself.

That’s where the Shred Girls books came in. I thought back to myself at 12 years old. I wasn’t interested in joining a team or playing a school sport. But adventuring around on my bike? That, I understood. I needed to think about what movement meant in a new way: Being an athlete doesn’t have to mean joining a team or keeping score. It can mean moving your body however you want to! I’m an athlete when I go for my long run, but I’m also an athlete when I go to a yoga class, or do my strength training, or bring my dachshund out on the paddleboard for a really, really slow paddle. I’m an athlete because I move my body in ways that feel good to me, where I am now in my life.

When I made the decision to start Strong Girl Publishing, it was after being told that books about girls in sport just “didn’t sell.” But I felt it in my heart that that wasn’t true… Plus, I was seeing in real life that people wanted these stories. I was hearing about girls who read my Shred Girls series and started to ride because of it. I was also hearing from young women athletes who had book ideas and wanted tips on how to get published. I’d worked with big publishers in the past and had books that had been traditionally published, but I knew that those young women would end up hearing what I had been hearing: Girls in sport don’t sell. I knew that wasn’t correct. And seeing the traditional media landscape shifting drastically in recent years, I realized that there was a space for a niche publisher with an extremely unique selling point to be able to make a difference. So, Strong Girl Publishing was born. We now have a small-but-mighty author roster, some amazing collaborations with groups dedicated to furthering girls in sport (like Girls Forward!), and—most importantly—we’ve helped a lot of girls find their sport!

The upside of running Strong Girl Publishing is that I pretty much have to practice what I preach: That’s why I love a month like this one we’re doing with Move for the Girls so much. It really reminds me that movement matters—whether it’s a 4 hour long run or it’s just 15 minutes of a quick morning yoga flow. There’s a joke in the sport industry that as you start to work in this industry, your training time—the reason you got into it in the first place!—gets severely cut down. But for me, being an ultrarunner and cyclist are key parts not just of who I am, but also part of what I want to represent for our authors and readers. I need to walk the walk, or run the run in this case, in order to authentically be doing what I do work-wise! So I’m “lucky” in that I’m able to count training for 100-mile trail races as work hours, and that time out on the trails is where I do my best thinking and problem-solving. And being a serious athlete for the last 18 years has forced me to always have physical health at the top of my mind—I think that’s why you see so many C-suite women who were student athletes. We realize that prioritizing health isn’t optional, and the habits that keep us healthy are ingrained. And it turns out, the more you move, the more you love to move!

Move for the Girls is a month-long initiative encouraging individuals, teams, and organizations to get active, connect, and inspire others to move.

Join one of our Move for the Girls pop-up events, host your own activity, track your movement minutes, or help raise funds that will benefit girls’ participation in sport across Canada. Share your movement throughout the month by tagging @girlsforwardca and using #MFTG25– and help us celebrate the strong, active girls in our lives!

Learn more about the initiative and how to get involved here.