It has been analogized marathoners train so hard because we’re either running away from something or running towards something. Well, at least recently by my therapist. 

My experience with the 42.2km (and the training leading up to it) has been a bit of both. When I commit to the intense training and race experience I know this beast of a distance involves, it is usually because I am “running away” from a place of deep hurt and “running towards” a place of healing. Boston 2021 is no exception.

The amount of loss and grief brought into our lives during this global pandemic is incomparable. Regardless of what those losses have been, I think that we’re all living with our own individual heartbreaks. Undoubtedly, they will require time to heal as we collectively move forward. 

Looking outside at the rain falling into the evening streets of my neighbourhood makes me feel punished by Mother Nature for the delay I’ve taken to go for my run. Wet streets or not – I still need to get out there and pound the pavement. I lace up and get dressed for the weather. I grab my keys and, in a rare and impulsive move, my iPod and head out the door. 

I make my way down Sherwood along my favourite hilly route. The rain mists my face and my thighs begin reddening from the cooler temperature. When training for Boston I incorporate as many hills into my runs as possible to prepare for the various infamous climbs on the race course. After completing a series of hills this evening (eight to be precise) I opt out of running in this residential neighbourhood and make my way onto the commercial streets of Wellington. 

The combination of yet another provincial lockdown and the rain has left the streets relatively empty. I take in the ghostly scene. Bordered up windows on small businesses that have not been able to stay open. A discarded face mask floating in a puddle. I shake my head sadly in response to a man holding out his hat for change. Heartbreaks.

I turn onto Parkdale, looping back home, and I change the shuffling track playing on my iPod. As the music starts, I immediately recognize the melody and voice as his vocals flood my ears. The scars around my heart instantly tighten. Lactic acid hits and my quads begin to burn. I blink, fighting back the tears while sudden emotional pain unexpectedly partners the physical.

****

Love hit like a wave. Effortless conversations streamed on for hours. Bodies relaxed as we held each other; sighing in relief. A shared unprecedented connection had pulled us out of the deep end of our respective pasts. Safe at last.

His words overflowed from his heart onto paper as the chapters of our story were written. Scenes of a future together were silently exchanged in knowing glances and flushed cheeks. Then, when the stakes got high, he broke the film reel. He flooded the room where it was stored leaving no trace behind. Tightly sealed windows and doors facilitated the rising water line which did all but drown out his last words.

You don’t exist.

You can’t exist. 

I was abandoned. 

No life preserver.

Anchored by a betrayal. 

Like my father. 

He left too. 

Running. 

Like water.

*** 

Loop completed. Thoroughly drenched, chilled, and exhausted from the run I head into the shower when I get home. As I rinse the mud off my legs I feel the pain in my quads and glutes consolidating as my muscles tighten. 

I wait. 

I wait for the physical pain in my lower body to be matched with the arrival of emotional pain in my chest. 

Unlike on the run – it doesn’t.

For the first time, in what feels like a long time, I breathe a little easier. 

Dear reader. Who knows? Maybe the best cure for this broken heart is going to be found in a little cardio. 

Vanessa de Hoog is a human. Being. She runs, teaches, writes, coaches, and consumes too much espresso. This fan of the Oxford comma lives in Ottawa with her cat Gatsby.

Visiting Moose Jaw a few years back I went for a sightseeing run through the city. Coming after a long winter, this first jaunt in the warm spring sun was divine. Afterwards, in the public library near my hotel I found a book I hadn’t seen in decades. 

The Complete Book of Running by James F. Fixx was a million-seller in 1977. An enduring classic among running books, it was still being referenced decades later (including by Roger Bannister in his 2014 autobiography, Twin Tracks). Rightly so, because in its day it was the Bible of running knowledge. 

Leafing through the worn copy in Moose Jaw I was surprised at how well its prophetic offerings had weathered the test of time. It was also a delightful blast from my own past. I’d run through much of the history contained between its covers. Most intriguing of all, though, it contained a compelling message for older runners today.

The Complete Book of Running came out when the initial North American running boom was in full swing. Athletes and duffers, women and men, kids, teens and middle-aged adults were taking this new activity to the streets. For the first time in history, masses of people were getting into running. 

Whether training for races or jogging for fitness, most were doing so with little knowledge of it. A nation crying out for running information found that The Complete Book of Running answered their call. It informed, educated and changed attitudes. 

Fixx was pioneering his way through his own experiences with the sport while combining personal observations with anecdotal and medical evidence of running’s benefits. He was preaching to a larger American public that was still wary and sceptical of the growing armies of men and women wearing little shorts trotting around its parks and streets. 

Fixx presented road races, marathons and jogging as normal and beneficial to health, not aberrations performed by a few fitness freaks. He was fighting a vocal chorus of naysayers, including medical doctors, who believed running was unhealthy, unnatural and perhaps even the sign of a demented mind. (My Grade 8 teacher rebuked me in front of my entire class after he saw me running on the street near our school!)

