Cleo Boyd is a 28-year-old runner from Mississauga who placed second to Leslie Sexton last year at the Canadian 10K Championships in Toronto with a time of 33:11:22. On Saturday, Boyd is lining up against Krista DuChene, Olympian, at the Canadian 10K Championships in Ottawa, and DuChene is a runner who Boyd says inspired her when she was 16, and who inspires her today, as she tries to live a balanced and healthy, competitive life. In anticipation of the race, and in celebration of our sport and the overall good feelings around the return of in-person Canadian racing, iRun arranged for Boyd and DuChene to meet virtually and discuss their lives, their race plans, their community, and the future of our sport.  

iRun: As race day approaches, what are the vibes? 

Boyd: It feels like such a long time since we’ve been racing in Canada that I feel excited, almost like Ottawa is going to be a reunion, and Krista, I just have to say, you’re someone I’ve looked up to for awhile. 

DuChene: I first raced Ottawa in 2003 and I feel the same way as Cleo, it’s nice to be back in person and I knew with this race, I just had to be there. 

Boyd: For me, it was Krista and Lanni [Marchant]. I remember not knowing any Canadian women who even did the marathon on a high level. I might have been in high school and seeing you two crush it, I remember thinking: these are women, not college athletes.

DuChene: It’s exciting to see up and coming athletes and knowing where they’re at. Cleo, I did the broadcast of the 10K Championships last year in Toronto. You were there?

Boyd: Yes. 

DuChene: I remember you puked at the finish line. 

Boyd: Yes. 

DuChene: That stood out to me because you seemed so humble to admit it in your interview that you got sick and I admired the way that you handled yourself—no pride, you just put it all out there and that was admirable. It’s neat that we look at each other in different, yet similar, ways. 

iRun: Let’s talk about competing and what that means. Cleo, pushing yourself to the point of making yourself sick: can you talk about your will to compete? 

Boyd: I’m curious to what you’re going to say, Krista, but to me it feels almost ordinary: making that discomfort feel normal. I don’t even think about it as switching gears.

That’s probably what all of us miss when we’re hurt, being in that place where you’re uncomfortable. There’s something peaceful about that place. 

DuChene: We’re choosing to do it, choosing to go there, and we enjoy it. When you finish a race you want to make sure you have no regrets when you’re done—did I push? Did I hurt? Did I give everything? If you didn’t, you’re looking back and your chance is gone.

iRun: So, when the leather hits the road Saturday, what should we expect?

Boyd: I respect the other women I’m racing with and know I would have to have my best day ever to win. My training has been solid for a couple years, but I haven’t put it together on a race day—yet. I’m hoping my fitness shows up and I’ll be able to hang with these women—maybe beat them—but I have so much respect for everyone I’m lining up with.

DuChene: In Toronto, were you second to Lesley? 

Boyd: Yeah, but I got dropped pretty early and I’m a little disappointed with that result. I thought I could hang with Lesley. 

iRun: And Krista, will you try and hang with Cleo? 

DuChene: Oh, my no. I’m going after the age group record, over 45, because in the 40-45 age group, there’s Sasha Gollish, Natasha Wodak, and I think Malindi [Elmore] has the record.  

Boyd: What time Krista? 

DuChene: 35-low. I should write it on my hand. I know I have it written down somewhere, but I won’t be racing Cleo. I’ll be nudging her to the front middle, standing in the back, yelling: Make sure you puke! 

iRun: Cleo, not to put you on the spot, but what is it, or when was it, that Krista came on your radar? 

Boyd: I remember watching Krista in Boston the year it was so miserable and, of course, a Canadian crushed it. I remember watching the TV and screaming and I’m sure so many Canadians had that pride on that day.

Boyd: Another thing I remember about Krista has to do with overcoming injuries. Did you have femoral fracture?

DuChene: I did. I had to have three screws in my leg. 

Boyd: I read that at 16 and it made me think that you can get through an injury and come out on the other side of it and be fit. Your journey to fitness was, for me, motivating and inspiring. 

DuChene: I wrote about that in the hospital. I wanted to be author of my own story and be authentic about who I am. I have no mask. I had no guarantee of the outcome. It’s neat that less than a year later I had the Olympic Standard, but at the time it was: how do I make it to the bathroom on my crutches?    

iRun: How do you feel, hearing Cleo, knowing that your message to young female athletes gets through? 

DuChene: I’ve always been deliberate about choosing how I use my words and represent women and I’m excited to see girls in sport.

