running guy

I’ve been running consistently since 2008. I’m not fast, I’ve never won a race, and I’ll likely never qualify to run the Boston Marathon. On the other hand, I have raced in multiple countries, logged routes in amazing locations, got fit, had fun and met some of the best people, so I judge the experience a complete success.

Posted on episode 300

Running into Spring

Sunday Runday, the first day of spring, and yet when we stepped out into the last few hours of winter air this morning it was blowing and cold as if winter was reminding us that we all lived on the Canadian prairies and we don’t get to simply up and decide that the chill has left for another year.

It had been nice all week.

Well… nice enough that warm hats became optional and the concrete of the sidewalks made a strong appearance as the layers of ice finally melted into chilly, slushy puddles that slowly drained into the storm sewers.

We’d gone for an eight klick run through a local ravine on Tuesday evening and returned with wet, blistered feet from sloshing through sloppy, water-logged melt still covering the aspalt trails.

This morning, avoiding the wind, we tucked into some suburban walking paths that wend their way along the back fences of a couple neighbourhoods that back onto the thawing creek. Where we’d been snowshoeing just a weekend ago was now a briskly flowing waterway the colour of milk chocolate twisting between the naked trees.

As we burst from the cover of the shelter paths and out onto the streets the wind was just starting to pick up speed and carried with it the hint of more snow.

And as we rounded the last corner towards the parking lot the hint of snow had turned into a very real peppering of icy sleet blasting our bare cheeks for the final push towards our coffee social.

It didn’t go unremarked that annually April is when our training proper usually begins. Longer distances. Hill repeats. Tempo runs. These start to populate our calendars as the snow melts and the sidewalks clear and the evenings offer a bit more daylight.

It didn’t go unremarked that April is only just about a week and a few days away.

I signed up for a short race in April in a nearby bedroom community after a friend suggested she’d like some company for a ten-miler and the first in-person she’ll have run in about three years. It wont be my first even this year, but somehow it feels like starting to be back to normal.

Back to the office in April. Back to local racing in April. Back to hill repeats in April.

Let’s just hope spring cooperates.

Posted on episode 297

Cross Country

Last July, right smack dab in the middle of 2021, one of my running friends suggested that a few of us sign up for a race.

This wasn’t unusual. We sign up for races all the time, and even many virtual races lately.

This race was a big one, though. A year-long virtual team run spanning every province of Canada in an effort to cumulatively run ten thousand kilometers in one year, from the West coast to the North coast and then over to the East coast.

We signed up. We ran. We tackled The Big Canada Run.

And on this past Sunday morning, as a ten klick team run through the fresh weekend snow, we logged our last bit of mileage.

We finished.

In a little more than eight months, nine of us managed to log a remarkable ten thousand kilometers (or about six thousand two hundred miles for you still stuck in imperial measures.)

Day after day, week after week. Competing against over two hundred other teams doing the exact same thing.

One run at a time, a few kilometers here and bunch more over there. Training runs, group runs, solo runs through the snow, epic slogs through the heat, half marathons, ultras and even just jogs with the dog.

I’ve done virtual races before, but this is by far the largest.

I’ve logged my own mileage for over a decade and often recorded high numbers over the course of a year, but never computed my distances with a team to reach such a monumental milestone.

Epic races are just epic goal-setting exercises. They let us see ourselves and our efforts against a backdrop of something so much bigger than ourselves or our individual footsteps. And running across a continent is so much bigger than running the loop around my park … even if I did have the help of eight of my friends.

Posted on episode 289

Race Report: Disney World 2022

Sunday Runday, and just over a week after rolling through the finish line of three Florida Disney World races, I did a (socially distanced) ten klick run back with the crew through the icy streets of Edmonton.

Amazing. Crazy. Chaotic. Nostalgic. Insane.

What other words can one use to describe the first international mega race back after a multi-year break from the same.

Exactly eight years ago I was standing on the same set of start lines getting ready to run (that time) four races. Back then I’d signed up for the inaugural Dopey Challenge, four days of four races starting with a 5k, ending with a full marathon, and tucking a 10k and a half in the blurry middle of it all.

This year, I cautiously signed up to do the first three of that series.

So, on that Thursday about ten days ago, all three of us, my wife, my daughter and I, woke up at 3am, found our way to a shuttle bus stop, trotted through the security mayhem outside Epcot, and queued up to run the five kilometer loop through that parks winding walkways.

My wife and daughter are not runners, but they are not out of shape either. We followed the crowd and dashed along the route and crossed the finish line to applause and medals.

I repeated the next day, but solo. Bus. Security. Race corral. Ten kilometers looping through two parks instead of one, past our first hotel of the trip, and ending with a musical pre-dawn dash under the glowing blue orb of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth as we pushed to the finish line.

