Category: running & adventure

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

  • Weekend Walking Clifford E. Lee Nature Sanctuary

    The Canadian prairies have a long and storied history that has been felt through the countless ecosystem changes in flora and fauna, and punctuated by the lives and actions of a handful of various peopled cultures that have lived and settled here for some recent thousands of years.

    I state it in this particular way to draw attention to the very idea of a nature sanctuary.

    A nature sanctuary is a space that has been set aside for the specific purpose of drawing a line around a bit of the map and deciding, as much as it is possible, to pause the progression of history or preserve a piece of it.

    We drove to the nearby Clifford E. Lee Nature Sanctuary on this recent sunny Sunday afternoon to wander the trails here and enjoy the day.

    The parking lot was full to overflowing.

    The sun was hot but the breeze pushing through the trees was still carrying the coolness of late spring.

    I turned on my camera.

    Located 33 km southwest of Edmonton’s city centre, the Clifford E. Lee Nature Sanctuary protects 348 acres of marshland, open meadow, aspen parkland and pine forest. The varied habitats of the Sanctuary attract a diversity of animals, including more than one hundred bird species, and provide excellent opportunities for wildlife viewing.

    This particular nature sanctuary was a space that was new to me. I’d never made the trip out here previously.

    There is a particular patch of wilderness here. It is crammed between the city-proper to the east, a trans-provincial highway to the north, and the twisting North Saskatchewan river to the south.

    The land is a mix of marsh and forest and seemingly poor agricultural space because it is speckled with acreages and nature preserves and the local University’s botanic gardens.

    There is a local ultra marathon that runs annually through the “river’s edge” tracing along the bottom of the above map tempting local runners with an eclectic single-track adventure on trails regularly inaccessible except with permission of the land owner.

    And when I was much younger, the scoutmaster of my troop knew of a bit of land (or likely knew of someone who owned a bit of land) in this area where we frequently winter-camped as teenagers.

    In short, when I think of nearby wilderness, it is this block of a few hundred square kilometers that often jumps into my mind first.

    The nature sanctuary itself was only established in the late 1970s, and set aside as a block of land that has been expanded and shifted stewardship over the years.

    It was hardly a pristine snapshot of undisturbed local wetland history however. The space has a multi-kilometer elevated boardwalk, picnic areas, bird houses and bird feeders, viewing platforms, plastic toilet boxes, and meandering families straying from the designated paths and being humanly-terrible by littering and trampling.

    Yet an imperfect preservation is better than no preservation.

    There were countless birds (and baby birds.) The elevated boardwalk was a photographic splendour. The marshland failed to excite my teenager, but I could have stood there for hours and watched the life in and around the murky waters. And spring was in its full groove on Sunday, new foliage popping from the trees, ground and swamp.

    This nature sanctuary is a space that seems to have been set aside for the specific purpose of drawing a line around a bit of the map and deciding, as much as it is possible, to pause the progression of history or preserve a piece of it.

    Resource extraction sites dot our landscape. Hundreds of houses hide in the woods on small plots of land just out of reach of the city. Roads and highways twist through the countryside. Jumbo jets climb into the sky on their way to explore the world as they take off from the international airport runway a few dozen kilometers away.

    It has been preserved for not just Sunday family walks in spring, but to draw our attention to the long history of these spaces, to help us recall the wilderness that was and the future we might want to recapture.

    If nothing else, it’s a nice place to escape the city for a few hours.

  • Backyard: Start Line

    Sunday Runday and my usual social weekend run date has turned into a solo expedition from my backyard.

    But training calls, and has little respect for blips in the calendar like global pandemics and provincial lockdowns and excuses about being stuck in one’s own backyard.

    Knowing a convincing distance run (by which I really mean a modest ten kilometers these days) was going to take some additional motivation, I gave myself a mission: I would visit the graffiti tunnel.

    While I can hardly claim to had discovered a concrete underpass painted thick with years of graffiti, I’d like to think I may have seriously helped popularize this local off-the-beaten-path bit of culture.

    The construction of a highway ring road around the city completed construction of this leg just over a decade ago, and in planning for future southward expansion of the park system, the designers incorporated a culvert-style concrete tunnel with a suspended walking path to accomodate the local creek and pass everything under the roadway above. The catch: the footpath was connected to nothing. It was little more than a bit of infrastructure for the future.

    For years few people noted this as anything more than a strange sort of bridge on the highway passing over a bit of wilderness.

    Then about five years ago I got adventurous. I went out on a long run (very much like I did today) and followed an old stretch of closed off road, went down through the trees, climbed down a grassy bank along the highway, and found myself in a graffiti-filled wonderland.

    Obviously the countless people who had decorated the place had known about this secret for a while.

    After sharing my photos on the socials and telling my run crew, I spent that summer leading multiple adventure runs into the off-trail wilds that led to the secret Edmonton graffiti tunnel.

    The next year other run groups, led by runners who had been along on my previous adventure runs, were posting their own shots from their own treks with larger groups of people, and the summer after that my feed was routinely populated by people who had driven from across town or from different cities to run down to this photogenic secret spot.

    By the summer of 2020 I started seeing the graffiti tunnel appear in semi-pro photo portfolios of local photogs I follow, blogs writing it into their local attractions guides, and even the radio stations promoting it as a hot thing to check out on a weekend.

    It had become mainstream, even to the point that it’s not unsual to see cars (illegally) parked along the aforementioned highway as their occupants take the shortcut down the ditch path to check out the tunnel.

    This morning, five klicks into my solo long run, I was the only one wandering through the graffiti tunnel, kinda like my first trip five years ago.

    Very solo.

    And if I couldn’t run with friends, at least I could visit an old favourite spot.

