works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

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

  • accidental distances

    It was only a little accidental that I ran my longest run of the season yesterday. But heck, it wasn’t much to brag about either way: barely thirteen klicks all in.

    And barely one when it came right down to it.

    My running is not doing great these days. I mean, I have always had good seasons and bad ones. I’ve been tearing up the trails for going on eighteen years now so anyone is bound to have a roller coaster of ups and downs during that time, no matter who you are. Injuries have sidelined me for as long as half a year or more. Winters have often been scaled back. And race plans always seem to set the real tone of how my summers go: any time I’ve signed up for a marathon it would be foolishness not to focus on building endurance and strength and distance with every spare waking thought.

    My fatigue caught up with me in the last week, tho. I walked in our regular Thursday run because I was bagged. And then I started getting leg cramps overnight on the weekend that gave me at least one sleepless night laying awake hoping that the charlie horse in my calf didn’t startle me awake again. So, waking up Sunday morning I was barely fifty-fifty on going out for my regular run. I barely, just barely made it out for one. I ended up accidentally logging thirteen.

    I lack a coherent plan, I realize. 

    I have written quite a bit on my own distractable nature these days.

    I am trying to walk a creative path, trying to rebuild a professional self, trying to navigate a transitory phase of my parenting career, trying to stay optimistic in the normalized collapse of western democracy, trying to eat better, trying to read more, write more, be more, trying, trying, trying. 

    I’ve let my running take a bit role in the stage play that is my life this year.

    It turns out that I am recovering from an injury to my soul that I wouldn’t have thought would crack my running agenda but somehow that is one of the plainest examples of the damage.

    And oddly enough, the path back to the paths isn’t clearly one straight through forcing myself to just run more, dammit. Sure, it feels good for a bit when I do it, but there is something bigger going on in my deepest self that I haven’t quite figured out, and it seems as though might need a bit of work on those aches and pains before the deeper trails clear out for me.

    We ran down into the river valley yesterday morning, down the big hill towards the footbridge under the freeway bridge, along the path budding with spring green, basking in the glow of the May sunlight and still-fresh air and the cool breeze that made it almost perfect for a morning run. We ran out to meet the other half of the crew who had started on a longer training loop an hour before us, ran to meet them and run back to home with this little cadre which after all seems like the whole point of it all lately. Ran and ran and ran, further than any of us had planned when we set out. A little accidental, and not much to brag about, but the longest run of the year for me, the longest run in a year when something is seeming to be gnawing at my feet and holding me back.

    No coherent plan, after all. Distractable and accidental.

    Recovering, but uncertain, unsteady. Not great.

  • run club restart

    I tend to have a lot of sentimental vibes for run club.

    In its current form it is a pale shadow of when I first showed up at my local run store for a clinic, oh, seventeen years ago now, but it exists enough that I attended the latest session of it last night and logged a nearly eight klick out-and-back with a few select members of the the crew.

    Everything was fresh after a late afternoon rain. There was a bit of a rainbow tumbling out of the clouds to the east. There were seven of us plus the leader, and she snapped a photo of the group before we set off into the trail system that runs between the houses and the creek wilds.

    Of course I don’t have that photo so you’ll have to deal with mine.

    I joined run club for the first time as a participant in the 5k Learn to Run clinic offered by the store two moves back. The clinic was a speaker and a short run on a weeknight—and then they encouraged everyone to show up for the drop-in run club two more days of the week for the sake of the weekly mileage. I dutiful followed instructions. And for over a decade it was my regular social outing to meet at the store and run.

    Eventually I became a group leader and then a clinic instructor and I have since flip-flopped around and tried to reconcile my status in the group now nearly and neatly without a formal run club mandate, me just the guy who plans a bunch of what we do but who has simultaneous been trying to nurture others to plan when I can’t. No store. No website. Just a chat group and determination to keep it all alive.

    During the pandemic everything shut down and the store moved for the second time, but our offshoot run club stayed put and in the five years since those first should-we-be-meeting social-distancing runs from the parking lot the group has stabilized into a local running coffee club.

    The running store moved about five kilometres down the road and we thought that was that, but after a couple years of nothing they reappeared and cautiously started inviting runners back to the now once-per-week meetup.

    And despite my semi-regular attendance, I go when I can and have no other training obligations than a straight run, well… the Wednesday night run club is not quite the same. It is, after all, little more than a rendezvous of fair weather dabblers up for an occasional run. Most of them come with a friend with whom they exclusively converse and pace. If they are back a week later it is a surprise.

