works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

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

  • On Detours

    Sunday Runday and it felt a little like old times as we plodded through busy spring trails, dodging bikes, dog-walkers, and fellow runners along the river valley trails.

    A few of the run crew have found themselves in an urgent training predicament. With the local restrictions lifting quickly and thoroughly, an ultramarathon that most figured on being postponed again seems to be running. A few of the run crew signed up to do signficant distances through mountain paths. A few of the run crew need to get back to their 2020 stamina levels in the next few weeks. A few of the run crew are a bit panicked.

    Not me. I’m just enjoying my minimal-race summer agenda, but I promised to train with them all no matter what they need to accomplish.

    So we planned on a twelve to fourteen kilometer Sunday run.

    Plans don’t always work out.

    Busy trails. Improptu plans. Spontaneous pathfinding. These are the ingredients for adventure.

    The first ten kilometers went without a hitch. We climbed the aphalt ascent from where we’d met and parked our cars that morning, looped through a local park as we traversed the weaving network of winding paths. We crossed the river on the sidewalk portion of the new bridge stopping for a photo. And we traced the trail to the foot of another long hill…

    … where we stopped and contemplated our options.

    To the right an asphalt trail cluttered with people led on a long slow ascent out of the river valley to a familiar neighbourhood. To the left a narrow dirt path ducked under a guardrail and dropped along beside the river, showing no signs of human life.

    The trail was true for the first few minutes. Then deeper into the route bits of it were washed away from the spring runoff causing us to take careful footsteps along sloping, sanding ledges barely as wide as our shoes. A corner opened up into a mud pit, which we trod through with reluctance (and a few choice curse words) and led to a steep drop gleaming with a gaping outflow of slippery orange mud dropping off of a sharp ledge that fell three meters into the murky river water below.

    The six of us stopped and debated our options.

    We were now about half a kilometer down what seemed like either a risky or dead-end path, and the choice was to continue on and hope we weren’t further blocked ahead, or turn back and take the alternate route up the people-cluttered asphalt hill.

    Detours and tracking back on your path are unfortunate side effects of taking risks in running as in life. Is it better to cut your losses and try a different approach to get somewhere, or stubborningly forge on and hope for the best?

    As we traced back, climbed the hill and then found a path back into the valley that would eventually connect back up to the trail we’d lost we wondered how much our detour had cost us. I stopped my watch at sixteen kilometers as I hobbled back to my vehicle at the end of the run. It was a small bit more than I’d planned to run today… but also a whole lot more adventure, too.

  • June Mountain Travel Runs

    It’s the first day of June and as spring officially trickles into its waning days, I couldn’t help but flip through some old local travel photos and recall how June once… sometimes… began for me for a few consecutive years as the week of the most epic travel race I’ve ever run.

    For four years in a row a small group of fourteen friends and I formed up a team and ran the epic Banff-Jasper Relay race.

    One photo hardly does this endurance relay justice, but it can try,

    Picture this instead: a ribbon of twisting, undulating highway follows a course northward through the Rocky Mountains for a distance of two hundred and sixty kilometers. On its way it passes through thick forests, expansive lakeside vistas set at the base of mountains, to the foot of a glacier, cresting at elevations many people will never experience let alone run, dodging wildlife and encountering unpredictable weather from fleeting snow to pounding sunshine. Runners tackle varying distances of as much as twenty kilometers each of asphalt highway shoulder, each section a unique challenge of solitude, terrain, or pacing as support vehicles leapfrog the highway providing water and nutrition and keeping tabs on each participant.

    I took this photo in 2016 with a small camera I carried with me that year. I had hoped to document not just the spectacular views but the spirit of the race as hundreds of runners and support crew set up bases at transitions, cheered from the highway, and embodied an experience that would be impossible to replicate outside of sports like this.

    We are so lucky to live so close to this.

    Yet, I call this a travel photo because as much as these mountains are a mere four hours of by car away from my house, the effort to participate involves days of adventuresome driving.

    The day before the race we would spend the day driving nearly five hours from home to the start line headquarters for the race in scenic Lake Louise, just North of Banff, Alberta.

    The morning of the run our support vehicle would drop runner one off at the muster point for the very beginning leg of the South portion of the race. The race used to be run as one loooooooong day but due to concerns about running along a highway in the dark was later divided into a North and a South portion. The start line was about thirty kilometers out of town at the proper beginning of the highway.

    For the bulk of the morning and early afternoon, each runner would run their leg of the mountain road while the others paced along the shoulder of the highway in the car. This meant driving slowly, parking, supporting, and repeating for upwards of six to eight hours.

    As the South portion concluded, the North portion with three additional legs, was still in full swing, so the participants from the South portion would drive a hundred kilometers of long, cellular-service-free mountain road, the same stretch run by members of the team just hours prior, to catch up and try to find the remaining crew.