    Addendum: as I was writing this, one of my running crew with whom I have been running cohort through the pandemic posted the update from her Sunday solo run. She had run from her backyard too, and made her way to the same tunnel. We’d missed each other by less than ten minutes.

  • Backyard: Travel by Flower

    It’s Travel Tuesday, and even tho I cannot go anywhere I have been plunging plugs of soil from the yard as I deal with some visitors from Europe who have overstayed their welcome.

    Dandelions: the two most commonplace species worldwide, T. officinale (the common dandelion) and T. erythrospermum (the red-seeded dandelion), were introduced into North America from Europe and now propagate as wildflowers.Wikipedia

    This photo is one that I took last year in the park near my house. A couple thousand square meters of little yellow flowers that blossom for a few days before turning into countless white puffballs.

    Millions of yellow flowers cover the parks of my city starting in mid-May each year, and it is only with an epic diligence plucking, pulling, or even poisoning the colourful weeds that my yard does not look like a dandelion explosion.

    Why?

    There is an eternal tug-o-war between the naturalization of green spaces including the small parcel of land over which I steward, also known as my yard, and the tending of those spaces into manicured single-species carpets called lawns. We work, spend, and bicker over the fate of these little flowers that appear for at most a couple weeks each year.

    Locals despise them, pick them, and chide each other for letting them grow too amply.

    For many reasons we favour grasses, green and soft, mowed to an even trim.

    And even if I did not, if I instead chose to let my property return to the natural state of mixed natural flora, local bylaws would trample on my eco-crusade and issue me a ticket in the name of neighbourly harmony.

    So I pluck dandelions from among the blades of grass, knowing that one visiting species, grass, is in a constant battle against a different sort of traveler, the aggressive yellow dandelion.

    It is a fight against a flower in an epic struggle for a so-called perfect lawn.

    Sometimes I really am just tempted to dig it all up and grow potatoes.

  • On Streaks and Inevitable Solo Runs

    It’s unlikely that you’ve been following any of the specific news emerging from my little corner of the world, but as of midnight tonight we go into yet another wave of increased pandemic restrictions.

    My region is considered one of the world’s COVID hotspots because … um, human stubbornness.

    I had spent last week trying to rebuild some of the stamina I’d lost over the last fourteen months.

    I find when the yardstick by which I measure these things, my ability to keep up with my running crewmates, measures up short there are a couple efforts I can make to quantitatively improve.

    One of those efforts is a running streak: run every day for a set number of days. Daily running pushes the body in mysterious ways to react and adapt, and somewhere in between burning oneself out and a string of epic training runs there is a gradual increase in endurance.

    So I ran a streak last week.

    I ran seven days in a row, running every day no matter the weather or how I was feeling, and somewhere between exhausted burnout and that epic feeling of accomplishing something, I think I moved my stamina a wee bit.

    Tho those runs were mostly solo. Alone. Because not everyone wants to run a streak.

    This morning I had that chance to again compare myself to my yardstick as the crew and I (all vaccinated) ran a casual ten kilometers through the river valley. Just five of us. Trails. Sunshine. Fresh air. And a hot coffee at the end.

    Yet like a finish line, it is the end … at least for a few more weeks.

    No more meet ups.

    No more group runs.

    No more running crew.

    That streak training improved my speed but what I think I might have really been training for was solo running again, this time for three weeks or until this third wave washes by and we can run together again.

    Deep breath. Here we go.

  • Race, Off

    Sunday runday, and it was about just a month ago I was lamenting the upcoming lack of race season.

    My running partners were all busily signing up for virtual races that seemed to me as little more than paying for a t-shirt and a medal. Meanwhile we would all tell ourselves that the difference between running around the neighbourhood this weekend as opposed to last weekend was that this weekend was a virtual race. Wink wink. And about ninety-dollars in race fees.

    I would run. But this year would be a season of no races.

    Tho.

    Until Friday night there was an exception to all my lamenting.

    The long-shot was a local late-May ultramarathon of various distances that we’d all signed up for in the first days of twenty-twenty. Over a year ago. Trained and ready when COVID sprung. In April of last year, we each recieved an email that the race had been deferred for a year in hopes that the pandemic (which surely wouldn’t last more than a couple months, right?) would be a distant memory. We would all race again next year.

    This year.

    So it went that on the last weekend of May 2021, four weeks out from writing this, I was due to tackle the Blackfoot Ultra for another go. Twenty-five kilometers of the “baby ultra” distance through the rolling trails of a nearby natural preserve area.

    Friday evening the fateful email came again.

    Due to COVID the race organizers, unsurprisingly, were unable to obtain a permit from the local health authority to host a couple hundred racers and support crew for a daylong event. Every registration has been deferred yet again to twenty-twenty-two.

    The single, solitary race for which I have been registered now for nearly a year and a half is now officially thirteen months away.

    Race, off.

    I could grumble here. I could write that all those hills we’ve been running were all for naught. That my push to recover from some joint inflamation over the last couple months so that I could keep up my distances was a waste. Or that somehow my motivation was only sparked by the prospect of that looming twenty-five klick weekend less than a month away.

    I could.

    I won’t.

    We’ve all made so many sacrifices this past fourteen months that I can’t account for this as more than another disappointing blip.

    It’s another opportunity to reshape my training plan. A chance to think about what I want to get out of a summer without any races at all. None. What that means to my week-to-week training and how I can use that freedom to explore the city’s trails again this summer.

    Perhaps a running streak?

    Or some adventure running, looking for trails I’ve never met before.

    Maybe just enjoying the time with my cohort without any pressure for pace or distance.

    The last of my races may be off, but I’m thinking of it as an opportunity.