Tag: ultrarunning

  • 50 reasons to run a 50k

    January is the time for new year’s resolutions, and also happens to be the time when many summer races begin registration. In January I’m often not very excited about running big races, but need to register if I anticipate wanting to run when the time comes. I wrote this to remind myself why I love…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Things Dad Brought Home

    Last weekend I ran on the frozen Seine River. Because of the rumours of wildlife along this twisting urban waterway, I kept my camera (the kind that also makes phone calls) handy. Sure enough, within the first couple kilometres I’d chased up a fox, later a small herd of friendly whitetails. And at about the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Trails Through the Snow

    The path is made by walking. Antonio Machado You’ve probably seen them, veering off the snow-free sidewalk and through the deep snow. What begins as a series of footprints slowly becomes a packed-snow path. In his book On Trails, Robert Moor calls them “desire lines.” Desire lines are shortcuts adopted by hundreds of feet, an…

  • To Know a Place, Run It: Reflections from the 2019 Polar Bear Marathon

    As a runner, I believe that the best way to get to know a place is on foot. Sure, you can cover ground more quickly in a car or plane, but to really know a place, you need to get out of your vehicle, plant your feet on the land, and feel the air on…

  • Your Mountain

    I’ve been on a steady diet of endurance sports stories and documentaries the past year or so. I’ve been fascinated and challenged by athletes who battle great landscapes and extreme conditions to perform great feats, testing the limits of their own strength and resolve. The latest of these epic stories was Free Solo, a documentary…