    Last night? We ran into the freshly washed trails. I had not even bothered with a jacket, risking a bit of chill for the sake of shedding the extra weight of carrying it if it turned out to be too hot. And it was warm enough, everyone else tearing down to their t shirts in the warmish evening air.

    Our leader, now on familiar terms as I’ve been making an appearance for three seasons of the renewed club, was quizzing me on our short parking lot walk back to the store afterwards. I’m not sure what you guys want out of this, she said to me. But I insisted that a place to meet and plan was good for me. Gone are the days of fifty people crushed into the store listening to a mini sales pitch before we strike out in group. Gone are the clinics and the annoying shoe talk. Gone are the bring a friend nights and slipping people in for free as pace leaders. People will stretch if they need. People will sort themselves out, I think. This is fine, I told her. 

    Or maybe I’m under-thinking it all.

    This used to be a real thing, you know. This used to be the centre of my week, the outing around which I planned my life. Everything was about making sure I got to run club and made my distances. Run club was my thirties. Some of my best friends are run clubbers. 

    Should it be more? Or is it just fine? I dunno.

    Sentimentality is a crazy drug, almost as addictive as running, huh? The run club vibe remains, but the memory of it will always be grander than the reality I’m sure.

  • Spring Runoff

    I had this grand plan about ramping up my mileage for spring.

    Not that it was an orginal plan. Same plan as every year, in fact. Arguably, not so much a plan as a routine.

    Each year around this time I’ve been “streaking” — but in the running, way, as in trying to run a minimum distance each day. Setting a running streak. Three weeks or maybe even a month of consecutive running. Kicking off April first with a daily challenge to myself to say, um, how many days can I lace up in a row? What kind of distance can I chalk up? How often do I want to do sports laundry this month?

    But then I got sick.

    Perfectly, poorly-timed, sick. April first, just as we got back from a mini-vacay to the coast, I got off the plane with a chest cold of the kind where running seems to make it worse.

    How does that go again? Neck up, run about. Neck down, rest it out.

    This was a neck down cold. Chest coughy-phlegmy-x-ray-worthy sick.

    I’m like 97% better. And better enough to do some short, slower runs with the crew now that spring is in full swing. Not better enough to attempt that streak, yet.

    We ran our regular Thursday meet up last night and slogged off a six klick semi-trail run through the trying-to-bud-out tree canopy, the light and shadows playing with our senses in that way that only happens in the shoulder seasons. I wore shorts, and only had one coughing fit. I guess that’s a good thing.

  • mountain campfire

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day four

    There is something about a campfire that brings people together.

    Perhaps it is just a primal urge to gather around a heat source, particularly in the cold, particularly when a second bear has been spotted foraging nearby.  But then maybe there is something more to it. The glow of burning logs signals a kind of control over nature. We are sitting atop a mountain, a still lake a dozen paces away, the towering peaks lurking in every direction. Even the sun dips from view earlier up here, and we are all left sitting in the shadows of hulking stone with a million trees, flowers, insects, and animals just out of view. Then we build a fire. We use our big brains to ignite dry wood and hold it captive for our amusement, and in doing so we all are drawn to the light and the heat and the community of it. So around the fire we sit, and strangers sipping tea from tin mugs, eating rehydrated meals from plastic bags, drying their socks, warming their hands, or just sitting, all of us strangers gather and talk. Soon the stories flow with ease, people talking over each other and interrupting to participate the drive to converse is so strong in the flickering glow of the fire.

    Together, alone atop a cold mountain.

  • the other day I saw a bear

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day three

    Bears have long held a kind of place of abstract mythology in my head. I’ve seen bears. I’ve seen bears in the distance. I’ve seen bears out the car window. I’ve seen bears in captivity. And all thru my life I’ve been taught over and over, with practiced regularity at the start of any adventure into the wilderness the core tenets of bear safety. Yet the bear, at least the bear as a beast of aggression and adventure ruining mischief has stood at this distance of a thing I’ve heard about but never had to deal with. And then, while backcountry camping we are in the position of making that bear drama come to a place of all too reality—in fact we suddenly find ourselves sharing a campground with a bear. A bear came through as we were eating breakfast this morning. Probably that bear has pooped all over the trails.

    That same bear was on the path between us and the campsite as we came back from our afternoon day hike and we had to stop for a few minutes and let him wander off to the side so we could pass.

    As I lay here in my tent recounting my day, there is the very real possibility that a bear will wander through our site and sniff around nearby as we’re sleeping tonight. This random creature which has been nothing but a subject of stories or a rhyme in a kids song, is suddenly our neighbour and everyone is just kinda okay with that What are we to do, after all?

    It’s the bear’s home first, right?