I coped. 

He didn’t mean it in a mean way, but he was being blunt: I was the kind of person—the kind that had a label so it must be a type—who put off seeking help well-past the time when I probably should have.  I coped with pain and minor injury and only found my way to medical help when it was beyond personal reckoning. 

I vowed to myself right then and there to do better.

So, you would think, when I fell in the woods a few weeks ago and suspected a broken rib that I would have found medical help and dealt with it.

I did not.

Again, I need to remind you this is not a coaching or advice website and you should not take my advice, and in some cases you should not even follow my terrible example.

Instead of having it checked, I coped. And of course, the longer one waits on something like that the more foolish one feels going into a medical establishment and admitting to ignoring a suspected broken bone for what has quickly become nearly a month.

Sigh.

We went on a dark run, and I realized after driving twenty minutes and digging through the glove box of my car that I had failed to put fresh batteries in my headlamp.

We were headed into some unlit trails in the dark.

Up here in the middle of the Canadian prairies we’re not quite at that never-ending night that they get up at the  arctic circle, but here the days do get awfully short. By the time the solstice rolls around we’re probably going to be lucky to see eight hours of sunlight per day. In fact, thanks to getting rid of daylight savings time this year our share of the sun is not due to rise in December until well after 9am, and then be set and gone again around 5pm.

Unless I start doing exclusively lunch runs, I’m going to need to find some fresh batteries for my headlamp.

Night runs are not a bad thing, of course. They are moody and quiet. The world looks different after dark. Safety and mental alertness becomes more important—watching for cars on the street or stray roots on the trails—and I fully recognize that my gender and size put me into a bit of a privileged place to enjoy these runs for their vibe and not necessarily be so wary of them for their other dangers.

We took our first night run as there was still a bit of lingering sunlight in the west, but within a klick or so we were deep into a dark trail, me holding out the light from my phone to check for tripping hazards, and the group of us little more than bobbing lights ahead and behind, occasionally calling out names to do a running roll call.

It was cool and creepy, just days from Halloween, the snow not yet arrived but the air feeling like it wanted it. And by the time we finished we were exhausted from the focus and shivering from the drop in temperatures.

I cranked the heater in my truck as I drove home, and wondered where I left my spare batteries.

We stumbed into a trail run on a recently passed weekend. It wasn’t an intense mountain ultra by any means, but in attempting to keep out of the cool October winds early on Sunday morning we ducked into the shelter of the trees and woodier areas adjacent to our more regular running routes and spared little reluctance to dive headlong into hitherto unexplored diversions from the same. 

That is to say, we knew there was some single track through the little suburban creek that cleaves between our little suburban corner of the city and the greater metropolis but they tended to be trails we ignored in favour of either more serious training or longer, more serious running adventures.

But it was Thanksgiving morning, there was a fresh box of it-was-someones-birthday pastries waiting back at the coffee shop where we run, and we were looking at something short and simple and let’s just get it done today and go have a coffee, okay?

The leaves crunching, the colours on the ground and in the trees, and the whole autumn vibe if I’m being honest—it all inspired me to pull out my phone and record some improptu footage of the run. I held the camera ahead of me as I dashed through the trees and dodged obstacles. 

If autumn seems like a long season, here on the Canadian prairies we are often lucky to get more than a week.

By next weekend the air will have chilled a bit more, the leaves will be detritus on the ground surrounded by a million bare branches. There could even be snow—it’s a coin flip. 

So instead we enjoy the trails in the moment, for a moment, and dig our winter gear from storage for another cold season as our autumn running seasons blinks past in a blur of orange and red and brown.

I originally wrote this on October 16, 2024 and posted in on my personal blog.

See, around these parts autumn is a season that lasts about as long as a soap bubble at a kid’s birthday party. The trees have been green all summer, and then over the course of a few days everything turns hues of gold and orange and red. The world is glowing.

And then a few days later all that foliage is on the ground, the trees are bare, and we won’t see naught but bare branches until about April.

I get a little excitable when I’m in the trails with my camera and the sun is out and the leaves are turning, and Sunday was just such a morning. We had veered into the local suburban trails, dipping into a nearby creek that drops out of the sprawl and winds through about eight klicks of relatively pristine urban woodland. There are literally parts where you don’t realize you are running through a city of a million people—but then you go around a corner and see that mansion overlooking the ravine and the nearby golf course and you try to stay in your happy place, there on the trail.

We were in the creek and the sun was making the world glow a vibrant orange.

