at a Grateful Dead concert.
The Ottawa Marathon peaked at 4,800 runners in 1983, but then fell on hard times. In the mid-’80s, stories from the archives refer to the end of the marathon-running “fad,” and the race was officially cancelled in 1986.
But after a frenetic effort to attract investment, the 1986 race was resurrected with some 1,500 runners, plus a new ten-kilometre run held the night before the marathon.
At that time, race organizers across North America could only have dreamed of events featuring 40,000 participants or more. Maybe they got some help from Pan.
Now, as thousands every year continue a tradition that began with the fanciful legend of an Athenian herald, with help from a poet and a baron, only one question remains: Why didn’t Pheidippides borrow a horse?
Love, hate and winter
iRun to enjoy all four seasons in Canada Wayne Snowdon, Ontario
I hate winter.
I hate the cold. I hate the snow and the slush. I hate the extra clothes you have to wear, the layers, the heavy boots. I hate shovelling and scraping. From Christmas until baseball season, I do whatever I can to avoid going outside. My main ambition in life is to find a way to be somewhere else for the first four months of every year. (So far, I have failed at my main ambition in life.)
Every winter, people close to me are subjected to six months of whining. During my regular shivery rants about winter, my father used to say, “But you’re a Canadian.” To which I would point out that I had no choice in being a Canadian, whereas he, born in a less wintry country, did. Then I would scowl, put on my parka and go home.
All of which make this fact all the more peculiar: I love winter running.
Learning this was as much a surprise to me as if I had suddenly discovered that I loved brussels sprouts. If, ten years ago, you took me in a time machine to see my future self jogging in -20C weather, I would have assumed that I had been sent to some kind of forced-labour camp.
Once upon a time, I was a fair-weather runner. If I managed an outdoor run on one nice day in March, I thought I was being hardy. In the winter months, I exercised indoors, the way God intended.
Running on a treadmill was warmer than running outside, but I found it to be as boring as running in circles in your basement. If you think time is moving too quickly in your life, just get on a treadmill for half an hour. It’s amazing how long even a minute can seem. I was constantly playing games with myself to avoid looking at the clock. Just stare straight ahead and don’t look down for ten minutes, I would tell myself. Then I would run for what seemed like fifteen minutes, sneak a peek at the timer and find out it was only five.
When I started training for my first marathon, the long runs began in January. At first, I tried to figure out how I could do most of them indoors. The problem is that, at most gyms, you can’t use a treadmill for more than thirty minutes at a time.
A few people said to me, try running outside, you’ll love it. That’s not possible, I said.
Having no other choice, though, I joined a running group to prepare for the marathon. I went shopping for winter running clothes. I bought a pair of running pants, a few long-sleeve shirts, a hat and something to cover my neck, mouth and nose. I now had the complete ensemble of a cat burglar. I learned, for the first time, about fabrics that “wick away” moisture. I learned that “wick” had another meaning unrelated to candles.
I started running with a friend in sub-zero temperatures. We did a couple of short early-morning runs when the temperature was minus -25, and another on a mid-January morning that was minus -30, with a windchill factor of minus -41.
What I learned very quickly was that I felt comfortable ten minutes into the run, no matter how cold it was. The wind was sometimes frustrating, but the freezing temperatures stopped being an issue as soon as you were warmed up. I started to feel like I was tougher than I had thought, like I was withstanding winter conditions that normally made me cower.
A month later came the big test: a 26k group run on a Sunday morning with blowing snow and a windchill of minus -35. The wind was so strong that I was almost knocked over once or twice. My running partners and I were pelted with snow and ice. When I finished, I thought, if I can do this, I can do a marathon. Since then, I’ve become a committed year-round runner. I run as often in February as I do in August.
As someone once pointed out to me, there is no bad weather for running, only the wrong clothes. You have to adjust your pace sometimes and change your stride if it’s slippery. You may also decide to take extra precautions, like making sure you have a cellphone or at least a quarter for a payphone. You don’t want to get hurt ten kilometres from your house and have to hobble home in sub-zero temperatures.
I still prefer running in the spring and fall and early and late on hot summer days. But I’ve gone from being a fair-weather runner to being someone who sees the elements as a welcome challenge. After a winter run, I often get home with steam rising from my head and icicles on my earlobes and eyebrows, and feeling as though I’ve conquered the Canadian elements.
I’ve learned to love winter running, but I still hate winter.
Because it’s there
iRun to paddle faster Adam Van Koeverden, Ontario
I’ve asked a lot of people why they run. And our magazine has collected thousands of iRun statements in which people spell out what they love about running.
But this, from Olympic champion kayaker Adam van Koeverden, might just be the best answer I’ve ever heard:
“Why do I like running? Because it’s there, I suppose. Because it’s within my grasp. The same reason why I like doing everything that I do that’s active: mountain-biking, kayaking, running, cross-country skiing. Because it’s not going to get done if you don’t do it.”
Because it’s there. If that’s a sufficient excuse to attempt Mount Everest, as it was for George Mallory, it’s a good enough reason to go for a run.
You know him as a kayaker, but van Koeverden is one of the most intensely passionate runners I’ve ever met. When we photographed him for a profile in iRun in the middle of winter, he insisted on doing an outdoor shot in which he would run through a cloud of snow. So I stood up to my knees in a snow bank and threw handfuls of snow in the air while photographer Colin Rowe captured van Koeverden sprinting through them.
How competitive is van Koeverden? Even though running is not his Olympic sport, all he wants to do is beat other runners.
“Whenever I see somebody in front of me, it doesn’t matter how far away they are, I just love chasing them down,” he says. “I don’t care how fast they are, I want to get in front of them and pass them.”
Van Koeverden started running before he started paddling. He ran cross-country in elementary school. And when he started kayaking, he noticed very few athletes at his club didn’t run.
“Right away, I recognized that all the good kayakers in the world and all the good canoeists at my club and everybody I was training with were running quite a bit,” he says. “You can’t be on the water all the time as a kayaker with the weather in Canada. Running in the winter is a lot easier than breaking the ice to be in your kayak.
“I
