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Pocket Poetry
The workshop (uh, dining room table) has been busy lately, as I’ve been bringing some of my poetry to life by way of handmade zines featuring the RunHaiku poetry I’ve been producing over the past few years. Hand-drawn, -cut, and -bound, these little books were a lot of fun to put together, and are available […]
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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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Touching the Land
It felt silly when when the idea came out of my mouth years ago. When asked about my life dreams, I looked to the ceiling and tried to put words to it. The image in my mind was of Denver’s front range, and the dream was to interact with those mountains. My tool of choice […]
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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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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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Running Every Single Street in Steinbach
“To walk across a place is to truly know a place.” – Rickey Gates # Last year I was inspired by Rickey Gates’ “Every Single Street” project, where the ultrarunner set out to run all of the 1170km (1100 miles) of street in San Fransisco. No big deal, right? Here’s the documentary that was produced […]
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Walk and See
The Appalachian Trail stretch 2,140 miles along the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States, from Maine to Georgia. The idea of one long continuous trail was originally dreamed up by Benton MacKaye in the early 1900s to provide accessible wilderness experiences to an increasingly urban population. As told by Robert Moor in his wonderful […]
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Making the Rounds
In his book Keep Going, Austin Kleon references the US Postal Service’s unofficial slogan in describing his family’s morning walk routine. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” This morning, on a day where the Canada Post has been delayed or […]
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Pouring Milk
VermeerSo long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end. Wisława Szymborska trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak Most of life, as you’ve probably also learned by now, is ordinary. The extraordinary highs (as […]