Boyd: There’s so many great role models. I look up to Lyndsay Tessier and I’ve seen these women excel—Malindi Elmore—and I’ve tried to follow in their footsteps. 

DuChene: To hear what Cleo says, when I started, there was a gap. I was the first Canadian to qualify for the Olympics in 20 years, but Lanni and I realized we could do this. Back then, it wasn’t as competitive as it is now, but the Olympic Standard was there for both of us to get. I want to be a role model. Even with the broadcasting, I want girls to look at something that’s been a male-dominated job and say, ‘A female can do that.’ A girl can turn on the computer and and see a woman doing the job.  

Peter Symons and Samantha Johnson, two marathon runners in Toronto, were recently featured in a popular story in iRun magazine. This is that story. Being underdogs and positive, generous people, I followed-up with the two athletes and asked them what they’ve learned month after month and year after year in their shoes. These are their tips for not only getting the most out of your running, but finding something in yourself to give back to our sport.

5 comments around running, by Samantha Johnson.

1. The hardest part of running isn’t getting out the door, but the first 10 minutes where you are trying to figure out how to actually run, and breath. But then, all of the sudden it comes together.
2. If you don’t start you will never finish.
3. Running gives you permission to eat all the ice cream you want. 
4. Going for beers after running is the best.
5. The running community is something special, and they make you always feel welcome and special.

Pithy realities on racing marathons from an old guy [Peter Symons] who has only raced two.

• Find friends with more experience than you and take their advice—but listen to your body.
• Train your body to tolerate and use fuelling. It is just as important as the running part.
• Always have two sequential race goals. Not every day will be your day.
• Buy fancy, expensive shoes—they may not make you much faster, but the physiologic impact will.
• Training for a spring marathon through a Canadian winter is tough. But you’ll fall back in love with running once it’s over.

Howdy! I’m Diane Chesla and am Co-Race Director of the Niagara Falls International Marathon (NFIM) exploring the mind-body connection of running & how lessons learned can be applied to life.

In my last article I talked about the concept of “flow” by researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. To recap, it’s a state we can get ourselves into, especially in sport where time seems to stand still and our activities feel effortless.  What’s really important to understand is that a key tenet of flow is when our our skill level meets a challenge we engage in. If the challenge seems too great we experience anxiety. If it seems too easy, we experience boredom.

In running, we absolutely can experience a state of flow whether it’s a simple feeling of an effortless run or far off on the opposite spectrum, where we have a complete out of body experience as I shared in my last article. To experience this state, we have to have miles on our feet that comes from years of running, speed work, hill work and all of that. We then have to engage in a run we deem challenging that meets our level of training. These are the basic inputs according to Csikszentmihalyi’s theories of flow.

Sure, there are those freak incidents where someone finds themselves in a precarious situation and can draw upon previously unknown strengths (e.g. running in a life threatening chase), but this situation is rare. What I actually want to explore in this article is exactly how we apply lessons learned from states of flow in running to real life.

When I started exploring the concept of “applying lessons learned from sport to life,” I noticed that most who spoke on this topic had the same advice. For example, we can analyze our training that helped us finish a marathon and conclude that focus, determination and overcoming challenges were keys to achieving our goal and can in turn be applied to succeeding in a career. What I noticed is that this isn’t so easy to do. For one, humans are emotional beings with distinct personalities and layers upon layers of conditioned responses built around our psyche. I never found that running taught me to deal with tough personalities, group dynamics, power plays or how to deal with my own emotional layers that I accumulated throughout my life experiences. 

There are a myriad of techniques we can try to “un-peel” these layers and better ourselves, but my interest is in how we can apply lessons learned from sport to “real” life. What I’m going to share with you here is one approach. I learned this approach while studying method acting at the Strasberg Institute. In method acting, we bring the most authentic version of ourselves on stage. How is it done? Through sense memory training that triggers an emotional response. Imagine—and this is the key—imagine that we are biting into a lemon wedge. We will most likely tense up our face and recall this as an unpleasant experience. We can go through all of our sense responses in this imaginary act—the smell, the taste, the feel and the visual recall of the lemon. Imagine now that we have to play a character on stage where we are disgusted by someone or something we see. Right before we go on stage we go through the sensory exercise pretending we are eating the lemon so we get all bitter and feel repulsed. We stay in that state during our act and voila, we now are repelled by this person or act in the scene.

