Tales From the Trail

Four trail runners offer highs, lows and their best cautionary stories

words :: Alyssa Noel

At its core, trail running combines the steeped-innature 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.”

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.

Jazmine slowly backed away, then she noticed three cubs.

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.