Four trail runners offer highs, lows and their best cautionary stories.
words :: Alyssa Noel
At its core, trail running combines the steeped-in-nature serenity of hiking with the adrenaline-fueled mental focus of mountain biking—and ultra running takes the sport to its extreme.
Sure, mountain athletes of all stripes push through pain, but pounding dirt for hours on end, often alone, with a singular goal to run 50, 80, 200 kilometres—it edges on insanity. Mix in wildlife, unpredictable elements and natural hazards and you have all the ingredients for some good stories. We caught up with four avid trail and ultrarunners to glean some of their wildest wisdom and best tales from the trail.
DFL Finish
When Hubert Kang watches a race, he waits until the very last runner crosses the finish line—because he knows firsthand what it’s like to finish “dead effing last” (or DFL, in running parlance).
Hubert’s debut race, the Buckin Hell, was a 50-km ultra that climbs 2,500 metres through the North Shore mountains. On long trail races, runners often find themselves racing alone, so as the hours wore on Hubert had no idea he was the last runner on the course. At about the 48 km mark he ran into a course marshal who ushered him down the trail—only it was in the wrong direction.
“The course marshal must’ve been exhausted and confused,” Hubert says. “It was the end of the day, and it was also the [section] of the course on the Mount Seymour highway. Maybe she wasn’t familiar with the roads.” Hubert had no choice but to keep going.
Realizing what she had done, the marshal hopped in her car and chased Hubert down to admit her error. “I didn’t know how far off I was,” he remembers. “I was just so tired. It was like, Okay I’ve got to run this out. It’s not like I can get an Uber.”
In the end, he ran an extra five kilometres. “I technically missed the cut-off time [to be officially recognized as having completed the race], but they gave me back some minutes for the extra kilometres I ran.”
“Okay, I’ve got to run this out. It’s not like I can get an Uber.”
Significantly, Hubert noticed several strangers still waiting at the finish line to cheer number 170 out of 170 runners to cross. “I was really impressed,” he says.
It’s a memory that led to him following suit as a spectator in other races. “The first-place finishers are probably so used to a cheering crowd, but the last place finishers—in my mind, these are the hardest working; they took a chance.”
One month later, Hubert took on the Squamish 50—and knocked two hours off his previous 50 km time, bumping him up to a much less exciting middle-of-the-pack finish.
Not Today
Professional trail runner Jazmine Lowther (who’s mostly based in Nelson but lives out of her van) felt good as she set out one day in September 2020 to claim the Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the Rockwall Trail in Kootenay National Park.
Greeted at the trailhead with the first snowfall of the season, Jazmine and her then partner dressed and geared up as light as possible for the 55-km, 2,700-m journey. On the trail, the pair quickly separated, with her boyfriend on a quest for his own FKT.
“It was very, very snowy for sections and I was wearing just a tank and shorts while hikers were in full down and winter gear,” she recalls. “My hands eventually got so numb I couldn’t open my [energy] gels, so my brain was operating at a very low capacity.”
She passed a camping area (earning a few sideways glances from bundled-up campers), headed up a hill and was instantly face-to-face with a grizzly bear. Jazmine—who grew up in the mountains with a good understanding of bears—slowly backed away, then she noticed three cubs. “I tried to show her I wasn’t a threat, but she charged me,” she says. “All sense gone, I started running.”
Admitting that, “like an idiot,” she had skipped bringing bear spray because of its weight, Jazmine did have some bear bangers on hand. But, with completely numb fingers, the bangers were useless. For a moment, she thought it might be the end. But she quickly gathered herself and slowly started backing away.
“My hands eventually got so numb I couldn’t open my [energy] gels, so my brain was operating at a very low capacity.”
Thankfully, the charging mother grizz stopped about 10 feet away from Jazmine just a few seconds later. Flooded with relief and deep in race mode, Jazmine almost instantly decided to press on and salvage her FKT attempt, but it wasn’t to be—battling the cold and waning energy, she came across a trail sign that confirmed she was off course.
“I wanted to just sit down,” she says, “but I was shivering and needed to keep moving. Giving up on the FKT ordeal, I followed the trail out towards the highway.”
Assuming her partner would be at the car with a win under his belt, Jazmine tried not to panic when he was nowhere to be seen. It turns out his FKT wasn’t to be, either. He had also taken a wrong turn into even more remote wilderness.
“We were both slightly underprepared for the route and perhaps the conditions, and learned some valuable lessons,” she says. Namely, bear spray will never seem lighter than when you’re face-to-face with a charging grizzly.
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A Series of Unfortunate Events
One late-September day, Graeme Budge’s local run club attempted to run the entire Howe Sound Crest Trail, and their motley crew’s morning began with a bad omen: One runner arrived at the trailhead with just two small 500 ml bottles of water. Everyone else was packing anywhere from two to three litres.
He did have a filter nozzle and Graeme says, “He was confident that there would be an opportunity to replenish water along the trail. He even pointed out some snow patches on satellite imagery.”
About four and a half hours into the full-day run, another group member started to feel off and decided to abort the mission, heading down into Lions Bay. Not long after, an off-duty nurse found him having a “mild cardiac event” and contacted the group. Realizing she was not going to finish the run and still make an afternoon appointment, one member left to assist.
As they headed toward the saddle of The Sisters, the group stopped for a moment to watch hikers ascending the West Lion on an improper route. “The sounds of falling rock echoed, and everyone was suddenly alert,” Graeme recalls. “A boulder the size of a microwave broke loose and tumbled across the trail in the area we were about to cross, no more than 50 metres ahead of us.”
Picking their way through that section safely, it wasn’t long before they began noticing their water supply quickly depleting. And that friend who packed way too little water? “He was feeling fatigued and dehydrated to the point of seriously considering calling SAR,” Graeme says.
They weren’t even halfway yet.
Making the decision to bail, the remaining crew headed towards Lions Bay when someone spotted a pool of water—about the size of a dinner plate—under a boulder. “We spent the next 40 minutes rehydrating,” Graeme says.
With the objective aborted, the group strolled into Lions Bay to meet up with the runner who left the group earlier in the day. He was feeling much better, welcoming everyone with soda, chips and a ride to their cars. “Completion or not,” Graeme says, “a day in the backyard with friends is always good. One for the memory books.”
And any day you take a miss from a giant boulder is a good one.
Small Misstep, Big Consequences
Sometimes disaster can strike even on the most innocuous trail. On a non-technical single track in Pemberton, just out for a relaxed run with friends, North Vancouver ultrarunner Katie Mills stepped off the gravel to cut a corner—just a couple of steps—and landed on a stick.
“Basically, a stick impaled my foot,” she says, “all the way through the bottom of the running shoe.”
With the nearest road just about a kilometre away, Katie’s friends carried her out of the forest and rushed her to the Pemberton Medical Clinic, where the on-call doctor dosed her with fentanyl for the pain, then cut off her shoe and pulled out the stick.
“It took months to heal,” Katie says. “Bits of stick and bark kept appearing in the wound.”
Ultimately, Katie ended up in North Vancouver’s Lions Gate Hospital months later so a plastic surgeon could fully clear out the injury. “This was a few years ago now,” she says, “but it’s still imprinted in my brain.” Cutting corners might be fine most of the time, but on the trail, Mother Nature’s consequences can be pointed.
All this goes to show, anything can happen out on the trail (let’s just say every trail runner has a poop story that’s better left untold), but that’s part of the appeal. What’s the other option? Log onto Netflix and hit the treadmill? No thanks.
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