Time hadn’t yet disproven what many North Americans believed: That recreational running was just a craze, a passing fad. Playboy magazine published a piece titled Jogging Can Kill You! Fixx countered these claims with studies, research data and interviews with runners. Ahead of his time on the science, he was also socially progressive. 

He dedicated an entire chapter to promoting women runners, attributing to them a better stride and greater stamina than their male competitors. This just five years after women were banned from running the Boston Marathon. In the mid-70s, only five percent of race entrants were female. Picture road races with starting lines of 300 runners and only 15 are women. I can. I was on those starting lines. 

At a time when suggesting so was tantamount to medical heresy, Fixx wrote that jogging could be beneficial to those who have suffered a heart event. The Complete Book of Running delved into running’s esoteric aspects: What it does to you psychologically; that it would extend your life; and that it could enhance sexual pleasure. Fixx even described the two-footed sightseeing he did in cities he visited, as I had just done in Moose Jaw. 

The Tarahumara runners of Mexico got a mention, 32 years before Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run. Illustrations accompanying his text emphasized inclusiveness. They depict men and women, African Americans and white people, star athletes and the chubby, kids and old shufflers. We’re all in there. Fixx built a big tent.

Of course some 44-year old information about running is out of date. I grinned at a few entertaining throwbacks: Running in cut-off blue jeans (quite a few people did); a discussion about whether jockstraps were the best underwear for male runners; if female joggers needed extra chest support.

There’s little advice on running shoes or supplements, because not a lot was known about either. In 1970 I ran a 20-mile race in Regina without the benefit of a single water station. Later that decade I finished near the front of the Melissa’s race in Banff wearing tennis shoes. At the time, neither of these experiences were abnormal. 

Yet Fixx was unintentionally prescient about running footwear. The shoes worn by the runner on his book’s iconic red cover are nylon Onitsuka Tigers, the same shoes I wore for many, many miles in in my youth. Onitsuka Tigers – take note here you barefoot and minimalist shoe people – had extremely little construction, all of the built-in support of a pair of bedroom slippers.   

Fixx came to running from a bad place – obese, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and working at a stressful journalism job. His only previous experience with it was in military basic training, so he did his first training runs in army boots. What shines through on every page of his famous book, though, is his love and heartfelt gratitude for running. 

Most remarkable of all about The Complete Book of Running is its promotion of running for seniors. Much of this jump-off-the-page wisdom reads like it was written yesterday.

We meet a 64 year-old man who runs the Boston Marathon in under three hours. This is remarkable, the author points out, only because he is an American, as Europeans consider activity in older age to be more acceptable. 

“In this country we have some odd ideas about how older people, even those barely into their forties, ought to behave.” Fixx wrote. He quoted medical authorities to back his claim. 

“Our attitude is one of overprotection,” says Dr. Theodore G. Klumpp, a New York cardiologist who hopes to establish a nationwide exercise program for the elderly. “Our middle-aged and older people are encouraged and virtually compelled to reduce their physical activities to the point where atrophy sets in, with damaging if not disastrous results.” Fixx then dialled up a higher authority. 

“Disuse is the mortal enemy of the the human body,” says the U.S. Administration on Aging. “We know today how a person lives, not how long he lives, is responsible for many of the physical problems normally associated with advanced age.” Fixx brought more ammunition to his argument, writing:  

“Exercise – in particular running – can do a lot to reverse the long-term effects of smoking, drinking and overeating, the salient conditions of twentieth century living. Studies have shown that sedentary older people who start training can become as fit as long-time athletes.” 

Even octogenarians, he maintained, can increase their physical capacities enormously. Then he quotes an anonymous doctor, “Most of us don’t wear out. We rust out.”

This out of print book poses an awkward question for baby boomers today. Have we taken to heart its words of wisdom about running into old age?  Has Fixx’s pertinent, advanced and encouraging advice to senior runners – delivered nearly a half century ago – been received? Are we acting on it? 

No, we’re not. Too many of us have simply given up on running toward personal lifelong fitness. Returning to my hotel that day, the inviting pathways through Moose Jaw’s Crescent Park were conspicuously free of joggers. Over the three days I was in this lovely city of 33,000, I didn’t see a single runner, young or old. Not one. 

In 2021, we need to find a new Fixx for this.

Jenkins has finished his book Jogging Through the Graveyard: Running For My Life After 60

My running partner recommended we bring our masks on our Wednesday night run and it wasn’t something I was going to do. We’ve reported in the past about the unlikelihood of spreading COVID-19 while outdoors running with a sole partner and I didn’t think—even as the cases get worse across the country—that masks were necessary. We run, generally, away from people and I don’t like how a mask feels while running. However, I don’t want to be selfish and if wearing a mask means the difference between running outside or staying home, I’d wear a mask in a second. We asked Dr. John Hooper, an ICU physician at the Ottawa Hospital, also the medical director of the Ottawa Marathon, if we need to wear a mask on a run.