    As those last still-racing runners completed their legs, the whole of the team would drive to the finish line in Jasper to cheer on the runner bringing in the fifteenth leg of the relay, followed by celebrating, food, and toasts all round.

    The next day, for those who chose to make but a weekend adventure out of the race, yet another four to five hour drive back to the city awaited, completing a loop of nearly eleven hundred kilometers over about three days.

    This year the race is purely virtual, but I’ll be thinking of those mountains as I continue training through the hills near my neighbourhood this June.

  • One Part Perspiration, One Part Inspiration

    It’s Sunday Runday and I slogged out another solo ten kilometer run this morning as I await the official lifting of a few of those pandemic restrictions later this week.

    And though I should have spent yesterday afternoon running twenty-five klicks through some local trails, I found I struggled more than usual this morning just knocking off ten.

    All my training, it turns out, is as much about inspiration as it is about the actual mileage.

    How to Get Inspired To Run

    Set a Race Goal

    And even though there is not much left of this racing season save for a long list of virtual competitions, I find myself wondering if I might have been to hasty in declaring my reluctance to enter any of these. In fact, my next door neighbour (someone who is not generally a runner) stuck her nose over my fence last week to let me know that she’d signed up for the our city‘s annual ten kilometer run, and all weekend she has been logging some of her own solo mileage around the neighbourhood. She’s probably logged more than me, to be honest. A race goal marks a very specific X on the calendar with a clear objective. Virtual or not, this gets a lot of people off the couch and onto the paths.

    Set a Mega Goal

    Back when I wrote a more personal blog I used to try to give some additional context to my readers (mostly friends and family) about the kinds of distances I was clocking. I called these my mega-goals, as in I was going to run from Edmonton to Vancouver, a distance of about eleven hundred and fifty kilometers. I was going to do this “on paper” as in, I would incrementally log my distances day by day and week by week, plotting them out on a map and updating my blog readers with posts, maps, and explanations of how far I’d run. It was also a huge personal inspiration, knowing that I was only twenty klicks away from crossing that border or five klicks away from such and such a town.

    Of course, you can combine this with a virtual race such as a couple of my friends did recently competing in the Great Canadian Crossing each logging a mega fourty-eight hundred kilometers over the last twelve months.

    Write it Down

    Or post it. Or blog it. Or Instagram it. I put all my runs on Strava which is a great big fitness social media network for athletes of all ability. I also previously posted a spreadsheet that I use to track all that stuff. It works. Accountability to a formalized accounting of all those numbers can inspire us to do all sorts of things whether we do it to log a streak, get the virtual badge or not be left out of showing up on the activity feed on a Sunday morning.

    Run with Friends

    And last, but definitely not least, the one that keeps me most inspired is having others to run with. Just this last week I was sitting at my desk feeling sorry for myself as work was wrapping up for the day. My phone chimed and one of my run crew’s name showed up on my phone with a “I’m working in your neighbourhood. Up for a short run?” I replied in the affirmative and had my gear on ten minutes later. He got off work. I got off work. We ran a solid seven klicks before supper, and probably seven klicks neither of us would have run alone that evening. I often say one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life is take up this running sport, but half the reason I say that is because of the people I’ve met signing up with a running crew. I’ve run a multitude of races, logged thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers, and kept in great shape. A year of solo-ish running has made me realize that’s in no small part to having other people to inspire me onward.

  • Intersecting Lines and Paths

    Sunday Runday and on my nine kilometer trek through the asphalt ribbons of my neighbourhood I once again ran solo through the spring sunshine.

    Except I didn’t, not really.

    I kicked off along the long curved edge of the park near my house and dodged and passed a familiar face walking her puppy on a Sunday morning. We’ve chatted in the past when our dogs greeted each other on walks.

    I ducked into the short connecting trail that squeezes between the two rows of houses, and waved to a neighbour I know biking with his kids in the opposite direction.

    I turned onto the asphalt trail climbing up to the footbridge over the freeway and paused for half a minute to talk to one of my running crew friends descending the same path and making his way toward the river valley.

    I sped along under the power lines then turned back onto the south-bound road, passing the house of one of my old running pals who was sitting on a bench on her porch and waved to me as I ran by.

    I crossed at the traffic lights, and started the third long leg of my run down the path leading beside the main road and waved to another runner who was wearing the same race t-shirt as I had on.

    I looped around the lake on the final leg of my run and shortcut across the field to catch up with a woman with whom I frequently run, out on her own Sunday runday run, and we walked the last hundred meters to my house as she waved goodbye.

    In a week or so I am hopeful that we can start to put the long list of mandatory solo runs behind us, but while I may still be running alone as of this morning I’ve already had to stop claiming I’m lonely. All these intersecting lines and paths have made short work of that.

  • 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.