Bruce Trail runner nears finish line
Fonthill woman has covered nearly 700 kilometres on foot in just 17 days
She went swimming on the trail. Made friends with some cows. And is having fantasies about brushing her teeth in her own (bigger than the space in an RV) bathroom.
Emily Allan, the 35-year-old Fonthill woman who is running the entire 895 kilometres of the Bruce Trail, is heading towards a Canada Day finish in Queenston Heights Park.
By the end of Monday, she had covered nearly 700 kilometres in her End-to-End CF running adventure.
And while the reason she is running is both real and life-altering — raising funds and awareness of cystic fibrosis — she’s had many fun moments along the trail.
Case in point: the morning she went for an unexpected swim on the trail. She was somewhere near Mono, in a valley.
“It had rained the entire night before,” she said. “There’s been lots of washed out days where you have to cross what would normally be a trickling creek and it was a river. This time, it was a whole flat area that was just completely flooded.”
The trail was under water but didn’t seem impassable. So, she waded through the water, following the white markers that guide hikers on the trail.
“I turned because the trail marker told me to turn. And I could see where the next one was, so I just thought, ‘OK, I’ll take careful steps.’”
And then she fell forward, up to her neck in water.
A GoPro camera she was wearing recorded the moment. She thinks the trail must have been raised up, and that she fell into a hole or down a slope.
In any case, soaking wet (and excited to show husband and logistics guy Dan Dakin the footage), she hurried on.
And then there’s the cows. Lots of cows.
The prospect of running past a field of cows is exciting. Indeed, motivating, as evidenced in the numerous cow-sighting references that appear in the daily video stories of her run.
“There’s lots of exciting things on the trail,” she said. “I just really like cows.”
Her enthusiasm upon encountering a cow herd prompted a cousin to comment: “Emily, I think you’re losing it out there.”
In fact, she’s not. It’s simply about having fun during long, 40-pluskilometre days of hills and valleys, roots, dirt and rocky trails.
Rest assured, “I just think of these quirky things anyways,” she said.
Allan hasn’t thought much about the end. And yet, at the end of the day, resting in the RV that she lives and travels in, she considers how nice it will be to not live out of a rectangular box and be able to accomplish the necessaries of life, like teeth brushing, in her own home again.
Until then, she embraces the daily routine. Running is not a chore. In her thoughts is her cousin and friend Sarah Bloomfield, her inspiration for the end-to-end run. She died of cystic fibrosis in 2005. She was 23.
Allan just runs. And runs until the day’s route ends.
The other day, she met a guy who also hiking the entire trail. He asked Allan where she started from that day.
“I couldn’t answer,” she said, other than to tell him she started 11 kilometres ago.
“And where are you going?” he continued.
“Uhhh … 30 kilometres more?” she offered, laughing.
“I know what distance it is to lunch. I know what distance I have to do for the entire day.”
Otherwise, she doesn’t look at the reference maps often. She just runs.
“I have to do what I have to do,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s hard or if it’s easy, or where it goes, because at the end of the day I’m going to run it anyway.”