I literally took a hundred photos as we were running. Oh sure, a quarter of them were blurry and it the trail plus trees plus blue sky got a little derivative after twenty minutes or so, but—wow—was I ever distracted, lagging behind, running with my phone in my hand and the camera app open so that I could be ready for the next perfect photo op.

Distraction is not a bad thing. I mean, race season is pretty much over and why are we out there on the trails on a Sunday morning in autumn if not for the experience, after all?

But my focus was not on the run as much as it was on the trees that morning, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.

Me, not usually. A few groans, but I generally get back up again, shake it off, and keep going.

But when recently I took the Kid down into the local river valley to run some autumn trails…well, I tripped. The irony of the situation was, of course, that I wasn’t looking where I was going because I had cranked my head back to tell my daughter to watch her footing because of all the tree roots and… thwaaap! A second later I’m rolling along the ground with all the elegant momentum of a giraffe falling down a waterslide.

My watch started buzzing alerts. It had detected the fall and was getting ready to call in the calvary. The Kid was patiently panicking, and was already dialling her mother—my wife—on the phone to alert her. I was cursing my inelegance.

I was also trying to figure out what hurt and by how much, but I was flat on my back in the middle of some freshly fallen autumn foliage and half sprawled across a lonely trail far enough from where we’d parked that it was going to be trouble if I couldn’t get myself out of there.

I lay there taking a few deep breaths as all the sounds swirled around me. Nature. A dialing phone. A buzzing watch.

Evaluation: a bruised ego, some scratches on the palms of my hands, a bumped knee, and I think I pulled a muscle in my torso. 

We limped along for a couple hundred meters, but I rallied and we finished another five klicks (getting out of the trails and onto smoother, safer asphalt) and a little slower than planned.

I made a few sounds along the way, too, but most of them are not appropriate for print.

The major arterial road that transects the suburban subsection where I live has been going through an expansion, adding dedicated transit lanes, widening, rehabilitating, and adding capacity through doubling bridges. It has taken years, and there are still a couple of years left.

All this construction, as focused as it has been on car traffic though, has had the side benefit of adding a bunch of new pedestrian trails and three new footbridges (the third yet to be completed as I write this.)

As a runner who spends almost as much time on foot on that trail system as I do in my vehicle, this has been fantastic… and also an adventure in path finding through an ever-changing network of asphalt multi-use trails.

Path finding, of course, is not just about finding routes. It is also about making plans to traverse those routes in a way that is interesting and compelling and, importantly, achievable. It is not worth it, after all, to set out on a trail that loops back after twelve klicks if everyone only was ready to run eight.

We path finders are only trusted so far as our maps match expectations of distance and difficulty. Take a bunch of runners on an adventure that was twice as long as planned and people get mad… or don’t show up for next week’s run.

With all these new trails and paths and bridge connections all the mental mapping I had stored away in my brain after multiple decades of running the local trail network is suddenly supplemented or just plain wrong.

It’s a real labour of love doing this, but it is still hard work. So. Don’t take the path finder in your group for granted. They are always checking out maps and shortcuts and new construction for interesting routes that twist down a new direction and add some mystery and magic to the next run. 

And remember, that construction sign often means someone needs to plan a new running route soon.

Autumn is a special sliver of time here.

By late November we are lucky if the temperatures are still above freezing and even luckier if there isn’t the first few falls of snow mucking up the paths.

As I write this in mid-September, the summer heat has seemingly dissipated.  There are scattered warm days that creep into the forecast, but mostly its become jacket weather, cool and occasionally drizzly, as the daylight hours shorten up and the evenings become hauntingly eerie and wild colourful sunsets a regular evening event.

The trees oblige. We have this local network of amazing trails through our river valley, a park system that is often cited as world class municipal park (though it is pretty much just a lot of interconnected wilderness with a ribbon of asphalt running through it.) The forests of the river valley spend a splendid few days turning from green to oranges and yellow and reds. They drop those leaves shortly thereafter, but for a few days running those autumn trails is like being transported to some kind of kaleidoscope of otherworldly magic. 

The cooler weather means more comfortable runs. I know some people love running in hotter weather, but give me single digit Celsius any day.  They say you feel ten to fifteen degrees warmer than the ambient air when you’re deep into your run, so a ten degree jog is almost spot on room temperature math for me personally. And I can run all day in that vibe.

It’s autumn as I post this. And again, call me crazy, but my season just began and I’m lacing up.