works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

My sport involves feet and trails and moving one quickly across the other.

  • It’s All About the Trail Shoes

    Sunday Runday and with less than two weeks until my first in-person race in over a year and a half I found myself facing a morning run dilemma.

    New shoes.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about new shoes.

    Quite the opposite.

    While on vacation in the mountains a few weeks ago I finally found a pair of trail shoes in my size and splurged. The next morning I broke them in with an (a previously blogged about) eight kilometer trail run up some steep incline and early morning terrain in the wilderness beauty of our National Park system, and then …

    … well … that dilemma I mentioned a couple paragraphs back compounded itself: I haven’t run any trail since, and the shoes had been sitting by my front door looking more forlorn than the dog when she needs her morning walk, and that other thing I mentioned in my opening sentence about an upcoming trail race kept nagging in the back of my mind.

    In two weeks I’m headed back out to the trails we visited last month for our little adventure with the wasps. Apparently the wasp situation has cooled alongside the weather, but neither of those things cooling off negates the fact that I’m signed up to run a roller-coaster single track trail half marathon quasi-ultra later this month.

    And as of this morning I’d run a mere eight kilometers in that brand new pair and brand new style (to me) of shoes.

    I tossed them into my backseat this morning on my way to meet my running crew and humbly suggested that we maybe, possibly, if anyone was interested run some trails as our Sunday route.

    There were some hefty dark clouds lurking to the west and the forecast (though cloudy and dry as we left) was for some light drizzle after a good soaking overnight.

    We decended into the river valley and into the rain-soaked single track weaving through the forests. The leaves are starting to yellow as the days shorten and fall creeps ever closer.

    By the time we exited that first stretch, my new shoes were clumped with mud and each weighed about a kilogram heavier than when I had entered.

    I was also dragging a small branch clinging to my heel, and I pulled off to the side of the path to clear the worst of it into the wet grass.

    A bit further down along we turned upwards towards a short ascent and into a utility corridor between the highway and the neighbourhood where the ankle-deep grass was still sopping with last night’s rain.

    Onward looped us into more single track and by the time we found our exit back into the asphalt of the nearby suburban streets not only were all our feet soaking wet and muddy, but the rains had truly arrived and would not let up again until we were well done the other half of our morning run.

    Soaked. Dirty. Tired. Epic.

    All for a pair of trail shoes…

    …and, oh, of course, the mental confidence that goes along with logging another medium-length trial run using those shoes, breaking them in, trialing them out, and generally assuring myself of their fit and function leading into that upcoming race.

  • Hymenoptera

    I sometimes tell people that while in university I unofficially minored in bugs.

    As a biology student I had many options for my options, but my interest veered sidelong into a course of courses in the entomology department. I exited with a bachelors degree in genetics, but the extra educational suitcase I had brought along was stuffed full of souvenirs from my study of insects.

    Packed in that suitcase, I’ve always adored the word Hymenoptera.

    hai - muh - NAAP - ter - uh

    Or, the order of insects that contains wasps, bees, hornets, ants and other similar six legged critters.

    The summer of 2021 was apparently a good year around here for a particular kind of yellowjacket wasp.

    Popular opinion was that there was more than just an uptick in the aggressive insects population over the last few months. Call it a surge. A bumper year for hymenopterans. Nearly everyone had a story of being stung, dealing with a nest, or even the consequence of the crop of pandemic puppies encountering angry bugs for the first time either in their campsites or own backyards.

    A nearby neighbour must have had a nest in their yard and for a couple weeks solid the little drones took over a corner of my backyard and harassed the dog (who never did seem to figure out that they were never going to play nice with her.)

    I reluctantly put a trap on a tree and caught a few hundred, but to be honest it neither made much of a dent in the population nor made me feel good about myself.

    There is a balance to everything, and I noted this most acutely when (after dealing with weeks of wasps and yellowjackets in and near the city) we vacationed in the mountains and hiked for hours without seeing so much as a hint of those black and yellow stripes.

    Our attempts to control and manicure the local suburban ecosystem with the species of plants and critters we think we like, the ones that are pretty or simple or tasty, has a side effect of throwing into chaos the nature tug-of-war we can’t quite see, and which manifests as weeds and coyotes and mosquitos and wasps terrorizing those same spaces as we eliminate natural predators or encourage invaders to take refuge in the vacuum.

    The mountain ecosystem, by contrast, has seemingly still not tottered onto its side and the result is that we were able to hike without much fear of being stung.

    Eaten by a bear, maybe, but stung… less so.

    Yet now, twenty years after graduating from university I don’t do much with or recall many facts from my biology education but I have this vague sense that I can see the loose threads of the ecosystem imbalance, that I can talk and write about it with some confidence, and that one of the hundred dollar words I can always lean on is Hymenoptera.

  • Runner en Route

    Sunday Runday, and the day slipped away from me.