I wore a mask the whole run. I wore a mask for all the runs. There were crowds and people and more crowds and on top of it all there were even more crowds. I have not been around that many heavily breathing runners in years and I’m surprised I didn’t bring home a viral souvenir from the experience.

Did I mention crazy and insane?

On the third day I woke up at 3am one last time and made my way to an even bigger starting corral with an even bigger crowd. It would be fair to say that somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand people stood at that start line, and if more than ten or fifteen of them were wearing masks I would have been surprised.

I went out in the second wave, with another dozen or so behind me.

We ran up the dark highway to the sounds of Disney movie soundtracks blasting from speakers. The path brought us under the park gate and through the parking lots and past the Contemporary resort and between the turnstiles of the Magic Kingdom. I held my phone out in front of me recording video as I ran onto and up Main Street:

I paused at a few spots for photos.

I absorbed the moments.

I kept on running.

Did I mention amazing and nostalgic?

In a short kilometer or so we were out the back gates of the park, running past some utility buildings and behind Splash Mountain as we disappeared back onto another Florida highway.

The sun rose as the view of the castle faded into the distance behind me, and I plodded along to finish the race back at Epcot.

My time wasn’t so great. Running 20.5 of the 21.1 kilometers in a surgical mask didn’t do much for my endurance. Stopping for photos and dodging crowds and slowing down to video or record a bit of it here and there left my pace a little dodgy in the end. Neither the pace nor time was the point, anyhow. The point was the experience.

And then it was over, and we flew home, safe and negative, and a few days later I was plodding along once again through icy streets with friends pondering the next year and wondering if maybe it had all been some kind of dream.

Amazing. Crazy. Chaotic. Nostalgic. Insane.

Posted on episode 285

Turtle Power

Sunday runday and on my solo five klick shakeout I paused beside path to watch a turtle the size of a football basking in Florida sunshine.

Also, it was nearly fifty degrees celsius warmer than the last time I ran oudoors a little more than a week ago. I haven’t been that sweaty from running five kilometers since the heat of last summer. I could have taken a dip beside that turtle and …

The runaway train of vacation planning never actually found a means of slamming on the brakes and the next thing I knew I was boarding an international flight to Orlando with my face wrapped tightly in a N95 surgical respirator and wondering, sometimes aloud, at the bounds of my own sanity.

Back in the summer, when all things virus had seemed to be packing its bags and getting ready to move out of the basement like all uninvited houseguest should eventually do, we registered in a series of Disney World Marathon run events.

Then we eagerly booked a vacation around that … and waited.

It all went great from there, right? Well … no. We watched anxiously as a viral variant named Omicron washed a new wave of panic all across the world. Triple-vaccinated and packing a smuggler’s haul worth of PPE, we warily tracked the news and tripped over ourselves justifying taking the trip versus the stupidly high costs of cancelling it and just wallowing in pity at ourselves from the safety of our frozen house. A dozen times we came a turtle’s breath away from calling the whole thing off, swallowing the thousands of dollars of lost travel spends, and buying a big bottle of bubbly for new years eve to forget the whole thing and …

And.

And yet, here we are.

And here I am on a Sunday morning, looking out at a resort swimming pool after a five klick shakeout run, sipping a six dollar cup of takeway coffee, having spent the last four days wandering through the densely packed, pandemic-oblivious theme parks of Disney World and giving myself blisters and aches and pains and overwhelming anxiety and exhaustion in the process.

There are a number of smooth and flat walking trails just out the front door of our hotel, winding around lagoons and restaurants and wire-suspended gondolas, leading into and around and between Epcot and a make-believe Star Wars lands. As thousands of racers congregate here over the next few days for races starting later this week, I saw dozens of fellow runners out on the boardwalks and asphalts. I even saw some of the race crew flagging locations for aid stations and mile markers and marshalling points.

We have a couple days to cool off. A few more days of park-hopping and pool lounging. We pick up our race packages mid-week and run before the weekend starts in earnest. I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle a half marathon I didn’t really train for, on which I’m banking on residual fitness and sheer determination, plodding along at a turtle’s pace to finish the thing on pure willpower.

This morning on my tour of the hotel trails, weaving around families walking towards the park gates, and as I trotted by wearing my 2014 Disney Half Marathon running shirt, one of the race setup workers looked up, pointed and snapped a photo of me from his phone. I smiled. It was probably the only time I’ve been out in public this week without a mask so it took a moment to remember how. I guess if you see a sweaty forty-something guy smirking akwardly on the runDisney socials this week … maybe it’s me?

Or maybe I should have posed with my new friend the turtle. I’d bet we have more in common these days than we realize.