“If you can spread out on your run, I don’t think you need to wear a mask,” says Dr. Hooper, mentioning that social distancing is the key for healthy outdoor exercise. Dr. Hooper says that where he lives, in the Kanata section of Ottawa, he has space devoid of crowds and so a mask wouldn’t be necessary; although, he might wear one anyway because he doesn’t want to send the wrong signal. Dr. Hooper describes his situation at Ottawa Hospital as bleak and says that the third wave of COVID-19 is upon us and everyone has to do their best to pitch in. We shouldn’t run with groups or expect organized races to return. But he still doesn’t think that if you have space to run away from people that a mask is necessary.

“If you’re running and nobody’s near you, I don’t think you have to wear a mask,” says Dr. Hooper. “The biggest issue with COVID is social distancing, but going out and exercising is more than appropriate, it’s necessary.”

We recently put the question to our readers on Facebook and received more than 150 responses to the question of whether or not runners were ready to exercise in their masks. Readers were mixed 50/50 in their responses. 

“I already run in my mask,” wrote one reader. “I mostly run in the early morning or at night and down side streets alone, so I simply pull it down below my nose, but have it at the ready for when I approach an intersection, or if there are people approaching (or I’m approaching them). I pull the mask up out of respect. As a runner, I find it incredibly selfish when other runners come up behind me and blow by huffing and puffing leaving me in their spit jet stream! Imagine how non-runners feel??”

Another reader wrote: “If this is what is asked of me to protect my family and my community then I’m all in!”

“I wear one while running outdoors,” another reader wrote. “I wore one during labour last August, if I can handle that I can run in one no problem!”

Still, a big population of our audience didn’t think the masks were necessary on a run. 

“If people are that afraid of catching COVID outdoors while they’re wearing their own mask because someone passing by them on a run in a matter of 1 second might be contagious, they are more than welcome to stay safe at home,” one reader wrote. 

“I 100% support masks, but I don’t wear a mask for running, which I do alone and give people space,” wrote another reader. “I’m curious what type of masks those running with them use. I find I struggle for air when walking up a steep hill with my around town mask on, so I think running would be a struggle. I’m curious how it is.”

Another comment which I think matches my own reasoning is this one: “If it was mandatory then I would have to run with a mask, but until then I will not.” Dr. Hooper, appro

“I’m all for masks and if you’re walking around and other people are around I’d put you in my idiot category or selfish category if you’re not wearing a mask,” says Dr. Hooper. “Masks aren’t the perfect solution, but they help. If you’re out there by yourself and no one is near you, you can pull your mask down. It could be beneficial to feel like a human being out there getting fresh air.”

Tim Pellerin might not look like your typical cannabis executive. Slim, energetic and a veteran of multiple marathons and too many half marathons to count, Pellerin is a longtime veteran of the packaged goods industry and the Nova Scotia Liquor & Cannabis Corporation who became interested in cannabis when PAX Labs contacted him in the summer of 2019. The PAX mission? “Establish cannabis as a force for good.” 

“We believe in the plant and that from recreational enjoyment to a medicinal role in a patient’s life, cannabis can be a positive influence and so we want to deliver the best, most transparent experience possible,” says Pellerin, who adds that his company, like the Apple of cannabis accessories, offers a superiorly-designed product that can change a user’s opinion of a category. “I know that the cannabis journey can be a scary one, so what attracted me to PAX was the idea of creating a personalized device that can help new users ease their fears and enhance their cannabis enjoyment.” 

Vaping is a new product category and one that’s been pioneered by the PAX team, which began at Stanford University in 2007 as an attempt to create a combustion and smoke-free system for smoking tobacco that removes the need for combustion. Though illegal vaping has rightly attracted media attention and flavoured-vape products should absolutely not be marketed to children—PAX is part of the movement behind the movement to remove the illicit market and child-friendly packaging from consumers—vaping is arguably an improvement over traditional flame consumption. Vaping, by creating a battery-powered heat source to activate the plant, requires no need to burn the material, which can introduce tars and carcinogens while also losing beneficial cannabinoid (think CBD, THC) and terpene molecules. By vaping instead of traditional smoking, you can cut out the bad molecules and magnify the beneficial properties.

“Our consumers are looking for transparency, which we welcome, because we want to operate in a regulated environment designed to protect the health of our customers,” says Pellerin, adding that the PAX ERA Pro, the newest PAX device, allows for ‘dose control,’ to ensure a user can ‘start slow and go low,’ the PAX messaging for consumption. “It’s important to PAX, and to me personally, to grow the legal market because we believe that good technology can help a user move along their cannabis journey in a transparent, regulated manner.” 

For Pellerin, an all-season athlete based in Halifax who actually trained for his first marathon by reading The Complete Guide to Running by Running Room founder John Stanton, the sport has been a gift he’s leaned into over the years.  

“There’s nothing like the runner’s high and I’ll never forget crossing the finish line of my first marathon, not knowing what to expect and loving the rush of all those people cheering you on,” Pellerin says. “Of course, I respect this community and know what it’s like pursuing a Personal Best and I’m really excited to introduce these runners to PAX. I do believe we offer the best product for both new and seasoned consumers.”