Let’s do this exercise with running. Imagine we are having this amazing run.  What does it feel like? Can you feel the gentle breeze caress your skin? Can you hear the melodic sounds of birds chirping? Are you in the country and witness the vast beauty of open spaces?  Can you feel your legs move in perfect rhythmic strides? Can you taste the dewy freshness of the air around you? You are in flow, no matter how intense or long this experience is. Do you feel like you are incredibly happy during this experience? Feel in charge of your world, your being?

Fast forward to a work day. You have to make a presentation in front of an important client. You’re not a good public speaker. What you can do is prep by relaxing and then recalling this amazing run and sensory experience. Go through each sense and recall the feeling of the run. Be very specific and take your time. Minutes before entering the presentation space at work, recall everything about that amazing run.  Enter the boardroom and knock ‘em dead! The key is staying in that heightened state.

There is a missing component to flow and sense memory recall. In my next article I explore the importance of relaxation as a precursor to states of flow.

Everyone runs for their own reasons, but too often the people who set world records are the runners being recognized. In actual fact, it’s the middle of the pack runners, even the back of the pack people—the runners who do it day in, day out, despite obstacles and hardships, setbacks and medical situations, and who continue to get out and run—who are the real stars. It’s easy to run when you’re great at it. When it comes naturally, when you beat everyone, and when Lululemon gives you free clothes. 

The most popular two runners at my club in Toronto are neither the fastest or the most buzzworthy on Instagram. But make no mistake, they’re warriors. They’ve both run marathons, and hoof it outside throughout the worst of our winters. But their stories aren’t one of shoe sponsorships and elite bibs; rather, they’re stories of perseverance, kindness, and strength.  

“I started running mostly to lose weight in 2013 when I was 63—there was 70 pounds more of me in those days and I had bad discipline,” says Peter Symons, who took a 5K to the Marathon course I taught at BlackToe Running, and had his cardiologist notice he was experiencing “skipping heartbeats.” Peter says the doctor wasn’t too worried. “You’ve done nothing for 63 years, the doctor told me, and so you surprised the hell out of your heart—but there’s nothing structurally wrong with you.”

The cardiologist told Peter to wait five or six years before running a marathon and Peter did that, running the marathon in 2019 and then, at 72, completing Boston.  

“The reason I love the running community is it doesn’t matter how young or how old or how slow or how fast you are, as long as you do your best you’re embraced by the whole community. I’d never seen a group like it, so tolerant and inclusive, it’s remarkable.” 

Samantha Johnson, pictured above, was a student wrestler and played rugby so her pre-running toughness is ingrained. But that was before she had cancer, then had cancer again, and had part of her pelvic bone and abdominal wall removed. After she ran the Mississauga Marathon this May, Johnson signed up for the half marathon in Toronto, and another marathon in California this December.  

“After the cancer, I had to figure out if I could run again, and what that looks like, and I didn’t want it to define me and I kept pushing through,” says Johnson, who met her partner,  multiple time Boston Marathon finisher Doug Kells, at BlackToe Running, where at least a dozen runners have showed up for training and left with a partner for life. 

“I can’t run as fast as Kathleen [Lawrence, a popular BlackToe runner recently named a female elite], but we had similar running style, so we would talk about some of the same issues we had, like tight calves, and we put in similar efforts and are willing to work hard and go to levels of pain that we probably shouldn’t, and I think whether you run a two hour, four hour or seven hour 10K or half marathon, it’s all challenging in a different way.”

The challenge of the run and the camaraderie of the training group; the shared effort in the workouts and jubilation and despair, which all runners experience in equal measures, are all part of the running experience. And there’s nothing better than rooting on our Canadian elites like Malindi Elmore and Ben Presser and whoever the fastest runner is amongst the people that you know, wherever you are. But too often it’s the people who don’t show up in the newspaper stories with the real journeys that deserve recounting. These are the runners who should inspire each of us to not only achieve our very best, but to do it graciously. Both Peter and Samantha famously cheer on their fellow runners and both of them are quick to pick up the next round. They give more than they take from our sport of running. And think about that. Because that’s a personal best. It’s not a finishing time. It’s your life.  

“I refused to buy the fast shoes at first because I thought they’re only meant for fast people, but I had to retrain my mind so that ‘fast’ doesn’t mean whatever magic number people say. I was feeling slow so I didn’t want the fast shoes, but now I’ll tell you: Put me in the fast shoes and do whatever you can,” says Samantha Johnson, with a laugh. “I keep telling Doug, I’m missing part of my pelvic bone and abdominal wall and don’t have the same stability that everyone has, but I do whatever it takes to make myself a better runner. 

I run because I get stronger with whatever I have.”