Category: running & adventure

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

  • Overnight on Public Lands

    The province where I live currently has over eleven thousand square kilometres of public lands that are available for a variety of recreational activities, including cross-country skiing, backpacking, and overnight camping.

    Sadly, much of that land is at least three or four hours of driving away… so nothing is close enough for a quick weekend getaway, at least not without some substantial planning.

    With everyone sticking closer to home due to lingering travel restrictions, it seems like a lot of the so-called official campsites are (like last year) likely to be booked up quickly by the RV crowd. We enjoy our share of backpacking, though, and it seems like it might be the summer to jump with both feet into the backcountry, random, boondocking-style of camping and see where that takes us.

    I thought it would be useful for both my readers, and my future self, to write a post where I compile some resources and thoughts on the topic.

    Resources

    Public Land Use (an Overview for Alberta, Canada) is the official government website detailing many of the places, rules, and parameters of those who choose to stray from the well-travelled path and forge their own adventure.

    Alberta Parks Random Backcountry Camping is a guide from another branch of the government with some more plain language guides, rules, and hints for where and how to camp outside of designated campsites.

    Beginners Guide to Public Land Camping is an adventure blog where they have already done some resource gathering for this topic. I’m not necessarily saying go there and check their list first … but I did.

    How to Camp Respectfully is another blog-like site with a great run down of how to get away from everyone else who is trying to get away from it all and find some backcountry camping solitude with respect for the land.

    Permits in 2021?

    I'll continue to add-to and update this post as I do more research on the topic.

  • Urban Creek Run Club

    Sunday Runday, and the weather improved by about thirty degrees Celsius over last weekend. I’m not afraid of the cold, but since I couldn’t run with friends I’m not running alone in brutally freezing temps.

    This weekend we resumed our small band of cohort runners for the second real run club of the year, and located some urban trails closer to the downtown of the city where we could enjoy the zero degree weather.

    The run included some scenic views of the downtown. (I used to work in one of those buildings! I guess I still do, I just haven’t been there in almost a year.)

    We navigated our way through some of the asphalt paths, still crunchy with a layer of dirty snow, up and into one of the neighbourhoods, and then back into the creek valley via a staircase. My calves were not impressed. I guess I should go up and down my stairs at home a little more frequently than to just refill my coffee.

    During the fall this is a lovely canopy of colours rich with that scent of gently decaying foliage. Today it was a well-trod winter path, wide enough to socially distance.

    None of us were feeling particularly fast, but it’s been a long, cold off-season. Most of these folks should have been running marathons this year, but thanks to the pandemic it’s more likely to be virtual 10k races.

    And yes, those are shorts… anything warmer than zero is shorts-weather around here.

    And the creek, still frozen, beckoned us for a short stretch of our total distance. The water underfoot is frozen for about thirty or forty centimeters of ice thickness. If it happened to crack though, no worries: the creek itself is only about a meter deep.

    Cold yes, but not too deep.

    We concluded with some lawnchairs in the parking lot, drinking some coffees from a nearby local and independent cafe, bundled up in our blankets and trying to keep at least six feet apart while we recovered.

    Hopefully the running season keeps at this pace, even though my personal pace could use a lot of improvement.

  • Spreadsheets & Footfalls

    Sunday Runday, and I’ve been hiding in my basement from the brutal cold, focussing on cross-training which is never a replacement for actually getting out on the trails.

    Not in quality of workout nor in the enjoyment of the effort.

    I’ve also been reflecting on the last year of pandemic lockdown and realizing that I’ve let a few things slip. I used to be particularly diligent in how I recorded and tracked my fitness. Used to be, being the operative words.

    Last year, for example, I completely neglected using the tracking tools I’d built for myself over the last decade. Before using Strava as a tracking crutch, I was meticulous in how I tracked and recorded my runs. I had built and refined a simple but useful goal-based spreadsheet for time and distance that calculated a few other factors in keeping myself on track. How much did I run. How did it compare. How much did I need to focus to catch up or get on track with an annual distance goal… that sort of thing.

    I also made it available to others for a few years in a row on my previous website:

    So, since I’ve started using it again and I’ve put in the effort of updating it for 2021, please make a copy and use it. It’s mostly simple, but I’ve always preached that in running (or life in general) information and data are powerful allies.

    Spreadsheets can be for more than business and budgets.

    They help track goals and progress.

    They highlight gaps and changes in routine.

    They offer insight into trends in your training.

    And they provide an ongoing overview of what can be accomplished by day after day after day of hard work which is motivational and can often give that extra nudge towards improvement.

    I’m neither fast nor competitive, but that also means I don’t have the benefit of a coach or endless access to resources that could improve my training. I’m just a guy who likes to get out on the trails, but that doesn’t mean it’s none of it is worth tracking. It’s worth it to me, and a spreadsheet is a simple and low-cost way to track it all.

  • How should you dress to run in winter?

    The saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad wardrobe choices.

