Running the Bruce Trail

Spring!

Saturday 2 May
Distance: 11.5 km
Time: 1.5 hours
Avg speed: 7+ km/h
Total distance to date: 629 km
Distance to go: 256 km

First (and final) run of spring

Flowers were all abloom on the Bruce when I got out on the first weekend of May. This section around the Bayview Escarpment made an easy loop. By logging an extra 3 km or so on the road (making the total run just over 14), I was able to double back to the car. Meaning I didn’t have to beg anyone for a drive. Further sections will be more complicated. At least I got in one springtime run. Next time it will be all summer and green, and my banner photo will be out of season yet again. Who has time to blog?

What is this strange furry tree?

Do not touch ANYTHING. It may explode and kill you!

Sunday 15 February
Distance: 17 km
Time: 3.5 hours
Avg speed: 5 km/h
Total distance to date: 617.5 km
Distance to go: 267.5 km

Dis-snow-llusionment

Snowshoe running on hard, refrozen crust after the previous week’s thaw made for faster progress. I gotta say though, sunny winter days are better spent schussing than trudging.

Running (I use the term liberally) on snowshoes is like being inside the guts of a Zamboni. Raquettes (oh so onomatopoeically named by the French) kick up a helluva lot of snow. That’s how Ranger the Indefatigable Snowdog gets the cute white stripe on his nose. I get a similar stripe from my waist to my toes. I tied my jacket around my waist and quickly found my unzipped pockets filled up like a couple of sandbags with crushed ice. I got crushed ice in some other places too. It’s, like, completely impossible to be warm and comfortable when you’re coated with melting snow. The cottage hot tub becomes essential post-run therapy. Without it I would still be shivering.

So all you people who are trying to popularize the sport of snowshoe running, don’t look to me. It is good exercise. It is an easy and fun way to get out into the winter backcountry. But skiing is better.

I went telemark skiing at Beaver Valley on Sunday morning. It was my first day on the hill this season, thanks to all the running and life getting in the way. That spoiled me for the day, and also caused my late start on the trail and the short distance of my run. I had to quit early and call Tory to come pick me up (thank you!) because entering the Bayview Escarpment Provincial Nature Reserve as planned would have meant running (literally) out of daylight. Then I had to figure out how to keep warm for 45 minutes standing around in tights.

Survival Scenario

I decided to light a fire because I’ve been carrying around a little survival kit with matches and a lighter, and I’d always figured I could light a fire if I hurt myself and started to freeze to death. I burned up my entire box of matches. I had to fight with Ranger for every twig because Tory and I did not take life-and-death fire lighting into account when we encouraged Monsieur de-Ranger to play tug-of-war with sticks (so cute!). He dismantled the fire with gusto as fast as I could build it.

Oh what fun it is to laugh and sing…while losing all sensation in one’s fingers.

Notes to self: Bic lighter is impossible to use with cold hands if you don’t de-childproof it first; carry fire-starting materials; carry a knife; tie up dog before trying to collect firewood; do not plan to rely on fire for warmth—stick to jumping jacks.

Spring can’t come soon enough.

Sunday 11 January
Distance: 20.5 km
Time: 5.5 hours
Avg speed: 3.7 km/h
Total distance to date: 600.5-ish km
Distance to go: 278.5-ish 284.5 km

Cold, wet feet just waiting to happen.

I had this idea that it would be just brilliant to snowshoe in running shoes, and that instead of buying something purpose-built for snowshoe-running (surely such a thing exists, though I haven’t seen it), I would transform my $30 closeout Adidas trail runners into winter footwear with the addition of $60 Gore-Tex socks. So far, so good.

About halfway through my run my left snowshoe broke through creek ice into knee-deep water (at which point I noticed the bridge). Although only my left foot got soaked, this seemed to give both socks the idea to open the floodgates. By the end of the run the right foot was as wet as the left.

It turns out that snowshoes kick a lot of snow back up onto your legs. If you wear tights, this snow builds up, glacier-like, into balls of ice which gradually melt into your leggings, which, in their engineered space-age way, do a great job of wicking all that moisture into the $6o waterproof socks you’ve got them tucked into. By hour five I could not feel my feet. I was running on numb clubs desperately trying to pound some blood through them. The feeling came back when I hit a long section of road and picked up speed. Back at the cottage, I wrung about a quart of water out of my socks which I’m convinced would have turned to ice had I stopped moving on the trail, my feet changing state with them. Back to the drawing board in the footwear department.

Annoying features of the Bruce Trail in winter include:

1. Cedars bowed over with snow in huge booby-trap clumps, concealing dog-swallowing hollows (Ranger hates these now), and rendering the trail indistinguishable from the surrounding dumping-snow-down-your-back forest.

2. The din of snowmobiles, close enough you can choke on the fumes. I’ve met some very decent sledheads. I understand that snowmobiles are one of the great modern inventions that have changed life and landscape in northern communities for the better. I even tried snowmobiling once as the open-minded participant in a media junket (about which I still have nightmares). However, as a form of winter recreation, there is no excuse for it. The death of snowmobiling may be the single greatest benefit of a warming planet.

3. Wet feet. See above.

4. Impossible to see trail. White on white. See Day 19.

5. Slow progress. I did manage to break into sort of a shuffling running gait on snowshoes for much of this day’s distance, but it’s still only half my summer speed.

6. The Bruce Trail’s ever-increasing distance. This has nothing to do with winter but it is annoying. The members of the Bruce Trail Conservancy have been working like beavers to piece together additional sections of the Niagara Escarpment to tack onto the existing Bruce Trail. Power to them. But could they just please hold off the unveilings until after I’ve passed by? Earlier this year when they opened 30-odd kilometres of new trail in Beaver Valley, it added a day to my run. And now, just when I thought I was only a day from Owen Sound, I discover the “Bayview Extension”, a new 57(?) km addition along the Bayview Escarpment. Right now the trail seems to be growing faster than I’m running it; at this rate I’ll never be finished. The Bruce Trail is an elastic thing. It’s like a river you can’t step into twice. Maybe that’s why some people hike it over and over again. I don’t know if the Bruce Trail has hit the 1,000 km mark yet, but if not I’ll bet there’s some earnest committee out there gunning for it.  They should have a party. There are probably folks who won’t be happy until the Bruce Trail passes through both poles. There is really no limit to how far you can travel between A and B.

Complaints aside, it feels like I’m the only one out here hiking the trail in the middle of winter, and that’s cool. When I do come across other snowshoe tracks, rarely, I feel mildly disappointed at the loss of solitude even as I pick up speed. I’ve spent some significant time cesspooling about how I could have finished the trail last summer if I’d been more committed, devoted more weekends to it and put in longer days, but I think the full seasonal experience is still the better way to go, richer in memories and all that.

I can say that now. I’m wearing dry socks.