    I plodded out a ten kilometer loop in the wee hours of the morning, running with the same trusty group of friends who have kept me company through a summer of adventure running and virtual race training.

    Yet over the summer something silly and spontaneous happened which I haven’t yet written about here.

    I signed up for a half marathon.

    A real one.

    In person.

    And.

    It’s outside of Canada.

    In the next few months.

    Yeah.

    I’m planning to travel.

    On a plane.

    With my family.

    Have a small vacation.

    And run a half marathon.

    With people.

    We thought it through.

    We think we thought it through.

    And we’re going.

    To another country.

    And I’m running a half marathon while we’re there.

    Really.

    That said, I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m comfortable with the whole thing yet, at least insomuch that I want to share any more details. Suffice it say, I am officially training for a race as of July. Yikes. During a stubbornly lingering pandemic. Double yikes.

    More vague details to follow in a future post.

  • Hobbling and Hurting

    Sunday Runday, and it’s been a couple weeks since I sat down to write a post. It is a summer break for me, after all, and I’ve been out on the road, in the mountains, on the lake, and … as the topic of this post will soon reveal, running through the wilderness.

    In fact, a few interesting things have happened in my running career since last I checked in. In particular, I may have spent some money on race registrations. In person race registrations.

    The BIG one I’ll save for another post.

    The little BIG one ties back to this morning’s Sunday running adventure that was had, all resulting from a spontaneous decision to sign up for a local (quasi) ultramarathon and the opportunity to do some practicing for that.

    And again, in fact, I wrote in passing about my intention to do just that a few months back when I wrote about a nature sanctuary we had visited west of the city.

    The River’s Edge Ultramarathon is an honest-to-goodness ultra marathon race through challenging terrain hosted on a large chunk of private land at the edge of the North Saskatchewan river. (Adult) distances range from a short 12km sampler run to a full 100km solo looping race of insanity.

    Last weekend I signed up for the half marathon “koda” distance, twenty-one klicks through rolling riverside terrain (and even some wet crossing to a small island, I understand).

    As the race host prepares the course and readies for the event, he invites some interested locals (ie. us) out to the start line to help clear trails, trial the trails, or just run the course. So, Sunday Runday and seven of my crew found themselves driving thirty minutes west of the city to spend three hours in the wilderness for one of the permitted practice runs on the “homestead” loop.

    Across a little more than three hours, we pushed through nineteen klicks of grinding hills, mucky soft peat, cliff-side crags, cow pastures, grassy stretches, ambling over barbed wire fences, and stumbling down rope-supported descents.

    On top of the regular running pain, the wasps had taken over the landscape. I didn’t count but I would confidently say there were well over two or three hundred nests along the length of the trail, and I was stung at least twice… which was about average for me and my fellow participants. Ultra-style trail running with a hot, burning, muscle-spasm of wasp-sting pain in your calf is nothing to shrug off.

    In about six weeks we’ll be back out there for the real race, trudging through similar loops on a (hopefully) cool September day, and my in person race career will have seemingly resumed with a challenge I wouldn’t have expected to take on again so soon.

  • Casting Call

    Our recent camping trip north of the city opened the door for a few good opportunities to toss a line into the lake. I brought along my new fishing rod, rigged it up for the ready, and leaned it against an out of the way tree in case the mood or moment struck.

    Our campsite was a sixty-second walk to the shoreline, and on a good choice of visit I often found empty a small wooden dock protruded five meters out into the murky lake water.

    On a less-good choice of visit I found the dock occupied and myself instead needing to trudge through the spongy layer of grasses and mosses growing from the loamy sand to find a spot clear enough to edge up to the waterside to be able to cast out without tangling my line in the vegetation.

    Conversation Starter

    It also turns out that a fishing rod is something of a lakeside invitation to chat.

    Strolling to the shore, invariably someone would comment on the potential for a catch. “How’s it looking?” someone would call out. “It might be a little hot for them out there right now.” Someone else would add, noting the 30C heat still lingering from the day.

    And “Any luck?” not just someone but everyone would ask as I strolled back to camp empty-handed after an hour of tossing my lure into the water.

    As it turns out the most inviting pose a guy can take (by far) when visiting the lake is to sit by oneself at the end of a narrow dock, dangling one’s feet over the end, holding a fishing rod with a line threading outward into the water. This must project some magnetic signal to other campers inviting them to wander up, sit down and chat.

    I found myself playing host to all manner of random characters telling me their tales as I sat holding court with my fishing rod patiently dangling outwards.

    Catchless?

    At the end maybe the weather was too hot or I was too impatient or perhaps my small collection of lures was not in agreement with the fish swimming through the murky lake water that weekend.

    I didn’t catch so much more than a few clumps of weedy grass.

    I did however catch a moment of peace, and a few curious stories.