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The Grizzly
While I’ve identified as an “ultrarunner” (mostly because it sounds cool) for several years, I realized, with all the cancellations over the past years, it had been nearly three years since I last ran an actual ultra marathon! Who am I anymore? But last week I finally had the chance to slap on a 50K…
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Mennonite Marathon: The Peace Trail
Not everything automatically becomes a tradition. You can do a thing once, have a good time (or not), then never do it ever again. There’s no such thing as a “first annual”, you need a second to make it an annual affair. Back in 2020, when we were all going stir-crazy and making up our…
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The Prize of Simply Seeing
Some of my favourite moments growing up involved encounters with wildlife. I poured over wildlife books, watched vigilantly from the backseat on long drives, and learned to walk or sit quietly in forest or lakeside. Wildlife rewards the observant with rare sightings. Even today, I find no greater delight than coming home to the breakfast…
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The Year of the Fun Run
When race cancellation emails began to fill runners’ inboxes in early 2020, causing a primary running and training motivator to fizzle, everyone was forced to look for those alternative motivations to keep moving forward. For several years I’d been finding “running as art” a good motivator for getting out the door daily (those RunHaiku won’t…
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Longest Night Run 2020: Recap
At 4:29pm on Dec 21, the sun set on the longest night of the year. In Steinbach, the gray sky hardly blinked as it slowly faded to deeper shades of grey, and the street lights slowly took over lighting the streets of town. And as the darkness settled in, we began to run. The weeks…
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What the Trail Requires: The Mantario
For the past couple years I’ve heard stories about the Mantario Hiking Trail from friends who’d hiked and run it. At about 63km (40 miles) long, it’s not to be taken lightly. The trail was created in 1970s (though I wonder at its prior history), and traces a north-south path through the Mantario Wilderness Zone,…
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Men on the run: Mennonite Marathon
At sunrise on Saturday, August 1, a fisherman stood outside his tent at the point where the Rat and Red Rivers meet. Rod in hand, a curious smirk crossed his face as he watched 11 runners walk down to the river’s edge, dip their toes in the water, then start off running towards the sun.…
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The Foot’s Silver Prayer
When Annie Dillard wrote about the man who kept a daily journal about the clouds, I thought the idea ridiculous. Who would document something as mundane as clouds? Most of us think clouds as boring as the paint on our walls, simply, unremarkably, there. But would this documentarian of the sky have disagreed? Today marks…
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Secret Paths of Steinbach
When I was a kid, I was enthralled by secret portals into other worlds. Books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Secret Garden captured my young imagination. What if I could crawl into a tunnel, a cave, or an ordinary wardrobe, and enter into a secret mystical world? I imagined carving a…
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The Right Path
Lately I’ve been reflecting on a recent read, On Trails, by Robert Moor. Looks like we’ve got a little impromptu series of posts going, you can read other thoughts from this book here and here. This book’s cover, even in its Dutch form, drew me in last summer, and this winter I finally had the…