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Teage O’Connor’s shoes are the first ancient sand dunes, peat-filled wetsurprise. They’re orange. That much is lands, dolomite cliffs. I had imagined fluorescently obvious even in the preO’Connor would scrupulously avoid RUNNING WILD sunrise gloom of this August morning. pavement and stay in these places He laces them up on his front porch as where, you know, all the nature is. But, we talk about the route. “Let’s start with Centennial Woods,” he as we run along this morning, he seems indifferent to the neat says. We’re going to try to run a “wild” marathon—26.2 miles binary categories of natural versus human—and more interested within the city limits of Burlington, traveling mostly through in finding what he calls “hidden places,” the experience of crosssome of his favorite patches of woods and unmarked backways. ing the landscape a bit like a fox: looking with practical eyes What’s more surprising is that O’Connor is wearing running for how to get around efficiently, searching for the more-thanshoes at all. Just yesterday, he ran a hilly five-mile race on pave- human wildness that pops up everywhere. ment in bare feet. He finished fourth, averaging 5:16 per mile. In “I’ve been obsessed with this idea of connecting to a place and 2017, he set the world record for the fastest barefoot one-hun- learning everything I can about it,” he says. At times, when he’s dred-kilometer run, covering sixty-two unshod miles in seven been training for one-hundred-mile footraces, “I try to become hours and thirteen minutes. this feral animal,” he says. But O’Connor—a 2010 graduate of UVM’s Field Naturalist We cross the parking lot of what used to be a concrete plant master’s program, and former steeplechase star at the University and plunge into a trail-less riot of vines and ferns near the Winof Chicago—doesn’t see himself as some sort of categorical Bare- ooski River. “Whoa. A deer,” O’Connor says as the animal jumps foot Runner. “I’m not in some cult, but I do love to run barefoot,” up from where it was bedded and crashes away. At the river’s he says. “Running without shoes can be an added layer of aware- edge, delicate footprints of raccoons cover the mud; bobcat and ness, another texture.” But today his feet are tired. “The cushion mink tracks have been spotted nearby, too. Upriver, the bridge feels nice,” he says. “Let’s run.” for Interstate 89 passes overhead. Downriver, we can see the red We loop through his backyard just off Colchester Avenue. brick of Winooski. We’ve been out for almost half an hour and “Here’s where a moose came over,” he says, pointing to a bent “we’ve gone one mile,” O”Connor says. Twenty-five to go. fence. Running downhill through dark woods, he gestures toward O’Connor jumps off a stack of concrete blocks, climbs over a patch of exotic trees, perhaps left behind by some landscapers. some driftwood, and into a rusting eight-foot-high pipe along the “Ginkgo, yew, Japanese maple, Siberian elm,” he says. The sun foundation of Chace Mill. Soon we’re running along an iron trail, begins to catch the treetops as we bump along a trail through the chopped remains of a riveted half-pipe perched between the UVM’s sixty-five-acre natural area, Centennial Woods. He points historic building and the river. Steampunk meets nature hike. out where beavers have chewed on the footbridge. The wildflowWe follow the river. Over the road, down the embankment to ers under the powerline spakle with dew. Salmon Hole Park, and a dash over rocks that hold ripples from a Forty-nine percent of Burlington is open space—parks, cem- five-hundred-million-year-old tropical sea. For several miles, we eteries, soccer fields, farmland—and half of this open space is follow the Riverwalk Trail and then go off-trail under the raila patchwork of natural areas: clayplain forests, alder swamps, road bridge, and into the Intervale. In these seven hundred acres
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V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
JOSHUA BROWN, GO-PRO