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 became a serious runner the day I became a serious kayaker.”
How serious a runner? Despite having the physique of a kayaker, he came close to doing a seventeen-minute 5k in high school.
“For someone who was 185 pounds, that’s pretty good. I remember lining up in cross-country in high school, looking over and thinking, ‘These guys are 140.’ I was pushing 190.”
On top of his training in the kayak, van Koeverden ran three times a week at school, plus track workouts once a week. On Fridays, he would run twelve kilometres in the morning at school, then fourteen or fifteen at night with his canoe club.
“I’m glad I’m not doing it anymore because it’s a lot of kilometres for a guy my weight,” he says. “But it made me tough. It made me really tough.”
Van Koeverden says he packs his running shoes wherever he goes. “Even if I’m going somewhere for a night, well, what if I wake up and want to go for a run? I can’t leave these behind.”
As an elite athlete with a finite career, he’s already thinking ahead to life after kayaking, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever give up running.
“I will always be a runner. Running is just so accessible, I’ll always do it. I’ll always enjoy it and I’ll always live somewhere close to trails and I can always just get on to the trail and give ’er in the trees for a few minutes.
“I always look forward to my next run. I could go on at length about the feeling you get after a run and the high that you feel and the sense of accomplishment that you get for days after. Even if you just did a short one, you just have something to reassure yourself that you’re doing what you should be doing and getting the most out of your day.”
Like many runners, van Koeverden dreams of running a marathon. But he wants to complete his Olympic career and then move down a weight class first. He’s done a half-marathon in 1:18, so he figures he can break three hours in the marathon.
“I don’t want to do a marathon until I’m sure I can crack three hours. I just don’t want to run for three-and-a-half hours. I’d much rather run fast and be dead. But I’ll have to lose some weight. Towards the end of a half-marathon, it’s starting to hurt a lot in my joints.”
Van Koeverden says he believes in getting the most out of every day, and he can’t think of anything more productive that investing time in your health.
“From my perspective, the things that are worth enjoying are free. Running shoes aren’t free, but it doesn’t cost anything to get out there and go for a run.”
Stumbling through the woods
iRun on instinct Ian Perriman, British Columbia
It seems I have weak ankles. At least that’s what I concluded from an otherwise satisfying and glorious trail run through the woods early one morning a few years ago.
I had never been much of a trail runner. I usually found myself spending a lot of time looking down, watching for roots and rocks, instead of taking in what was around me. For me, the uneven terrain was extra work and extra stress, preventing me from getting into a good rhythm. You struggle up a short hill and then try to fight the gravity going down the other side. You go up and down, sideways, turn left, turn right, over logs, dodging rocks, stepping between tree roots, avoiding puddles and mud. So you never relax, never settle into the groove of a good long road run.
But those kinds of challenges constitute a healthy break from the monotony of running the same route through your neighbourhood.
An invitation from an old friend to run through the autumn leaves was too much to resist. Which is why I was up at six o’clock on a Saturday morning, driving through the dark to rural Quebec. The plan was for three men and a dog to take a two-hour run through the woods.
We started out just as the day was breaking. It was a morning to savour: clear and crisp and just below zero. At any time, this would be a spectacular route, but in autumn, it was even more special. We were basically running on an enormous bed of leaves. It made the trail less evident, but thankfully my friend had run it many times. The sky was perfect, the temperature ideal and I was quickly warmed up and enjoying a comfortable pace.
The challenges of the route made the time move more quickly. Another benefit of trail running is a relief from the pounding of a road or bike path. In autumn, the leaves can make for an especially soft landing. But what lies beneath can pose problems; the leaves are a clever disguise for rocks, roots and soft spots, and this quickly became a problem.
My experience from a few previous trail runs was that if I don’t land with a flat foot, I can easily stumble or turn an ankle. With alarming regularity on this run, I found myself recovering from minor stumbles. I found it particularly common when I was running downhill. I would stretch a little bit to get over a root or a branch lying across