    Yet, as I prepare to post these words on this Sunday Runday it is -34 degrees Celsius on the other side of my front door and this morning I’m leaning on the fallacy of that statement: that’s actually pretty bad weather.

    I do run in the cold, frequently.

    When I run in the cold a few simple rules apply.

    Layer. Head to toes, it’s generally seems more effective when I have multiple varied layers of clothing than fewer. Layering not only traps warm air in the spaces between the layers, which is what keeps you insulated and warm, but it provides opportunity to select different fabrics for different jobs: insulation, wicking, wind breaking. It also allows you to shed a layer as you warm up.

    Tuck. As valuable as lots of layers are, I find they are even more valuable as things are tucked into other things. Sock cuffs pulled over long underwear legs. Shirt hems slipped between skin and the underwear band. Neck buff squeezed under the shirt collar. Half way into your winter run is no time to figure out that there is a freezing breeze sneaking through a gap in your clothing defence.

    Head. I often apply the layering and tucking rules to the head and neck as well, but I call it out here because getting the right gear on your noggin is a specifically important point worth mentioning. Ears get frostbite very easily. The neck line and face are tough to work around with the need to breath and all that. And you can make a snug-fit inner hat by turning a buff inside out, twisting it a three-quarter turn at the 60/40 split point, then inverting the longer side over the shorter.

    Traction. Often overlooked in cold weather running is proper footwear. Ice is everywhere when the weather turns cold, and deep snow can slip into the air vents of shoes quickly freezing toes and packing into the tips of toes leading to injury on long runs. Specialized shoes are a great investment if you’re a dedicated winter runner. Or, if you’re only sticking to cleared pathways a pair of pull-over traction grips like Yaktrax will last you multiple seasons and store conveniently with your winter gear or in the backseat of a vehicle.

    Support. Having a support line is too often taken for granted in cold weather running. If your winter wardrobe doesn’t include easy access to a running partner, or a phone if you’re going out solo, don’t go. Someone always knows where I am on my winter runs. Things can go bad so much more quickly in the cold, and after a few kilometers of sweaty exercise, a damp runner who slips on the ice or twists their ankle in a snowbank can be in huge trouble.

  • Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek

    After a bitterly cold week the sun broke through the chill for a few hours on a recent Saturday afternoon. I met with some friends to explore a local creek, frozen and snowy, on a pair of trusty snowshoes.

    Adventure journal.

    I live in a winter city.

    It is cold, bitterly cold, freeze your cheeks frostbite cold for at least three months of the year. Nearly a million people live here. While not all of them savour the dark, chilly winters, most everyone embraces the hard reality of the climate. A hardy few revel in the snow and cold, and seek adventures unique to our northern location.

    In this winter city, I live in a suburban neighbourhood framed on three sides by preserved wilderness. Incredibly, the city has made an active planning effort to avoid development (apart from trails and bridges) of the river valley (to my west and north) and the twisting feeder creek bed (to the east).

    This means that I can access a vast ribbon of natural area on foot in fifteen. Alternatively, by driving for a mere few minutes I can find a place to park and step in.

    As the local pandemic restrictions loosened over the last week, I met some of my running crew for a snowy hike in the aforementioned creek bed.

    We wore snowshoes.

    Admittedly, these were unneccessary for ninety percent of the hike.

    Yet there seemed to be something more interesting about story called “Going Snowshoeing on a Frozen Creek” than a tale merely titled “Winter Hiking!

    The Whitemud Creek feeds into the North Saskatchewan River to the north. This is a broad, shallow river that flows east across multiple Canadian provinces and eventually drains into the Hudson’s Bay, whereas the feeder creek is a half dozen meters wide at best. Though I’ve never actually tested it I would guess I could stand in the centre in springtime and not get my shirt wet.

    The creek is frozen nearly solid by January each year, or at least solid enough to safely walk atop it. Thus, after a fresh fall of snow the creek makes for a smooth, flat course, and one boxed in on each side by an alternating combination steep banks as high as twenty or thirty meters, natural boreal forest, and a single track trail that paces through the woods that we often run in spring, summer or fall.

    By far the best part of the two hour, seven kilometer hike was time spent with three friends. I had not seen in any of them in person for over two months. Over the holidays we video chatted, texted, and shared pictures and stories. This is not the same as walking beside someone through the snow, even if they are wearing a pandemic mask.

    The ice crackled underfoot.

    We climbed like giddy kids under and around multiple fallen trees that had not yet been cleared away by municipal maintenance crews.

    We skidded across patches of bare ice on snowshoes meant for trudging through deep snow.

    The sun warmed the air with a loving apricity as we paused for breath, or conversation, or just to take in the simple natural views. Even the clean, crisp air of a suburban creek bed was a brilliant change from the hour spent hunkered down in our houses simultaneously avoiding the cold and a contagious virus.

    A winter city adventure, and a local travel adventure for a strange, frustrating year.

    I don’t think I could have traded it for a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.